As Aaron Pang sees it, writing is primarily a tool for performance. “I write to get on a stage to say stuff,” he explains. “I want to have a conversation with 3,000 people.” He’s certainly found opportunities to perform, including a tour with The Moth, a nonprofit organization that hosts storytelling events across the United States. “Performance is part of how I relate to the world. I wrestled with that for the last five years but now, it’s like, that’s just who I am and I like that,” Pang says. He is also drawn to what he describes as the “control” aspect of performance. “You get to hear my story exactly the way I want you to hear it, and that’s interesting to me. I love to be funny and use humor in my writing when I talk about things that are more serious, and that is hard to get across on the page. I want full control and get your full attention.”

Now, in his first year in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing program, Pang is redirecting his focus from the stage to the page, and he’s enjoying the newfound challenges and opportunities in this shift in form. “On a stage, you need to get to your point fast,” he shares. “People don’t have the attention span to deal with very subtle things, or imagery gets lost in the temporality of performance spaces. But I think that for me, the page has been nice because you get to wander and meander a lot more. A lot of onstage storytelling has to be really linear, and you still have to explore a lot. What I’m able to explore now, which I still haven’t done yet, is the potential of moving in non-linear ways.” In contrast to his undergraduate schooling, where he viewed courses as “a game in which I would learn how to get an A,” he’s found that graduate school has shifted his mindset, as you “do it because you actually care about the work.”

If you told Pang a few years ago that he’d be in a graduate writing program in Iowa, he probably wouldn’t have believed you. He studied computer science and business at Washington University in St. Louis and spent the following six years moving between careers in the technology sector in the San Francisco area. Working full-time and writing on the side, Pang found it “mentally taxing. You can’t ever fully work on your craft doing that,” he notes. He finally committed to graduate school, enticed in part by the University of Iowa’s “fully funded program and the safe space to actually work on what I really want to work on.”

So what, exactly, does he want to work on? In large part, he wants to “tell stories about disability.” “Disability is this thing where there’s no beginning, middle and end. The typical story is like I got sick and then I got better. What happens when the credits roll?” The topic hits close to home. “I’m disabled,” Pang explains. “I walk with a cane and I have a spinal cord injury, and my writing started as a way to process it, to write stories around this shift in my life, how it changes my relationship with my family, how it changes my relationship with the world, how it changes my relationship with relationships.”

In sharing insights about his body and the world around him, Pang incorporates a lot of humor. “If you’re just describing the realities of being disabled in a world that isn’t made for you, it’s just sad,” he says. “And no matter how empathetic audiences want to be, nobody wants to just be bummed out all the time. I just make jokes about it. And that can actually ring harder and more real than if I’m just making you sad. Humor in my opinion is harder. And it’s fun to have people come up to you after and say, ‘I’ve never really thought about that.’ That’s fantastic—well it’s not fantastic that you never thought about it before. You might need to do some self-reflection to think about things other than yourself—but my goal is to make you think.”

Pang is not yet sure what direction he’ll pursue after earning his MFA, but he has time to explore his options. A recipient of the highly competitive one-year Iowa Arts Fellowship, he is enjoying the freedom to develop his writing skills without the added pressures of teaching in his first year. “Writing is tough, but I enjoy it,” Pang reflects. “I enjoy the act of doing it, and that’s right now what I’m focusing on. I’ve been very lucky. I’m very lucky in the opportunities I get to write and the things that I get to do. I’m just very grateful.”