roxane gay!

2016 may 1 at the pen world voices festival:  roxane gay was invited to deliver the arthur miller freedom to write lecture, after which she was joined by saeed jones.  i didn't take notes during her lecture (which was incredible), but i did during the conversation, which was obviously amazing.

saeed jones is a poet and the culture editor at buzzfeed, and he's currently working on a memoir.

---

saeed jones:  i want to say thank you because your work is about freedom, and it does come at a cost.  and i was wondering -- in moving from an untamed state to bad feminist and, now, to hunger, how have you worked to deal with negotiating the vulnerability [in the undertaking of this offering]?

roxane gay:  every time i write something, i tell myself no one's going to read this.  for a while, that delusion was perfect.  i try to have boundaries about what i will or will not write about, and i allow myself to have responses to criticism about my work.

RG:  when you put yourself out there, you'll be criticized both for your work and how you present yourself.  [...]  i'm constantly trying to work against the way the media tries to represent my work.

RG:  i read a review of hunger ... that i haven't turned in.

RG:  i try to make sure to remind people that i'm not in control of the narrative that's put on my work once it's out in the world.

RG:  i don't mind being someone people can look up to.  i very much respect that.  it's uncomfortable and weird because i'm me.  and i watch a lot of HGTV.  i tweet about HGTV so much that someone from HGTV emailed me.  it's like, oh, now i'm living the dream!

SJ:  something i was thinking about [beyonce's] lemonade -- how she willingly puts herself in the context of generations.  do you see yourself in a lineage of writers who have regarded their body as a text?

RG:  oh, absolutely.  especially toni morrison, the way she writes about the black woman's body.

RG:  one of the challenges of when you're an underrepresented person is that certain people believe that there can only be one.

RG:  money doesn't buy you freedom from pain and from ridicule and from being distorted, and money has never bought a black person freedom from being a target.

RG:  i think it's important to recognize that, when you've achieved a certain amount of respect, that you [have to pay it forward].

RG:  if your creative world is only you ... then you're not very creative.

RG:  first of all, i'm reading because i'm like that's my competition.  [laughs]  but also, you have to be aware of the conversations because you can't be part of the conversation if you don't know what's going on.

SJ:  [white men are] praised as though their offerings are the shoulders upon which civilization rests.  the best praise women get is that, oh, she's following in his footsteps.

RG:  [re:  knaussgard and how his confessional writing is praised as literary genius when it would be looked down upon had he been a woman]  i mean, it's fine -- if you want to read him, do you.

RG:  we have to continue pointing out that the rules are different, and we have to do something about that.  and we're in the problematic position [where women can only be experts on themselves].

[she gave an example of a woman who might be an expert on a scientific field, but, still, she would be told something like, "can you write about that scientific field and menstruation?"]

SJ:  people are eager to say we're in this transformative moment.  we certainly are in a moment of a lot of conversation about diversity ...  do you think things have changed in a way that will matter in a way five years from now?

RG:  not yet.  [...]  why do we keep talking about the problem when we know it's there?  publishing needs to do something about it.

RG:  what's also frustrating is that all the people i know in publishing are great.  so i just don't know where the disconnect is.

SJ:  even in hollywood, it seems like people are smart enough not to go up to actors and ask how to solve problems of race or gender.  they at least go to directors and producers.  if you were to design a better roundtable or panel, what would you do?

RG:  i would not [do that].  [...]  what i would like is for publishers, for the next year, to hire only people of color.  and pay them a living wage.  you can do targeted hires, and i think publishing needs to start doing targeted hires.

RG:  i'm so done with the diversity question.  i'm more interested now in problem-solving and making people feel bad.

SJ:  [asked a question about roxane's willingness to be herself], which we're often told that we can't do if we want to be a successful writer.

RG:  it's a little easier because i get to do more of what i do without having to justify it.  in grad school, i remember reading derrida and lacan and just being like ... ughhhhhh.  and they were brilliant, but no one's going to read them.

RG:  culture exists on a spectrum.  i think that, if we can change pop culture, we can trickle up because trickling down has never worked.  but maybe, when we've changed the culture, people will look and see there's diversity on television [...] and it keeps moving upward.

RG:  i love ina.  she's so amazing.  her hair's so shiny, and she has her perfect little bob, and she wears the same shirt everyday, but it's a different color, and she gets them custom-made but she won't say where.

RG:  i love being open about what i love.

RG:  the best advice i ever got -- i'd just gone on the job market, and my friend told me, "just be yourself because you don't want to have to pretend to be who you were in the interview for the next twenty years."  because academia is forever.  ish.

RG:  these things that people call lowbrow but i call awesome.

SJ:  i know you're still working on hunger --i'm working on a memoir now, too, and it's an incredibly transformative experience.  have you learned anything?

RG:  i think the book forced me to be honest with myself.  [and to realize i needed to change.]  and i don't know what that change is going to look like, but i know that i'm ready.

RG:  it's the hardest thing i've ever had to write, but i think it's also the best thing i've written.  [...]  i think it's the only memoir i'm ever going to write.

[audience Q&As]

RG:  you can't control what other people think.  you just have to do you.  there is literally nothing you can do.  you can [change all you want], but there are people who are going to think of you as stereotypical.  so you're asking the wrong question; you need to ask how you can be more comfortable being you.

RG:  we're not the problem.  the problem is the people who want to do harm.  there is nothing more that we can do to establish our humanity than by existing.

RG:  [re:  kim kardashian's posting of a nude photo -- is it body positivity or what?]  i think it's a marketing ploy.  kim kardashian is one of those people who got famous for doing nothing but being very enterprising.  [...]  of all the kardashians, kim is the most attached to kardashian-ism.

RG:  the only thing you can do to help yourself is to write and to be relentless about putting your stuff out into the world.  the only person you need is you and then you need a little luck.

RG:  it's easier to be who you are than you you've pretended to be.

RG:  [re:  the small, boutique publishing houses that have popped up -- is that a solution to the diversity problem?]  no.  i think that lets big publishing off the hook.

patti smith + viet thanh nguyen and vu tran!

2016 april 19:  patti smith at the graduate center.

patti smith was in conversation with kevin baker, and she was at the graduate center as part of a festival commemorating the 70th anniversary of camus' only visit to the states.  it's always such a pleasure to hear patti smith, even more so when she's talking about the writers and books she loves.

again, did a pretty crappy job recording questions.  ^^

---

[before the program started, patti smith said that she had a horrible case of the allergies, so, "if i start coughing, don't worry -- it's not catching."]

kevin baker:  how did you get introduced to camus' work?

patti smith:  well, the truth is i loved french literature, and, if you were french, i was going to read you -- it was that simple.  i don't know; i just really liked the titles of the books.  the original title of the stranger was the outsider, and i was arrested by it.

KB:  he's a great observer.  do you feel he influenced you?

PS:  oh, absolutely.  and it's truthfully entirely literary -- i'm not a political writer ... but his writing style, it's just -- i just understood it.

PS:  i know it might seed conceited, but, as a young person, i aspired to walk in his tracks if i could.

KB:  it struck me that he writes a lot about metamorphosis.  and that's also a thing of yours, it seems to me.

PS:  i guess so, but i never thought about it.

PS:  the idea of metamorphosis has always been comforting to me because it gives us this sort of idea that we have another chance.  metamorphosis or resurrection, whatever you want to call it -- another chance.

PS:  the idea of death seemed so terrifying to me, and a happy death helped me find some kind of reconciliation.

KB:  was there a particular reason?

PS:  i was so ill as a kid, and i heard countless times some country doctor telling my mother, "i don't think she's going to make it."

PS:  i didn't want to die because there were so many books to read.  there were a million books i hadn't read, so i had a lot to do.

PS:  [about a happy death]  it's like all the hubris of youth that suddenly in the end very quickly evolved into a different place.

KB:  people say that your work sounds kind of like a french novel-in-translation.

PS:  i'm not like a big proust reader -- i mean, i plow through proust, but those long, long sentences ...

PS:  i don't think writing is ever easy.  writing is torture.  [...]  there are moments you think you're a genus, but that's disproved the next day.  writing is labor.

PS:  when i was living in the twentieth century, i mourned that i wasn't living in the nineteenth century.  now the twentieth century seems so innocent.

PS:  when you're writing, you create an atmosphere that the reader can enter like gumby.

PS:  being profound isn't really my biggest ability [KB:  au contraire!], but, when i'm performing, risk is always part of it.  part of the battle is that you have to communicate with the people.  you have to rein in.

---

2016 april 21:  viet thanh nguyen and vu tran at the brooklyn public library as part of the international writers series.

this was an incredible event with two smart, well-spoken, thoughtful writers.  my little asian-american writer heart was bursting as i walked home afterwards.

i gave up on trying to record any of the questions.

---

vu tran:  i guess i've always had these conversations with my vietnamese friends who are also writers.  when i said that to the new york times*, i felt kind of guilty because i hadn't engaged with it on a deeper level.  i had guilt on my part because viet has always been doing that -- he's been doing that in his criticism work.

*  i'm trying to find this interview.

viet than nguyen:  (started this vietnamese arts organization that grew into this bigger representative of vietnamese arts and cultures)

VTN:  to me, that's really crucial because obviously the work of writing is something to do on your own but so many people need a community for sustenance.

VT:  what's also really important about it, though -- at lease, for me -- i grew up in oklahoma, and i didn't have any vietnamese friends -- i didn't have any asian friends, let alone vietnamese friends -- and i feel like you end up sitting not in a vacuum but in a context you don't always need.

VTN:  when i was in college, i wanted to write on vietnamese literature, but there was very little [of it].  it's incredible to see this explosion of vietnamese literature and vietnamese literature-in-translation from the last thirty years.  there's a lot for people to read out there, who want to read more of vietnamese literature and participate in this community.

VTN:  sometimes, vietnamese-american writers write about vietnam, sometimes they write about different things.

[re:  genres]

VT:  i wrote that short story -- the second chapter in dragonfish -- and i felt that narrative -- the crime narrative, if you will -- didn't feel fleshed out to me.  there were some characters with this backstory i thought i'd investigate.

VT:  the crime framework became primarily something -- we all read mysteries because of the kind of ambiguity of the story and the shadows that can never be resolved [...] and i thought that was kind of an interesting framework for a story about immigrants.  because immigrants do that.  we walk around with all these stories from our parents, our grandparents, and we don't want to share everything.  [thus creating a natural ambiguity and maintaining shadows.]

VTN:  i always loved genre fiction.  i don't look down on genre, and it's really weird to me that, in this literary world of new york, we sell a lot of genre fiction [but put literary fiction on the pedestal].

VTN:  i'm scared of reading genre fiction because i know that, if i pick up a jo nesbo novel, i'm not going to put it down.

VTN:  what i'm most excited by are books that mix genres and aren't easily contained.

Q to vu:  why a white-american protagonist?

VT:  he needed to be a white-american because i guess i was playing with two things.  one was the narrative that i think we're all familiar with -- a white westerner comes into the native community, and he's the one who saves them.  but, also, there's the conventions of crime fiction or the detective novel, in that i was interested in the detective who wasn't very good at detecting -- and, in my mind, those two narratives tended to overlap.  in my book, i think what robert [the protagonist] does is that, because he doesn't get access to this woman he loves so desperately, he creates this other narrative for her, which is that she's crazy.

VT:  i don't let [robert] learn that much [about her] because, sometimes, you can't get all the answers to your questions.

Q to viet:  in the sympathizer, you wanted him to be the anti-hero.

VTN:  anti-heroes are the privilege of majority culture, majority writers.  you have the full panoply of representation to you as the majority.  if you're the minority, you have the burden of representing your community.

VTN:  why would my anti-hero be all of vietnam?

VTN:  the novel was deliberately set up to be a confession from one vietnamese person to another vietnamese person.  i think it's easy for writers of minorities to write to a white person because publishing is very white.  i rejected that.  [...]  what is translated [in the book] is american culture to the vietnamese.

VTN:  my experience has been that americans as a whole don't know anything about us.  on one hand, there is a very large refugee community, but, on the other hand, it's very invisible.  we had this whole interior life scattered across the country, and no one knew about them.

VTN:  when i was growing up, in every pho restaurant, there was this clock, and that just affirmed for me that vietnamese people are very conscious of time.  

VTN:  i grew up with my dad constantly telling me we're one hundred percent vietnamese.  [...]  the second time [my parents visited vietnam and came back to the states], my dad said to me, "we're american."

VT:  in my book, i think of vietnam as this animating but debilitating shadow that follows all these characters, whether they wanted it or not.  with my characters, it was more, at least with suzy [the vietnamese wife] i think that -- she abandons her daughter, and i think vietnam is embodied in this one act.  it's something she feels guilty about, but, at the same time, she knows it's something she has to do.  that tends to happen -- it'll be like one particular experience or one fact that ends up, in a way, if you're displaced from your country, that becomes representative of that in your memory.

VTN:  another [thing] that minority writers are expected to do with this refugee narrative is that, in the end, the characters are americanized.

VT:  i [wanted there to be] not literal ghosts -- i want the reader to question whether these are actual ghosts or not.  the thing i was thinking about is that, when you talk about magic realism, that kind of magic is diffused in that culture.  i thought that american culture -- they don't actively believe in ghosts in ways that other cultures do.  and, in many ways, i think that has to do with religion.  i wanted that spectre of ghosts to be something that weights on the characters a bit in different ways.

VTN:  haunting is so much a part of the legacy of war.  haunting is real, even if ghosts aren't.  if the parents are haunted, oftentimes, the children are haunted, too.  and i wanted to make that quite literal.

VTN:  if you look at so many immigrants -- filipinos, cambodians, koreans, laotians -- so many of them came here because americans fought wars in their countries.  but the american dream doesn't remember that.

VT:  i feel like the melting pot is an idea that goes back to the huddled masses yearning to break free, and it goes back to this idea of immigrants coming here to make things better for their families and assimilating -- but that melting pot doesn't leave room for those who were forced to come here.  if you believe in this notion of the melting pot, it's not just something that builds things; it destroys something in the process -- you're erasing something in the process, and that's detrimental to those people.

VTN:  we blame refugees because they're easy scapegoats for problems in society, for these problems we've caused in other countries.  it's very important to remember that the refugee narrative is very different from the immigrant narrative.

VTN:  i know [that the pride vietnamese are showing in my book after winning the pulizter] is more of a symbolic appreciation than a literary appreciation, and i'm okay with that.

VT:  i got the chance to change my name when i got my citizenship in the sixth grade, and i wanted to pick scott, but my mom stopped me, and i'm very grateful for that.

VTN:  the job of writers is to destroy the cliche.

hanya yanagihara!

2016 april 13:  hanya yanagihara in conversation with cfda director steven kolb at neue house!

i have not read a little life, but i enjoyed this talk immensely.  i find that i don't have to have read a book to enjoy hearing an author talk, especially one as smart and well-spoken as yanagihara.  and smartly-dressed!

(note:  steven kolb's statements led into questions, but i didn't necessarily get them all down as questions.  [my thumbs and the apple keyboard aren't very friendly when it comes to really fast typing.]  i think it's pretty self-explanatory what he's asking.)

---

steven kolb:  given that you are a woman, i was surprised by the absence of significant female characters.  why was that?

hanya yanagihara:  i went to an all-female college [smith] then graduated into a very female industry [publishing].

HY:  one of the things i find interesting about writing about men is that men are certainly less encouraged to discuss some things.  this could probably have been written about all women characters, but then it would have been about a third shorter.

SK:  the majority [of the book] is told in dispassionate third person.

HY:  what i wanted to do was have something that i thought of as a warmer third-person omniscient.  it's told about the four different characters' lives, and jude is the only one whose name isn't mentioned -- it makes the reader feel as though you're sliding in his head.

HY:  i wanted jude, who's the protagonist, to be someone who was a trustworthy and reliable narrator but not necessarily trustworthy or reliable about himself.

SK:  your book is very internal to the characters.

HY:  when you have a novel and you strip away everything external, you're left with a new york that's, in this case, an interior new york, and this traps you in these characters' lives and that again has the effect of making the novel feel internal and claustrophobic.

HY:  most of the scenes are set inside.  there's very little sense of being outside.  [...]  you become immersed in this particular universe.

SK:  how are the characters similar, and how are they different, and what do they bring?

HY:  it sounds like a tinder profile.

HY:  the book begins a fairly standard literary sub-genre, the post-collegiate story.  sort of by the end of the first section, you realize that this might not be what the book is.  [...]  by the middle, i hope the reader is wondering what kind of book this is.

HY:  i wanted them to share a sense of ambition, which is why they're in new york.

HY:  in our world, identity means simultaneously everything and nothing at all.  and so much of these characters' lives in adulthood is spent trying to make peace of [the thing that] what defines them, whether it's their past or their externals, is inescapable.

SK:  do you have a favorite?

HY:  jude is a character who never really changes.  he starts off at one point and tries and tries and tries but doesn't change.  [...]  i wondered what the propulsion of that kind of book [where the main character doesn't change] would be.

HY:  he's a character i wanted to be lovable, and i wanted him to inspire love but also be maddening.

HY:  i would say that 50% of my friends haven't read the book.  which is fine because they bought it, and that's really all that counts.

HY:  i think a reader can always tell -- if you write a character, you should be able to know everything that's not on the page.  even if it doesn't literally make it into the pages of the book, the reader should sense the wholeness of the book.

HY:  jude was the easiest to write, but JB was probably the favorite.

SK:  did you ever consider one of them not making it and working at starbucks?

HY:  one of the reasons i think this is a new york book is that these friend groups aren't uncommon here -- where people have all made it.  success is fetishized here [how ever you define success].

SK:  what's behind the title?

HY:  i do think we identify lives as big or little, but, in the end, every life is equally little and, therefore, equally big.

SK:  re:  willem and jude.

*  wow, i did a shitty job of writing down the questions.  ^^

HY:  i knew exactly where this book was going.  when i started, i knew what the last line would be, how the story would unfold [etcetera].  i wanted it to be about two romances -- the romance between willem and jude and the romance between jude and harold.

HY:  i think one of the things this book asks is that romance is often tied with sex and sometimes it is but sometimes it isn't.  i think many women will understand what i mean when i say "a romantic friendship with other women."  so, when i talk about jude and harold's romance, i'm taking romance in terms of they both have romantic ideals of what it means to be a son and what it means to be a parent and what it means to be loved [... and what it means when those ideals aren't realized].

SK:  i was very moved by how you created that family relationship.  

HY:  this city has always been a sanctuary for people who wanted to find or make families of their own.  and here, perhaps unlike other cities, you can have a family that's defined as a tribe.  it was really this idea of coming some place and [finding] some people you recognized.

HY:  it's still a place where people associate with escape and where you might be able to find someone who recognizes you.  that's one of the things that makes the city human.  and humane.

SK:  is this the great gay novel?  [mentions a review]

HY:  i don't read reviews, but i know the review you're talking about.  [it's the one by garth greenwell.  (here)]

HY:  it wasn't something i consciously set out to do.  the idea of male friends, male love in all its iterations is something that sort of went out of fashion in the 20th century.

[she said something interesting about how the dialogue around gay relationships shifted in the five years between the time she started writing the novel and the time it was published.  (altogether, five years, which is insane.)  she also said that men over fifty are more rigid when it comes to sexual identification -- they find it harder to believe that a man can have relationships with women and be heterosexual by all accounts then fall in love with a man.  people under fifty see sexuality/attraction as a much more fluid thing.]

HY:  one of the things i was interested in was are people fundamentally good?  there are people in my life who seem to have this innate gift of always doing what's right.

HY:  i think it was a love a based in part on pity, but i don't think there's anything wrong with that.  i don't think a love based on sorry or pity is any less genuine a love.

SK:  have you heard from hollywood?

HY:  uhm, yes.  and there have been some interesting offers from people i really respect.  but i want it to be a very limited series on cable or something.  i want it to go to someone who's going to have ideas for it [instead of doing a strictly literal adaptation].

HY:  a lot people say ben whishaw for jude, but i say either joseph gordon-levitt or christian bale.  who are two very different actors ... [she got a lot of noooos for the latter.]

SK:  are they based on real people?

HY:  no, except JB's me.

HY:  most writers are either assholes on the page or assholes in life, and i think i'm an asshole in both places, and i think JB is, too.

audience Q&As -- or, really, just some As because i didn't record any of the Qs.

HY:  i really wanted this book to feel artificial in many ways.  there's a real absence of reality in some senses.  i wanted things to be turned up.

HY:  it's a fairy tale in the guise of a contemporary realistic book.

HY:  i do think, for some people, perhaps not in as baroque or gothic a way, i think for some people who've been traumatized is that trauma keeps happening to them again and again and again.  when you've experienced trauma at a certain age, that's the way you see the world. 

HY:  the terrible thing about trauma is that it doesn't just affect your sleeping hours [or similar things] but how you see the world in every way.

HY:  [re:  the criticism that there's too much trauma for the reader to handle]  the reader can take anything as long as they think that [you] have a strong authorial hand and a full world.

HY:  [someone talks about her first book]  i can't believe you read the first book; no one read it.

helen macdonald and mary karr with kathryn schultz!

2016 march 24, 92Y:  love love love.  mary karr is dry and witty, and helen macdonald is like a unicorn -- charming, smart, self-deprecating, all with a sense of humor.  i heard that karr specifically asked to do this event with macdonald, and they were great together.

(my apologies for the terrible photo; the 92Y doesn't allow photos; and this was the best i could get.)

---

as they were doing their readings -- karr read from her newest book, the art of memoir:

mary karr:  i'm the warm-up band, and i'm more than happy to be the warm-up band for helen.

MK:  no one elected me the boss of memoir, but people have been stupid enough to pay me for it so whatever.

MK:  (about memoir)  there's something about that single voice crying out in the wilderness about being a human being.

MK:  when i was a little girl, i wanted to not be an asshole.

then macdonald read a poem from shaler's fish and talked through h is for hawk, explaining the arc of the book and reading short passages as she moved along:

helen macdonald:  when i talk about hawks, i generally start to do the movements.

HM:  (talking about carrying her hawk around town)  kids would yell out, "harry potter!", which ... it's a hawk, not an owl.

HM:  when you're grieving, you can't be you anymore.  you have to be someone else.  to be able to contain that grief, you can't be yourself.

then onto the conversation:

kathryn schultz:  (to helen)  you had been writing poetry before.  what made you turn to memoir instead?  did you know in advance what form you wanted?

HM:  what had happened with me and the hawk was a story.  and it was an old story; it's what's happened to a lot of people.  this kind of was classical myth, and i thought this wasn't a story about me but a story told through me.

HM:  i liked how difficult poetry was.  [...]  but i wanted just to tell the story, and prose, i guess, was the only way to think about that.

KS:  even the best poets seem to be really marginal to the rest of life [but memoirists don't].  marry, it's been the case that your books have been accepted as revelations, and i'm curious what you think about that and whether your poet self is resentful.

MK:  if that's true, then i've been underpaid.

MK:  i don't know, i mean, i sort of feel like that what happens to my work after i'm done is kind of none of my business.

MK:  part of being a writer is feeling like you're part of a bigger conversation.  what i loved about helen's book wasn't [just the writing or the story] but that she happens to be in conversation with t.h. white.

MK:  there are moments [in writing] when you feel like you're in conversation with the people you admire.  it's like you take your little league slugger in yankee stadium and you feel like you're in the house.

MK:  (to helen)  [it's funny that, as a child] you wanted to be a hawk, and i wanted to be a memoirist.

HM:  you've been more successful than i have.

KS:  (to helen, speaking of t.h. white) one of the things that's very interesting to me about your work is that it's very unusual to see both autobiography and biography in the same book.  did they inform each other?

HM:  it's weird; he was never going to be very much in the book until i started researching him and he began to haunt me.  and then i began to see that the book needed more of him for many reasons, partly because i wanted there to be more than one voice.  but, also, i wanted to try and see through his eyes, like i tried to see through the eyes of a hawk.  writing the book was kind of like riding a half-wild animal.

MK:  i know you'd have written a proposal, but i'm assuming the book morphed as it went along.

HM:  oh, totally.

KS:  mary, i want to ask you about harry cruz.  as it happens, harry cruz also wrote a novel called the hawk is dying.  it seemed to me in reading your new book [the art of memoir] that cruz occupied a fairly central role in terms of shaping your own sense of what's possible in prose, in what can be written about your own life.

MK:  i was living in cambridge -- in cambridge, MA, whereas ms. macdonald is from the original cambridge.  i sort of finagled my way into the academic ghetto there.  [...]  i would go into lamont library, and there was a memoir section, and i was the only person who checked out [the biography of a place] in thirteen years.  [she says she checked it out six times and was immediately taken by the first page.] it was redneck voice, and you know immediately that he's cutting a deal with you that he's telling you a story of apocrypha and family myth and he's desperately trying to reinvent himself and he doesn't want to be a redneck.

KS:  helen, i mean this in the best possible sense:  your book is so weird.  [in that it's part memoir, part autobiography, part biography, part training manual, etcetera.0

HM:  thank -- thank you?

MK:  it's a good thing.

KS:  did you have any influences?  did you have any models?  did you read something that made you think here's the range of possibility?

HM:  i knew i wanted a lot of genres.  in terms of influences, i could bring in a bunch of stuff.  one of my favorite memoirs is by henry green called pack my bag.  [he's a very privileged person, but] it's a book by a man who's convinced he's going to die and he needs to make a reckoning.  and the prose is just like nothing else.  he just went for it.

HM:  but, actually, in the physical act of writing, i found it interesting that i couldn't read any literary fiction.  good writing sticks to you.  i listened to a lot of audiobooks of agatha christie.  and shakespeare on the radio.

MK:  it's so funny.  i can't not read.  i feel like i'd be so lonely, so sad, if i weren't reading.

HM:  i'd go bird-watching.

MK:  that's right.  you're actually interested in the world.  i'm interested in being home in my pajamas.

audience Q&A:

Q:  what do you turn to when you despair?

MK:  do you know why we wear black in new york?  because we can't get any darker.

HM:  i trust that, so far, despair only lasts so long.  trusting in time.

MK:  i pray and talk to jesus.  i know some people might laugh at that, but it's true.

MK:  i ask myself, where is God in this?  like, where is -- i guess, if you don't believe in God, you can ask, where is the light?  and often it's about finding what you can do for someone else.

Q:  do you need to fortify yourself to delve into such painful material?

MK:  yes.

MK:  someone said to me the other day, were you a cheerleader?  and i said, do i look cheerful to you?

KS:  [let's talk about craft.  how do you go about writing?]

HM:  you have to be pretend to be someone who's brave.

MK:  i move from place to place

[KS talks about the criticism of memoir and how women get called self-absorbed if/because they write memoirs and in the "i."]

HM:  [talks about being called self-absorbed]

MK:  so was st. augustine.

jung yun with alexander chee!

2016 march 23, UES barnes and noble:  i've been raving about jung yun's shelter since i read it last year, and i'm glad it's finally out in the world for everyone to read.  if you haven't read it yet, read it; it's amazing; and it will wreck you.

---

jung yun:  i used to live in new york city but left fourteen years ago with this vague idea of being a writer.

JY:  i started writing [shelter] in 2010, but it's set in 2008.

[the scene they discuss below is the one she read -- pages 12-17 from the novel.]

alexander chee:  i think the incredible power that you give the mother as she approaches is just one of the moments when i knew that i loved this novel because you allowed her the dignity of her suffering, in a sense, amid the humiliation that was happening.  and the misunderstanding of the son -- it's so heartbreaking.  that's not a question.  how did you come to this idea?

JY:  so that scene -- i was an MFA candidate, it was 2004, and, at the time, my parents were getting older and heading toward retirement.  you know, my parents are fantastic and they're loving people, but i was thinking [...] [about how you can love someone, but it can be inconveniencing].

that was sort of the beginning, then i put it away in a drawer, then, in 2007, there was this high-profile home invasion in cheshire, connecticut.  [two men broke into a home of a family of four; the mother and two daughters were brutally raped and murdered, while the father survived.]*  i became really obsessed with that case, but i didn't understand how this man was ever going to have a life.  i didn't know how this man was going to recover knowing that his loved ones had all died in fear.

that particular crime that happened in real life was the connecting thing between the scene in the field and everything else.

* wiki page here

AC:  the parents are also remarkable characters, and i think that was part of what moved me about the novel, this sense that i was reading characters i'd never really seen in a novel.  and, to some extent, that includes your portrayal of kyung.  it's hard for someone like to understand that there is a great deal of love in all of the demands placed on him, and yet that's also part of the heartbreak.  so this is a kind of crisis in which crisis happens -- this gap.  what were the biggest challenges in structuring that?

JY:  i think, in not making it overly sentimental.  i wanted kyung to be kind of unlikable from the start but also for readers to understand him.  there are times my husband would be like "he's so frustrating," and i was like, "good!"  i wanted to capture some of the tension and expectation of someone who came to the country with his parents and has felt the weight of having to do just as well or better than his parents did.

JY:  i tried to avoid delving into too much sentimentality but tried to subvert expectations and to avoid stereotypes and make him more three-dimensional.

AC:  how much did you research the family and kyung?  maybe the expectation would be that you're korean so you wouldn't have to, which is ridiculous.

JY:  i did a lot of research into domestic violence in immigrant communities.

AC:  what surprised you in what you learned?

JY:  i don't speak korean very well myself, and one of the most messed up things i learned was about the korean language.  in english, you can say, "you hurt me," but you can't say that directly in korean.  but you can say, "it hurts."*

* i had to sit and puzzle over this for a good five minutes there.  it's kinda blowing my mind ... but not.  sounds very korean.

audience Q&A

Q:  did you purposely want to write about korean-americans?

JY:  i write a mix of characters, but i did want this character to be korean-american, and i wanted him to be married to someone who wasn't korean-american because i wanted that question.

JY:  when i was doing press, i'd get the question, "are these people based on real life?" a lot.

AC:  the most boring question.

JY:  taking care of parents -- taking care of lousy parents -- that's not a korean-american problem; that's a universal problem.  struggling with money, having financial problems -- that's a universal problem, too.

JY:  [explained how she gets up at 4:30 in the morning to write before work because she realized that, after the work day, she has no wherewithal to write.  writing is the most important thing to her, though, so she'd start getting up at 6, then 5:30, now 4:30 to write, and now she wakes up without an alarm.]

JY:  when i don't write, i'm terrible.  it's better for everyone if i start my day doing the thing that's most important to me.

JY:  there's a whole lot in my life that i can't control.  i can control what's on the page, and that's about it.

AC:  i think the thing that's so frustrating about the autobiographical question is that you put all this energy into creating something and the thing people want to talk about is the thing you didn't write about.