Beauty out of grief
I began writing The White Flower after the loss of my mother. I needed to find a language for what I was feeling and to create something new – and beautiful – from the pain of her absence. It was a way of keeping her memory alive and honouring the incredible lifeforce she possessed. Around...
That first night
I WORE A DRESS on the night I first met Ming. A crowd swarmed the union bar, and my shoulders jostled as boys dressed as girls and girls dressed as boys pushed in and out of the front line. A tightness seized my brain, a vacuum-pack seal over its folds. I looked up. Large paper...
Beyond language
Indeterminate Inflorescence is a collection of aphorisms on poetry-writing taken from the creative writing lectures of Lee Seong-bok, one of South Korea’s most prominent living poets. These 470 meditations, collected by his students, are evocative micro-poems in their own right. Some express ideas at once familiar and breathtakingly new – truths we could sense but not put...
Fight your own war
I am sitting in this small room, two or three months from now or two or three years from now, writing a story about a number of human beings marching in a hunger parade and writing about what is going on in their minds, about all the remarkable things they are dreaming and imagining in...
Dark delights
I’VE ALWAYS LEANED INTO what’s funny about the terrible, in life and in my writing, in part as a coping mechanism, but also as a way to bring people in. If things are just across-the-board awful, it’s my experience that people stop listening and/or reading. They turn away, back to the safe mundane. But aptly...
