2015.09.16: patricia park and alexandra kleeman with anelise chen at aaww!
last wednesday, i went to a reading at the asian american writers' workshop with patricia park (re jane, viking books) and alexandra kleeman (you too can have a body like mine, harper books), and can i just say? it's awesome to be able to sit and listen to someone say things about what it's like to be korean-american and just think, oh my god, that's exactly what it is!
- PP: with re jane, i kind of wanted to speak for queens. queens suffers from a PR problem.
- jane is a minority within a minority, which doesn't make sense to white americans who expect hyphenated americans to fit in within their minority groups.
- AK: it was very important for me to have a female protagonist.
- wanted to create someone who was very sensitive and porous to the world around her
- PP: wanted to explore being mixed-race because, until very recently, korean society was very homogenous
- PP: jane eyre was such a refreshing departure from the disney characters i'd been weaned on.
- Q: were you thinking about the womanly traits usually attributed to female characters?
- AK: reading beckett, realized that you didn't need much to create empathetic characters
- PP: whether characters are likable or not, do they garner your sympathy?
- AK: we have a narrow scope for who we befriend or talk to in bars, but fiction allows usu to get to know someone we normally wouldn't.
- Q: this whole thing about how female characters should be likable also comes out in how both A and jane deal with how they should be likable.
- PP: yeah, i guess it's tough being a woman, isn't it?
- for jane, the korean community is driven by nun-chi, which casts her as meek and subservient as an au pair -- the ways these cultural cues translate (or don't) cross-culturally.
- AK: the feedback cycle through which women constantly assess themselves -- it makes them very malleable.
- PP: i think cities shape people, as much as people shape cities.
- PP: it's funny how koreans have all these words for different categories of koreans. (i.e. she isn't just a korean. she's a korean-american who lives abroad, etcetera etcetera etcetera.) (my note: seriously, the labels go on.)
- AK: my book is stripped down and generic, which comes from being biracial and asian-american and having moved a lot
- moved 11 times before she was 13
- they (these cities) had their differences but were also very much the same
- this stuff that was supposed to be generic and normal was so strange to me (re: being biracial and growing up with different food/snacks).
- PP: was more concerned with getting the cultural context right than with modernization
- re: the MFA experience: did you workshop the book? how was the journey?
- AK: i'd recommend getting an MFA with conditions.
- you can't really teach writing, but you can expand your mind.
- feels like the classmates she was closest with/respected the most sit on her shoulders
- with this book, got some really good feedback
- felt like dickens, writing it a chapter at a time
- PP: chose BU because ha jin was there and it was only a year long
- thought it'd be really efficient, but writing the book took a decade
- ha jin was very refreshingly prescriptive.
- "this is writing, right? you go down all these dark alleys, only to realize you don't want to write about it after you've written about it."
- AK: the most helpful thing i got was from ben marcus -- he would take a story and say that i know where you're trying to go with this piece, so how great would it be if you put this first?
- it's an incredibly difficult thing to do, and she still doesn't know how to do it.
- AK: i'd recommend getting an MFA with conditions.
- AK: the most upsetting thing about the best american poetry [scandal] is that anyone who just skims the story will land on the conclusion that it is easier if you're asian.
- PP: had one crotchety professor who commented that her characters sounded so assimilated
- PP: "going back to korea" / "going back to the motherland" -- we say this jokingly, but then we go to korea and realize we're foreigners
here's a slice of matcha custard pie from my favorite pie bakery, four and twenty blackbirds.
2015.09.23: lauren groff at bookcourt!
tonight! lauren groff (fates and furies, riverhead) is an absolute delight. she's ebullient and bubbly and enthusiastic, and she read a bit then fielded Qs from the audience.
(there was also this awesome cake, inspired by the novel.)
- "you're hitting me at the happiest time. the birth of my children was great ... but it was painful and there was recovery."
- (starts reading from the very beginning, then sees a child run up to her parent) "i'm gonna read from a different part ... i don't want to contribute to the dissolution of any minors."
- re: the play excerpts
- it was so much fun [to write].
- found out in the writing of them that she'll never write plays ... okay, maybe one. but it'll never be put on.
- tries to imagine everything fully, but playwrights have to take everything away (because plays are all dialogue).
- Q: what inspires you to write?
- "anxiety? the deep dark pit inside of me?"
- wasn't good at anything else -- bartending, telemarketing ("i have a phobia of phones"), etcetera
- "the thing that inspires me to write ... is that i have no other skills."
- feels the urgency of story
- "there's knausgaard who does it ... and doesn't stop!" (re: about writing an entire life in 16 pages or so)
- "you teach yourself how to write whatever you're writing as you're writing it."
- re: the structure of fates and furies as a two-part book
- with lotto's part, wanted to write a fairly straightforward bildungsroman
- with mathilde's part, tried to puncture that -- it's told in short sections, jumping around in time
- basically what i'm doing when i'm writing is gleefully amusing myself.
- there's a secret structure in the second part that she's waiting for someone to discover.
- "i love structure!"
- re: the lack of technology in the book: i learned emoji yesterday. people would send them to me, and i'd wonder where they were hiding them.
- if you haven't read the iliad recently, it. is. the. most. perfect. book. that. ever. exists.
- it has magic realism in ti!
- basically everything i read in the long period of time i was working on this is reflected in this book.
- i would watch a lot of youtube videos -- lots of youtube videos -- of operas and plays.
- on not having a life: "you guys have nyc! i have alligators and heat. and sand."
- (she lives in central florida.)
- publishing period for arcadia was two-and-a-half years
- "i write things at the same time."
- started fates and furies a little after she started arcadia
- usually one fails.