Lee: Absolutlely, I would say in retrospect
I see how I was always obsessed with houses. My Master’s thesis was on
Elizabeth Bishop. It was called, “The idea of Houses.”
Figueroa: Bishop wrote the villanelle “One Art,”
correct?
Lee: Yes, Bishop was totally obsessed with
houses, and the science of moving houses all the time, and belonging. “I lost
three houses once,” - from “One Art”- that kind of thing was present in her
work a lot. So, in retrospect, I really realized I was obsessed with houses and
the idea of belonging, shelter, and safety from danger. A house is a fraught image that just came into the story. It was
unusual because it went in reverse order. Usually, you have the story and then
it’s the title, and afterwards you end up giving the title to the collection
first, and lastly the image appears.
Figueroa: The idea of mobility, like immigration
and emigration, is a prominent element in your work. Do you feel DH has a
fractured element to it, in that the mobile aspect of home has a tinge of
impermanence?
Lee: The house, or where we belong, seems
like such a mobile thing at this point for so many of us. I think of it as a
literal physical place, the thing that is drifting, and the house is the place
of love and the people you love. But it’s also, in some ways, stable and
unstable, because love is like that, and family, and where we belong.
DH
itself it literally our body that is a house that is maybe both. It looks as or
appears to be as physically anchored, but it’s actually always moving as well
in the sense of not quite belonging or being alone.
So,
houses have a slightly sad note for me.
Figueroa: Do you feel in your collection of
stories, especially those about North Korean defectors, that you show a certain
amount of mercy towards whatever actions they had to take in order to escape? I
feel there is a sympathetic tone to your characters even when they are put in
awful situations.
Lee: I don’t see it as giving them mercy
because story writing is an opportunity to try and understand different peoples
and their challenged circumstances. It’s like literally taking that saying of “Putting yourself in someone else’s
shoes.” That is what you do when you write fiction.
Things
that seem impossible or improbable, when you imagine them they are not so much.
It’s about writing to understand, such as, when I hear about someone who’s killed another person,
my first questions is, “How did they grow up”
or “Why did they become the way they became?”
People don’t become that way overnight. The decisions come with their
repercussions, and the context sets the pace and tone of what is possible in
that moment.
I
think that is how I think of my characters, by trying to understand what is happening
to them and negotiate that. The negotiation is sometimes what surprises you.
Figueroa: When I have written short stories and
have shown them to workshops, I was told by many people that it was a great
idea for a novel, but not a short story.
Lee: I got told the same thing!
Figueroa: Yes, in your workshop experiences, your
peers often said that you had seven stories going on and they tried to get you
to trim it down to just one. However, you have said that your goal is to keep
those “7 complex things.” Why do you feel it’s important to keep them?
Lee: I got told all the time with every
single story that I ever brought to a workshop environment, “This could be a
novel,” and I had to tell them, “But it’s not.” I didn’t want to write a novel
at that point; I wanted to write a short story.
So, I didn’t feel like I could
understand the character without everything else there. That’s the thing; those
7 other complex things are what helped me understand the character. I wanted to
keep all of that in.
There
is a short story by Alice Munro where her fiction instructor tells her something along those lines, and she
trims the story down to this one story line. Then, she adds a page of footnotes
of all the things she left out, saying, “This is the story that didn’t make
it.”
Also,
Edward P. Jones writes stories with at least 70 different things in each story,
they’re remarkable. I think the kind of stories he is trying to tell requires a
lot more in order to understand the character.
Figueroa: What was your MFA program experience
like?
Lee: Mine was a little different because I
was living in Korea, and I got a fellowship through Warren Wilson. I did a
low-residency program, which is an MFA that is very low-key. Most of it was
online.
I
liked the program because it had excellent teaching, both the poetry and fiction lectures. Most of the faculty turns
their lectures into books later.
Of
course, it I were in the States and my life had been more conducive to that, I probably would have done a full
residency MFA. I don’t know if I would say
one is more helpful than the other. In some sense, the full residency obviously
builds a tight community, which is great, but you also sit in more workshops,
and I don’t know if the workshop is good or how helpful it actually is.
Figueroa: How is it teaching the students in your
new professorship in Korea?
Lee: I teach students from all around the
world. The faculty is all academics and scholars, except me, the fiction
professor, and one other poetry professor. And that’s it for the whole department!
Figueroa: If you could say one last thing to a
person on the fence about getting an MFA, what would it be?
Lee: MFA’s offer a great community, the
opportunity to grow confident as a writer, a great reading list, and you get to
see all the great writers on campus.
Figueroa: Did you feel your stories were
discovered by being in the right hands or by knowing the right people?
Lee: I didn’t know anyone, I mean, I was in
Korea! I actually shared the story with the other Neustadt writers about the
business side of writing. And a few of them actually think the business side is
really important, but I actually agree with Charles Yu. He said, “Writers
should spend 95% of their time writing, and 5% taking care of the business side
of things.” I really feel like it should be that way.
But
a lot of writers don’t approach it that way; a lot of them put a lot of time
and energy into making phone calls and aggressively marketing their book. I just
think that time will pass and eventually if your work is meant to be discovered
it will be. After I told my story, the other writers said, “Things happened easily for you, but it
doesn’t for other writers.” And it was interesting, I thought even if it didn’t
happen with my first book, if I write one book or two, eventually things will
happen. I think you have to be patient with that.
So,
no, I didn’t know anyone. I just happened to go to writer’s conference with an earlier draft in the story
collection, and they loved the story. The people on the staff told the agents,
“We have a real writer in my workshop!” So, they said let’s send it to the Atlantic Monthly, and the agents started
coming to me.
Figueroa: I’ve heard that agents should come to
you, you shouldn’t have to go to them.
Lee: Well, it happens one way or another.
Great books have also found an agent because they knocked on doors and wrote a
pitch letter. I was actually terrible about talking to publishers. I just
thought, “How do I talk about my book? I don’t know!” Or it happens really
easily when you’re discovered. Getting lucky makes it easier because you don’t have to go through that arduous process
of finding an agent, but once you have an agent and you get your hands on a
publisher, you do what you can for the book within reason. I’m just not willing
to break my back with publicity because if the book is good enough, and if you write a few books over time, the readers will find you
and discover you. You have to trust your words and trust the story, and work
hard at becoming a better writer than just working hard to becoming better known as a writer. That’s my philosophy.
***
I cannot thank the staff of World Literature Today enough
for their constant guidance.
The week of events was immensely inspiring to lovers of reading and writing.
I want to include the names of the other Neustadt jurors so everyone
can be exposed to these amazing living voices:
Cristina Rivera-Garza, Gabriella Ghermandi,
Ananda Devi,
Lauren Camp, Fady Joudah, Ibitsam Barakat, Laleh
Khadavi, Andrew Lam, Deji Olukotun, and Krys Lee.
For more information on the Neustadt Prize, go to
neustadtprize.org
or visit worldliteraturetoday.org
and the Neustadt 2013 class.
