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Human And Nonhuman

Living in the twenty-first century means living face to face with artificial intelligence, the product of an unprecedented leap in scientific technology. It also means living with an acute awareness of the fragility of the environment and the role of the human species among many other nonhuman species on earth. Our current concerns with and for the nonhuman, however, are not new. Indeed, we could say that nonhumans have never been far from our minds. Already one hundred years ago, science fiction writers were struggling with the ethical dilemmas they foresaw in future societies, and many of the stories they imagined involved robots, animals, and plants. Here are two Korean writers whose work grows out of an abiding interest in the complex relationship between the human and nonhuman: Bae Myung-hoon, whose satirical science fiction depicts the imbrication of humans with technology, and Kim Mella, who writes from the engaging viewpoint of insects, objects, and other nonhumans. by Taehoon Roh

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Boundless Like the Stars

I was the kind of child who put on plays by herself. The stage was usually in the back of the shop where my parents worked, and the actors were the small plastic dolls I collected. The plays always featured a troublemaker who sets off on an adventure in an unknown world, who never lets any adult stop her with a “Don’t go. It’s dangerous!” As all stories go, the troublemaker would encounter danger, falling into booby traps or having run-ins with giant monsters. Each time, she would quell the monster with a stunning kick. And once the monster had surrendered, the troublemaker would show mercy and stop her attack. After an apology from the monster, the two would become friends, and the troublemaker, climbing onto the monster's shoulders, would set off on a new adventure in yet more distant lands.  Writing fiction, too, is a play I put on by myself. I know some people might find this simplistic. But losing myself in a childhood game and losing myself in the act of writing really aren’t all that different. The little dolls that I moved with my hands, the troublemaker whose dreams about the unknown lead her to hardship-these are the same characters that make me keep writing fiction.  In one of my short stories, a child named Christmas has the ability to see a light that no one else can see. I call it “belly button light,” because it is emitted from a person’s navel. In the story, all humans give off this light, like giant fireflies. And just as fireflies flash their light late at night in search of a mate, the belly button light reaches out toward loved ones, carrying with it the emotions of its emitter. I thought the light should be emitted from the belly button because all humans are connected to their mothers through their navels before birth. The belly button light, thus, is evidence of that love and the desire for human connection. But Christmas cannot get others to understand the light she sees. In time, she seeks out others like her: the anglerfish with its bioluminescent lure in the deep sea, the bees and butterflies that can see ultraviolet patterns on flower petals, and even the dung beetle that navigates by the light of the Milky Way galaxy. It is with these unusual fellows that Christmas finds belonging. This is no different from how a loner troublemaker makes friends with a loner monster. Was the troublemaker setting off on an adventure in order to find a friend? Are sorrow and solitude the inner forces that propel us to discover other worlds?   People who feel pain and alienation from the words they hear and read look for another language and sound. They need to create new “words” to express themselves fully. And this language does not necessarily have to be uttered in a human voice. Suppose there is a couple who, for some reason, only treat each other as lovers inside the privacy of their home. Socially, they are just friends or housemates. Besides them, no one knows of their true relationship. That's because, in a society that is staunchly heterosexual, they cannot be anything but friends. But what if we look at the situation from the perspective of nonhumans? What if the couple's story were narrated by dogs, cats, or houseplants?  I once wrote a story about a dildo that observes a lesbian couple. The object is critical of the two women, who don’t treat it with care. Although its gaze is distorted and full of resentment, the narrating dildo nevertheless has a close-up view of the couple. It knows about their secret relationship and their hidden story. I don’t need to explain that a dildo is made for very human purposes and looks like a human body part. Yet it spends most of its time hidden in a drawer. In other words, the dildo is a great representation of the contradictions and duality of being human. Just think about it for a second: a situation in which an object that I hide in my drawer, an object that is the opposite of the image I present to society, observes and judges me 24/7. What if the object's analysis of myself were to become the final record of my existence? From what point of view should we tell our story? And from what vantage point should we analyze and interpret this world?  In my other work, The Book of Joy, I wrote about a springtail, a mosquito, and a spider, who all watch humans. These insects are commonly classified as pests. But whenever I meet readers, I explain in an excited voice how awesome it is that springtails can jump using their furcula, the tail-like appendage from which they receive their name. A famous biologist once quipped that it only takes a beetle for us to realize that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and insects. Indeed, the number of beetle species feels as vast as the stars in the night sky. It’s no wonder that some people stare at the tiny lifeforms beneath their feet with the same awe and wonder felt by people who gaze up at the stars. Mystery and miracles do not require distant lands or faraway galaxies; they take place in the very grass that brushes against our ankles. I have been curious about what lived on this planet before humans. Insects were the first animals to evolve the ability to fly, and they made the journey onto land even before plants. Human civilization is roughly ten thousand years old, but the wings of the mayfly have been around for 330 million years. While reading books about bugs, I learned that the cicada pupa stays underground for seventeen years, counting the seasons by listening to the sound of tree roots. I also learned that some butterflies and grasshoppers journey across entire oceans. That’s not to say I don’t swat at mosquitoes in the summer or mindlessly tear spider webs off the wall. But when I’m at my loneliest and most exhausted, when there is no one around who understands me, it is those small bodies that comfort me. One day, I was cleaning my room when I saw a spider crawl across the floor. It suddenly occurred to me that I was being watched by all the bugs in my house. They were watching me, just as I was watching them. While reading books about nature and insects, I imagined what they must see, what they might say if they could talk. Little by little, the troublemaker of my youth reawakened. The rhythm of the springtail jumping past its limits, the plight of the female mosquito who must drink the blood of other animals in order to lay her eggs, the spider who, like me, endlessly weaves a “text”-they all breathed new life into me. I felt refreshed by the richness of their diversity. Looking at things from the perspective of bugs, the hardships I was dealing with suddenly looked so trivial. The insect narrators in my head have unconventional values. As observers and recorders, they report the situation on Earth to the insects living on other planets. They declare, among other things, that the human species is a regrettable evolutionary error caused by the instinct to reproduce. Their perspective, which is heavily insect-centric, gave me a sense of liberation. A lot of the things that are called abnormal when measured by human standards are actually unique and full of individuality from a nonhuman perspective. If, for example, you look at things through the eyes of a caterpillar, whose body changes color according to the leaves it eats, the fact that humans discriminate against each other based on the color of their skin suddenly seems so immature. Through the eyes of insects, I came to understand humans better. I realized that the lifecycle of an insect is like the biological rhythm of my partner. I can’t detail my life with my partner in this short essay. I will just say that, just as insects sleep for long periods of time when the weather is too hot or cold, my partner's sleeping pattern also changes with the seasons. In the eyes of humans, my partner's lifestyle would need to be corrected, but in the eyes of insects, it's a clever mechanism to maintain harmony with the rhythms of nature. People in modern society work the same amount of time every day. This has nothing to do with our bodies’ biological rhythm. Only human lives are run on an unnatural schedule determined by the standards of industrialization and capitalism. Every plant and animal lives according to the movement of the Earth around the sun. The sea ebbs and flows according to the gravitational pull of the moon, and sea life migrates thousands of miles in response. Our knowledge of these processes is limited. We don’t know exactly how mullet or eels return to the river where they were born to lay eggs. We don’t know how the Pacific swift can sleep while flying, or how the warbler senses the Earth’s magnetic field as it makes cross-continental journeys-we don’t even know what it would be like to sense magnetism. We don’t know how a leaf produces nutrients with sunlight. We know that it happens through a process we call photosynthesis, but we don’t have a full explanation of the quantum interactions between photons and plant cells. And yet, despite our ignorance, billions and billions of leaves across the surface of the Earth achieve this miracle every day without fail.  I don’t want to imply that nonhuman organisms are superior. Nor do I wish to repeat the logic of power that divides things into superior and inferior things, into dominator and dominated. I just want us to think for a second about how anthropocentric thinking limits us to a terribly narrow framework from which to understand the world, about how humanity itself suffers as a consequence. Around the time I wrote The Book of Joy, I was so lonely that I found comfort in insects. I was so isolated that I couldn’t even sympathize with the pain of the person I loved. It was only after I saw flashes of the world through the eyes of insects that I realized my own arrogance and narrow-mindedness. The springtail, which is as small as a speck of dust, taught me to take pleasure in the joys of daily life. The female mosquito, which suffers from a fate far worse than my own, showed me what it really means to be exhausted. And the spider, who is constantly weaving its web, never quite sure when it will be destroyed again, taught me the patience never to give up on life. With their small and fragile bodies, they taught me the vastness of acceptance. While the rules and notions of human society failed to explain my love and my pain, the nonhuman voice allowed me to accept reality and simultaneously opened up a whole other reality for me.  While writing these novels, I often thought about Jules Renard, author of Nature Stories, who later came to feel ashamed of the jokes he'd made at the expense of plants and animals. I think about what he must have felt as he looked back in regret on his disdainful writing. That is the image of the kind of human being that I love, someone who reflects seriously on the damage caused even by acts carried out in curiosity and affection, who takes time to pray in remembrance of the dignity of the frogs and grasshoppers once laughed at. Jokes and metaphors find completion when they arrive at regret and reflection. Imagining the nonhuman perspective involves more than just personification. In the beginning, I suspected that I was analyzing plants and animals and objects by projecting a human perspective onto them. I even worried that my comparisons might be merely rhetorical devices for writing. But then I realized I wasn't describing the movements of worms and butterflies just to spice up my language. I wanted to marvel. That's why I was connecting with them. Just as worms move forward by devouring the soil and butterflies taste flowers through their legs, I use the body of language to sense the world. Like all corporeal beings, I am connected to the world through something both limited and unique.  What I wanted to fill my novels with was “flow.” The rhythm of the circle of life, of birds that eat snails whose shells become the calcium in eggshells that crack and fall to the ground, where they break down into soil from which plants grow, which feed the snails that grow the shells that birds will swallow again. I wanted to cross boundaries, the way these animals cross boundaries. To flow, with the help of the currents of language, across the boundary between people and fireflies, between people and things, between life and death. After all, that is the way that every other being, aside from humans, seems to be living its life. The scientific knowledge that all life forms are made from the dust of exploded stars is no different from the religious conviction that all things are connected. The spirit of inquiry that reaches for the stars and the quietude that allows me to look deep inside myself pointed me to the same path. Indeed, the realization that all roads eventually merge as one gave me deep relief and great joy.  Once, humans could hear the trees. They laughed looking at the faces clouds made and sang to the rhythm of raindrops. My three-year-old nephew thinks everything is human. He imbues everything with human voices. When he brushes his teeth, the cavities in his mouth yell: “Run away, run away! The toothbrush is here!” When he eats, he hears a voice inside his body. It rumbles: “What did the broccoli inside me just say? Where is it passing?” The voices he imagines are learned from the stories adults tell him. Stories invented to get him to brush his teeth, to get him to finish his vegetables. But the human imagination often strays from these well-paved paths.  One day, while running to the bathroom, he might wonder what his pee could say if it could talk. “I’m coming out to soak your pants!” In this way, a child puts on a play to express his own desire to wet his pants. In this game, even urine is a full-fledged, conscious being. But he anthropomorphizes more than just trivial things that belong in the toilet.  One day, he prayed to God for good dreams. Then suddenly, a doubt came to him: “But wasn’t Jesus weak?” The God he knew was always emaciated and had a tired expression, so he was not sure such a weak person could grant his wish. In other words, God was just another human to him. To children, nothing in the world is lesser or greater than a human. Everything laughs like them, feels pain like them.  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:Kim Mella , The Book of Joy (Hyundae Munhak, 2024) 김멜라, 『환희의 책』 (현대문학, 2024)  Kim Mella, “Teary Eyes and the Invincible Bellybutton,” in OO (Moonji, 2026)김멜라, 「젖은 눈과 무적의 배꼽」, 『이응 이응』 (문학과지성사, 2026)  Kim Mella,”Sunset,” Please Dream of Me (Munhakdongne, 2022)김멜라, 「저녁놀」, 『제 꿈 꾸세요』 (문학동네, 2022) 

by Kim Mella

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AI Ethics and a Century-Long Repeat Sign

At some point in time, Korea entered the “Age of AI.” Exactly what that means is hard to say. Two years ago in 2024, the great science fiction author Ted Chiang visited Korea and gave us his opinion about artificial intelligence. His message, which was quoted by various outlets, was this: What everyone is calling “AI” isn’t really AI; it’s ridiculous to say you’re going to use it to create art. On the page, his tone came across as calm and matter-of-fact, but in reality, he was probably screaming at the top of his lungs. The noise of that incident is now in the past, and Korean society has officially entered the Age of AI. In an era named as such, it’s only natural that science fiction writers receive questions about AI wherever we go. They’re usually questions asking us, as professionals who straddle the line between science and the humanities, to predict how the two will ever find harmony. Of course, I have my own thoughts and opinions on the matter, and so do the professionals from various fields with whom I’ve shared the stage. But these forums invariably end with the same call to action: “Now it’s time for us to think about the ethics of AI.” It’s a bit cliché and mechanical, but it’s always made with the most serious of expressions. What can artificial intelligence do? What are its limits? Conversely, what are humans uniquely capable of? How will society delegate work and make sure the two domains don’t overlap? And how can humans and machines possibly coexist? I always come away from these deep questions and serious debates with the same impression: “Wow, what a constructive discussion, reinventing the wheel for the progress of modern civilization!”   I included Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. on the reading list for my literature course this semester, a play which was staged across the US and Europe in the twenties to great popular acclaim. Not the 2020s, but the 1920s. I know, some of you are rolling your eyes right now—“Karel Čapek? But he lived so long ago!” However, the reason I’m bringing this old work into the conversation is precisely because it’s one of the many reinvented wheels of AI ethics. The title R.U.R. comes from the name of the robot manufacturing company at the center of the play: Rossum’s Universal Robots. In fact, the word “robot” itself was introduced in this play and referred to the company’s product. This isn’t to say that R.U.R. was the first and only text to talk about robot-like beings and artificial intelligence, but I believe it’s a natural place to begin the discussion. To skip straight to the point, if R.U.R. was the first wheel of AI ethics, it rolled fantastically well upon its invention. So well, in fact, that I find myself wondering how it was possible that someone like Čapek, living when neither robots nor AI nor anything remotely similar existed, could formulate questions so like the ones we see on television news today. (This is me encouraging anyone who hasn’t read the book to find it and read it for themselves.) The questions the work raises are as follows: What distin­guishes us humans from robots? Is it acceptable for humans to treat robots as objects and to discriminate against them? Isn’t the very pain and toil we try to escape through robots, in fact, the core of what it means to be human? Indeed, where do we find meaning once we are deprived of our ability to produce? Should robots be used in war? If the ethical questions we raise in 2026 are barely distin­guishable from those raised in 1920, it’s not only because R.U.R. is a great classic, but also in part because the questions we are raising in 2026 are so painfully superficial. At the threshold of the so-called “Age of AI” stands a repeat sign, one that transports every discussion about AI ethics back one hundred years. The ethical thought experiments pioneered by early science fiction writers and carried out over the last century, and the loose but far-reaching social contracts that emerged from them—it is these that the repeat sign conspires to make us pretend we’ve forgotten.  In which direction did the twentieth-century wheel of AI ethics roll? The number of authors who have written about robots and artificial intelligence is too great to count, and this makes it hard to reduce the trajectory of the discussion to a single line. We have no choice but to use the names of giants as signposts. Standing firmly at the junction of the 1940s is none other than Isaac Asimov.Behind Asimov’s famous “Three Laws of Robotics” is the memory of the rebellion staged by the robots in R.U.R. who took over the world. The robots of the play were originally designed to strip human workers of their livelihoods—the U in R.U.R. stands for universal, after all. So the robots were inherently terrifying beings. Because of this, Asimov encoded the following laws into the brains of his robots.  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.[1][1] Isaac Asimov, “Runaround,” in I, Robot (Doubleday, 1950), 40.  Asimov’s novels serve as case studies of the errors and loopholes that can arise despite these three laws. Nonetheless, the laws make clear one thing regarding the coexistence of humans and robots: humans are the masters, robots are the tools. Countless other writers and branching paths lie along the way, but Asimov’s wheel keeps rolling. In the 1960s, Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in which a human detective hunts down androids despite constantly grappling with the possibility that androids might be more human than actual humans. The questions raised in this novel were adapted into the 1982 film Blade Runner, allowing them to reach an even wider audience. Through this continued discourse, it became clear that, because of the terrifying possibilities that AI and robots posed for humanity, the industries producing them needed appropriate bargaining chips to win public acceptance. From this, an implicit agreement took shape. The use of artificial intelligence and robots as weapons of war would be heavily restricted, and they would instead be deployed first and foremost in the dangerous, difficult, and dirty work that humans don’t want to do—so-called 3D work. This agreement became a kind of social contract and functioned as a loose norm well into the early twenty-first century. Even in the 2010s, when AI technology made its dramatic leap forward, people thought of putting AI to use primarily in areas such as healthcare and caregiving. It’s probably in this same context that, during that period, the number of entries to science fiction writing contests featuring care robots exploded. The narratives themselves weren’t especially novel, but they had internalized the ethical lessons. For the most part, they were heart-warming attempts that somewhat renewed one’s faith in humanity. But this norm was quickly forgotten as AI technology became more visible. Now, engineers tend to develop not the technology in fields that need to be developed, like the 3D industries or caregiving, but the technologies that can be developed, like the production of art, literature, and music. It is here that the repeat sign of AI ethics appeared. The sign is also a proposal that we erase the thought experiments and social contracts of the twentieth century, and start thinking about AI ethics from scratch. The results of this attitude are already unsettling. Even the most progressive TV news channels report on the real-world deployment of AI-equipped weaponry with indifference. This would have been almost unthinkable back when the imagery of the Terminator series was fresh in the mind of the public. Even in 2016, when there was much ado about Lee Sedol’s face-off against AlphaGo, it seemed that the ethical lessons of the twentieth century were still alive and well. Newspapers and magazines were calling science fiction writers daily, and most of the questions I received stemmed from the same fear at the heart of R.U.R.: Was AI going to take over the world? At least up to that point, Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics seemed to be still in effect in human society. But the wheel didn’t just stop rolling with Asimov. Donna Haraway invented her own wheel, which rolled in the opposite direction from Asimov’s. Is it really the case that only humans can be subjects, while robots remain mere objects? Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, which subverts the relationship between human and machine, claims that humans are already cyborgs. I’m doubtful of the validity of her thesis as it applied to the world in 1985, before the internet and smartphones. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t a cyborg back then. But now, I probably am a cyborg; I couldn’t do even half the work I do right now without the internet. Haraway is not a writer of science fiction, obviously, but her wheel brushed right up against the concerns of contem­porary science fiction by following the intellectual current of posthumanism. About ten years ago, a somewhat curious phenomenon arose in the Korean literary scene. Literary critics and humanities scholars started furiously consuming Korean science fiction, which until then had been largely dismissed in academic circles. As a writer of science fiction who was at the time already twenty years into my career, I couldn’t help but find this a bit odd. I still read with skepticism any literary criticism that approaches science fiction from a posthumanist perspective. Too much of it feels discon­nected from the actual concerns of the authors. My impression is that posthumanism wasn’t brought in to make sense of the explosion of Korean science fiction over the past decade, but rather that science fiction has been commandeered and appropriated for the purpose of writing about posthumanism. Then again, I can’t dismiss the overlap between the two. The continued literary achievements of science fiction writer Kim Cho-yeop, the literary embodiment of posthumanism, cannot be overstated. As its name suggests, posthumanism is a theory of reflection and a reckoning against humanism which dominated all of modernity. It overturns the assumptions that humans are subjects while things remain mere tools. And in literature, it was used to rewrite the grammar that fixed subject and object in their respective hierarchies. By its logic, the Three Laws of Robotics would need to be rewritten completely; robots and AI would have the right to defend themselves, without regard for human safety or human intent. My point is: even before the recent wave of celebrated AI services, humanity was equipped to ask whether AI and humans can coexist. Do we really even need to start the ethical inquiry into this problem from scratch? Frankly, I don’t think so. This is a line of inquiry already in the stage of finding answers. We don’t need to go back to square one to reopen the discussion.And neither are the answers to all these ethical questions locked away in some ivory tower of literature and theory. You need only look at the countless children’s robot cartoons airing on educational television to start getting clues. Some robots still act as protectors of Earth, but plenty of others have transformed and combined with humans to rescue humans, to coexist with humans, to position themselves between the poles of humans and machines. And they do this all without ever once mentioning the word posthumanism. Even without such a concept, people are already thinking and feeling along posthuman lines.  Art is basically useless. More precisely, it’s an activity that can’t be properly evaluated with a ruler that measures usefulness. And because I’m so used to being called useless and watching my fellow artists being called useless, I find myself reluctant to ever call anything useless. But if there is one thing in this world that might have no use, it might be trying to improve the performance of self-driving cars by reinventing the wheel. Of course, there might be cases in which something useless in engineering might prove extremely useful in ethics, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them. Should a news anchor be allowed to proudly announce that cutting-edge weapons equipped with AI were deployed in combat? Even if the report is delivered calmly and objectively, are we supposed to sit around and accept the news without doing anything? Can AI be conscious? Can it have a soul? If we discover something within artificial intelligence, could we declare it real? How true is the claim that AI, through “training,” has become capable of creating art, and how much of it is just playing loose with definitions of words? And finally, is it really true that we still haven’t developed the ethical framework by which to judge any of this? Before we set about inventing anything new in the face of these kinds of questions, let us first look back at Karel Čapek. He gave us the wheel for this problem, and our civilization is already rolling along with it just fine.

by Bae Myung-hoon

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Stories Move Forward While Looking Back

The first books I fell in love with after learning to read were classics of world literature for children. My parents bought me a sixty-volume set when I was eight. The moment I opened the pages of the first of these books, my world split in two: the world inside the books and the world outside. There were times when one world outgrew the other, but neither world managed to become the whole.  On the way home from school, I would ponder which book to read that day. The hardback books featured colorful covers and curious illustrations that depicted children and grownups that looked a bit different from those I knew. When I looked at the illustrations again as an adult, I realized that the illustrations in my Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were pretty much the same as the ones in the original version. At the time, traveling overseas was still restricted in Korea, and for a child like me who’d just learned to read hangeul, the stories and illustrations in the book set seemed worlds away. I was fascinated by France, Germany, England, Turkey, Japan, and many other countries I knew nothing about, and by the exotic names of my favorite authors like Eleanor Farjeon and Zacharias Topelius. Of all these books, it was those from colder countries like Denmark and Finland that I read over and over until I wore them out. Perhaps that was when I started to love winter.  The stories I listened to during my childhood in the world outside of books were stories about my grandparents’ memories of the hardships they had experienced during the Japanese colonial period and the Korean war. Stories of countless episodes when they had nearly lost their lives. Of people who had actually died. My grandparents’ eldest son had died during the war. The people who came to visit our house were relatives and friends who had joined them in their flight to Busan. They would unwrap bundles of stories about their memories of fleeing the war. Although they were always the same old stories, each time they told them, they managed to retell them in an entertaining and surprising way. Thirty years had passed since the end of the war, yet they still remembered everything so vividly, as if the events had happened only the day before. Now I, too, have memories of events from twenty or thirty years ago. The memories are so vivid that the past events immediately unfold before my eyes as soon as I recollect them. I remember very clearly the day the folksinger Kim Kwang-seok passed away in 1996. I remember how strange the air felt that day and how I grieved with a friend with whom I had gone to see his concert. This must be why the survivors could not forget what it was like to flee the war. But by then their experiences were no longer sad stories. They were more like long remembered songs from their youth. As a child, I used to sit among the grownups, listening to their stories over and over again while nodding off on the warm ondol floor, until I opened my eyes again and it was already the next day. The warm and melancholy image of this scene has long lingered in my mind. This must be why, ever since my childhood, I often have had dreams of fleeing the war. There is a dream where I am walking on ice in the dead of winter, caught up in a swarming crowd of people, and my younger sister’s hand slips from mine, and I lose her. A dream where I’m crying out her name, looking for her, and wake up crying. So cold and sharp—to whom does this memory belong? Why do I dream of something I’ve never experienced? Why do I experience in this way a war I’ve never experienced? When I was a few years older, I read some Korean children’s stories at the school library. They were stories set during the war or the time of poverty that followed, and so full of sadness and pain that they didn’t seem like children’s stories at all. Perhaps that was why the illustrations also seemed sad. One story that has stuck with me is Sister Mongsil by Kwon Jeong-saeng. I remember crying for a long time even after finishing the book. Mongsil is a girl who, in the absence of her parents, takes care of her younger siblings in the midst of war and poverty. I knew that the book was set a few decades earlier, but she felt like an older sister from my own neighborhood.  At the time, Kwon Jeong-saeng was living in Jotap Village in the Iljik neighborhood of Andong City, which was twenty minutes from my house by car. I was familiar with that neighborhood because my maternal grandparents were from there. I remember finding this odd, because I was used to thinking of authors as beings who, like characters in books, lived in another world than mine. I used to think of books as distant dreams dreamt by people from somewhere very far away—but this experience made me realize that books were connected to the real world. It was as if the world inside books and the world outside books, in that fleeting moment, had briefly met. I can’t explain the feeling I had then, but for a few years after that, I avoided reading Korean children’s books. Reading about the pain of children from far away made me want to comfort them, but I couldn’t bear to meet the sad eyes of children in the stories of a writer who lived so close to me. These stories were my grandmother’s and my grandfather’s. They were in a way my own stories.  I need to write my own story. That’s what I thought when I began writing poetry. What I ended up writing was not my own story but stories I was drawn to, stories that attracted me. After publishing the poems, however, I realized they were my own stories after all. I didn’t realize this when I began writing poetry, but after publishing them I understood that poems are stories that pass through the poet’s body.   My first collection of peoms, I Fell Asleep Wearing Shoes, opens with the poem “Scheherazade”: Shall I tell you an old tale A tale as light as a nightmare, as heavy as air, one that slips through your fingers like sand when you grasp at it A tale like a silent scream A tale like lace woven for a thousand years, like a spider web, that could break and blow away in the wind at any moment A tale trite and strange, like the movie you saw some nights ago, like a scene from your dream last night, like the windy path you walked yesterday afternoon A tale as clear as your skin, as black as your eyes, as red as your lips, as unfamiliar as you whom I’ve never met A tale as enchanting as formalin, as rancid as breast milk, as deadly as charcoal fumes A tale as electric as a last kiss that unravels like a loose thread from a sweater A dogged tale like a runaway dog pelted by rain, like a kicked-out dog beaten with a broom, like a dog that still returns home in the end The last tale you told The tale you tell every day The tale that your dead body will tell me every day until I die A tale with no end A tale as anxious as erratic clouds, as hot as fish blood, as beautiful as a lover’s beard A tale you can hear even when you cover your ears An experimental tale with no experiments and no experimental spirit that rejects any kind of experimentation A tale you will write down in your notebook after it pops into your head A tale I will whisper into your ear tomorrow night, without realizing it’s the same story I told you last night I wanted to write something familiar and strange, something strange but knowable, something I didn’t know was inside me. The sadness, beauty, fear, and feeling of strangeness that I had glimpsed in the world inside books, and the sadness, beauty, fear, and feeling of strangeness that I had glimpsed in the world outside books. I straddled these two worlds. Inside and outside books, inside and outside dreams, inside and outside seasons, inside and outside my body. The worlds of life and death interfered, invaded, soaked through, infiltrated, flipped, dominated, opposed, accepted, and melted into each other, yet even now neither one has become the whole. And inside me there is a storyteller who continues to speak and tell stories. That storyteller—one or many—speaks the voices of all those who make up my world and who I am. Why does contemporary Korean literature actively attempt to revive old stories? When I was asked this question, many thoughts came to mind, but I still don’t know the answer.  In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argued that the overflow of information has diminished the value of experience conveyed from mouth to mouth. He predicted that the storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights would not survive in modernity. But then why does experience, welling up like an everlasting spring, continue to be passed from ear to ear today? People once declared that we would all be reading electronic books before the arrival of the twenty-first century. But that prediction missed its mark. The materiality of books and the feel of paper against the fingers are still an important part of the reading experience. Some readers prefer e-books, but many readers’ bookshelves are still full of books.  How do old stories manage not to disappear? How do they continue to play variations on our lives? Perhaps, through stories, we try to slow down time a little. The world is moving so fast, carrying us on its back, going I don’t know where, traveling at such a ferocious speed. Our daily lives, now shared by AI, have already changed so much. I wonder where I will be tomorrow, how I will look. It scares me a little. As I write this piece, it’s the spring of 2026, and the US and Israel have begun air strikes against Iran. War is now a part of our daily life. This war might continue until I die, or possibly even after I die.  A friend of mine once told me that they fell in love with someone because of their handwriting. Such events will not happen anymore. People don’t exchange handwritten letters anymore and can’t recall their friends’ handwriting. In the past it was natural for people to remember someone by their handwriting. I still keep the letters I received in my teens and twenties in a box, but lately I have neither written nor received such letters.  Do writers perhaps want to slow down the speed of the world by telling old stories? Is it just them, or the readers, too? Is having to say goodbye to so many things at such a vertiginous speed making us all feel dizzy? Sometimes I feel like I’m standing in the middle of a road, with a dazed expression on my face, unable to move either forward or backward as cars speed past me. If only someone would stretch my time, so that it would move just a bit more slowly. If only the hour hand and the second hand on that clock were to turn back and look at me.   KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: · Kang Sungeun, “Scheherazade,” in I Fell Asleep Wearing Shoes (Changbi, 2009) 강성은, 「세헤라자데」, 『구두를 신고 잠이 들었다』 (창비, 2009) Kwon Jeong-saeng, Sister Mongsil (Changbi, 1984) 권정생, 『몽실언니』 (창비, 1984) 

by Kang Sungeun

Cover Features

The Pleasures of Folktales

Korean literature today is turning more than ever to the tradition of telling old stories. Myths and folktales are being revisited by storytellers to revive the power of stories long hidden in the shadows of the dazzling lights of modernity. These old stories subvert the confines of modern literary conventions by replacing reality with the unexpected twists of fantasy. A polyphony of interweaving, interpenetrating voices steps in to replace the speaker’s fixed point of view. Stories unfolding one after another carry us over the boundaries of genre. Is this new trend a nostalgic turn to our bygone past, or an acquiescence to the culture industry’s insistent demand for popular forms of storytelling? Here are the responses of two of our master storytellers. by Shin Soojeong  Legends and folktales exist in all countries. Storytellers usually signal which genre their stories belong to by using distinct markers. Korean folktales, for instance, begin with “A long, long time ago,” sometimes followed by “when tigers used to smoke pipes.” In Poland, the most common expression used to signal the beginning of a folktale is “Beyond seven seas, beyond seven mountains” (Za siedmioma morzami, za siemioma górami). Sometimes Polish storytellers say instead, “Beyond seven mountains, beyond seven forests.” In Russia, there is a special formula that marks the beginning of a folktale: “There lived— there was—” (жил-был).  According to the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp (Владимир Пропп, 1895-1970), the folktale features a peasant protagonist who goes on unusual or magical adventures and usually comes to a happy end. It is an oral genre created by peasants who told stories to entertain themselves during the offseason—the tediously long winter months, for instance. It’s important to note that folktales were told for fun. Folktales were not told to teach a lesson. The same goes for legends and myths. According to Propp, legends are stories that explain how places got their shape and name. For instance, they might tell a story about a place called Crane Rock: “There once was a crane that lived in heaven. One day, for some reason, it fell down to Earth and became a rock . . . ” This kind of story is a legend. Myths, on the other hand, are stories that explain the origins of peoples and nations. The Dangun myth that recounts the origin of the Korean people is a good example. Here, too, there is no lesson.  Fables, on the other hand, teach lessons. Fables are short stories featuring animal protagonists. They inevitably come with a lesson at the end. The best-known western writer of fables is Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695). La Fontaine’s fables are very short—eight to ten lines—and provide a lesson in the last two lines. These stories satirize the human world through animal voices; they are easy to follow, full of wit, and fun to read.  Although people tend to confuse fables with oral genres because they feature animal protagonists, stories transmitted through oral tradition—folktales, legends, and myths—are much older and usually go by the name of “tales.” Often (though not always) tales narrate mysterious and unusual happenings. Like fables, tales often feature nonhuman entities playing the main or supporting role. For instance, almost all countries have tales featuring foxes. So readers who read a story featuring a speaking fox will think of it as an “old” story—even if it takes place in the present, and even if it does not begin with “A long, long time ago” or “Beyond seven seas.”  Indeed, once readers recognize the story as “old,” they will usually have a fairly easy time accepting what happens in the story, no matter how unrealistic it gets. After all, that’s what old stories are like. Foxes can talk; rabbits can gnaw on human brains. If readers think “This is an old story,” they will accept what happens as natural. Even if the story proceeds in an unexpected fashion, they won’t resist; they will find it fresh and interesting. In this sense, old stories are a very powerful genre. They appeal to us at a very fundamental level. Lessons interfere in this process of storytelling. In Cursed Bunny, there are many short stories featuring animals such as rabbits and speaking foxes. In Midnight Timetable, there is a haunted sheep (or sheep ghost). Both in Korea and abroad, readers have asked me what these animals symbolize. Some readers overseas worry about missing the unique, traditional Korean symbolism hidden in my stories. When I tell them that there is no symbolism involved, that there is no special meaning attached to haunted sheep in Korean culture, and that it’s all my invention, they look relieved. Stories can cast a heavy burden. Western readers schooled in the fable tradition and Korean readers who grew up answering multiple-choice questions about the “author’s intention” worry about missing the point.   Let me be clear. Not all narratives teach a lesson. In particular, folktales, which are often dubbed “old stories,” are a genre created for entertainment. I came to love Vladimir Propp for clarifying this point. With his extraordinary studies, Propp made Russian folktales a subject fit for serious academic study. Of course, there were scholars who collected and catalogued Russian folktales before him. Take Vladimir Dal (Владимир Даль, 1801-1872), for instance. He collected and catalogued hundreds of thousands of folktales for posterity. It’s hard to comprehend how he managed to collect such a jaw-dropping number of folktales back in those days, with no computers, recorders, and email to aid him. Dal organized the folktales he collected by feature: some featured foxes, some bears, others witches, and so on. This was a common and intuitive way of classifying folktales. Propp, on the other hand, went a step farther. Many folktales feature foxes, but foxes don’t all play the same role. One fox may help the protagonist out of trouble by lending him good advice; another may kill a chicken or abduct a child. Propp argued that folktale characters have a “function” and that folktales should be classified according to their functions as well as narrative structure. For instance, a fox that helps a protagonist in trouble is a “helper,” whereas a fox that abducts the protagonist or deceives and endangers the protagonist is an “enemy.” In folktales, the same character may have opposite functions, while contrary commands may have the same function. For instance, let’s say there’s a folktale in which a protagonist’s parents tell him, “Do not leave the house under any circumstance.” He will probably disobey them and leave the house anyway, because that’s how adventures begin. But adventures can also begin in a different way. Let’s say there is a king who initiates an adventure by commanding the protagonist to steal a heavenly horse from the neighboring country. Propp argues that the commands “Do not leave the house” and “Go to the neighboring country” in these folktales may look different but in fact have the same function, since both commands initiate the hero’s adventures. We all know that, no matter what parents say, children will end up doing exactly what they want. So Propp has a point here. Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (Морфология сказки, 1928) is a landmark study devoted to the analysis of the structure of folktales and the functions of the characters, including animals. Propp explained that he had adopted the term “morphology” from plant science in order to suggest that his study of narrative structure was similarly scientific. Before Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, folklorists were only interested in whether the folktale had a fox or a bear in it, and whether or not it contained a lesson. For me, it is comforting and inspiring to know that human beings probably began telling stories without lessons—stories invented purely to entertain—from the moment they began to speak, and are still telling stories today. My job is simply to write the most interesting stories possible.  Another book that revolutionized my understanding of old stories is Strange Tales from Korea (1996), edited by Park Yong-koo. I own a small paperback edition that I bought at a subway station somewhere. In this book, Park provides a selection of his translations of old Korean stories, originally recorded in hanmun, into modern Korean. In the preface, he provides some samples of the original hanmun texts and briefly compares them to his Korean translations. I learned from the preface that, until the Goryeo dynasty, about half of the Korean mountain spirits were female, and the other half male. In the Three Kingdoms period and the Goryeo dynasty, Koreans used geomancy to interpret topography. They believed that places with strong yang energy—sunny mountains with pointy peaks—were inhabited by male spirits, while locations with strong yin energy—mountains filled with deep, dark forests and teeming with springs—were populated by female spirits. Koreans explained the gender of dragons using the same geomancy principles. Dragons living in sunken areas under waterfalls were supposedly female because such damp places carved out by the sheer weight of falling water are full of yin energy. In his preface, Park claims that all this changed with the establishment of the Joseon dynasty, as folktales adapted to the change in official ideology from Buddhism to Confucianism. Thereafter, powerful spirits such as mountain spirits all became male. Park was a writer of history novels. He was born in Seoul in 1923, and passed away in 1999, a few years after the publication of Strange Tales from Korea. He was hardly a feminist; he was simply stating a fact about the stories that he had read and translated. Until the Goryeo dynasty, in other words, people told numberless stories about the many female mountain spirits and female dragons that populated their imagination. Theirs was a balanced world-view that aligned with geomancy.  In her book Women Turned Ghosts, Heyjin Jeon similarly explains the connection between folk religion, folktales, and Confucian patriarchy. According to Jeon, the most representative Korean ghost—the vengeful virgin ghost—serves to expose the crimes suffered by women. The Tale of Janghwa and Hongryeon, for instance, concerns child abuse; The Legend of Lady Arang deals with sexual violence. Curiously, however, women in these tales can tell the truth about the crimes they suffered only after they die. And they can only take revenge through the help of a man—specifically, a local magistrate who belongs to the scholar-official class. This magistrate listens to their stories and punishes the criminals. And who are the criminals in question? In The Tale of Janghwa and Hongryeon, the criminal is the step-mother—basically another woman who is also a victim of Confucian patriarchy. In The Legend of Lady Arang, the criminal is a low-ranking government clerk—in other words, a lower-class man. The power to aid the suffering women, administer justice, and maintain patriarchal class order thus always rests in the hands of scholar-official men. Stories from the Three Kingdoms period are quite different. I believe our Korean ancestors were freer in the days before they became tangled up in Joseon neo-Confucianism. I’d like to write stories that are free and enjoyable to read. In addition, I’d like to write stories that expand, rather than shrink, the boundaries of the world. For this reason, I try not to write stories that teach lessons. I am hardly fit to “teach” my readers in the first place. I prefer to write stories that readers can truly enjoy. Will it be fun if a fox speaks? Or if a cat knits? The process of asking such questions is part of the pleasures of storytelling. I find help in folktales from other countries as well. In Russian folklore, there is a famous sorcerer named Koschei the Deathless. Koschei is usually portrayed as an old man whose role is to abduct princesses and lock them up. Nobody can kill Koschei by stabbing him or wounding him, because his death lies outside his body. In order to kill Koschei, the protagonist must break a needle, which is hidden in an egg, which is inside a hare, which is inside a duck, which is inside a chest chained up on an oak tree. (Or maybe inside a duck, which is inside a hare. I always get confused about their order.) The idea that our death might lie outside our body, and that we might have to undergo a complicated process to access it, is marvelous and captivating. I would love to come up with a character based on Koschei.  Some old stories boast an intricate narrative structure featuring multiple reversals. Recently, as I was thumbing through Samguk Yusa, I rediscovered the story “Shoot the Geomungo Case.” This short but truly memorable story leads the reader through a linked series of animals and a wonderfully unpredictable storyline with multiple narrative twists, before finally ending with my two favorite themes: adulterous passion and murder. Scholars say that, until the martyrdom of Ichadon, the Silla people held Buddhism in contempt. This is why the stories set in the early Silla period in Samguk Sagi and Samguk Yusa often feature adultery between the queen and the court priest. When their illicit love is discovered, they are punished or sentenced to death. Setting this historical context aside for now, I must say I find the narrative plot of “Shoot the Geomungo Case” enthralling. One day I would like to write a story that moves as quickly and as breathlessly from one incident to another, until ending with a conclusion you could not possibly predict. Literature serves many roles. Literature records truth and expresses beauty. But literature also delights readers and helps them see the world from a different perspective. That’s no small role. We are always telling each other stories. Through stories we reflect on our lives and come to understand the world. Assuredly, technology may change and develop; AI may one day write novels. But we will continue to tell each other stories. After all, communicating with others is one of the most fundamental human desires. That’s why I tell stories. May they be enjoyable, quirky, and free.  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: · Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny (tr. Anton Hur, Honford Star, 2021)정보라, 『저주토끼』 (래빗홀, 2025) · Bora Chung, Midnight Timetable (tr. Anton Hur, Algonquin Books, 2025)정보라, 『한밤의 시간표』 (퍼플레인, 2025) · Park Yong-koo, Strange Tales from Korea (Seomundang, 1996)박용구, 『한국의 괴기담』 (서문당, 1996) · Heyjin Jeon, Women Turned Ghosts (Hyeonamsa, 2021)전혜진, 『여성, 귀신이 되다』 (현암사, 2021) 

by Bora Chung

Cover Features

Toward the World’s Edge

Contemporary literature may appear far removed from localities, yet their traces never fully fade. Habits of language, sentence patterns, and directions of thought quietly and unfailingly track a writer’s physical and psychological terrain. Locality in literature rarely resides in setting or decorative details; it appears in long-nurtured sentiments and rhythms of a place that surface in sentences. Uniquely local sensibilities and textures—ecology, dialect, food, seasons, and the like—weave literary aesthetics at a level that precedes the writer’s awareness.  My longtime residence on Geojedo island, too, seems not unrelated to my writing. Perhaps, for my writing’s sake, I needed an island village far from the so-called center. Living here as a writer means more than residing in a quietly familiar place. It is a resolve, in harmony with the island’s nature, never to lose the strength of my soul. Though born in Busan, I crossed over to Geojedo just before elementary school, which, for all practical purposes, makes the island my hometown. Barring my time in university and a few years in my late twenties, I lived most of my life here. From time to time, I spent weeks in other cities and countries—traveling, lecturing, or giving readings—but at the end of those brief sojourns, I always returned. Like the ebb and flow of the ocean’s current, Geojedo exerts an invisible, gravitational pull that bolsters the center of my being.  Dwelling on Geojedo signifies more than simply staying in one place. It involves attuning to nature’s unique rhythms —pulsing slightly more slowly than the rest of the world— and drawing from that wellspring a writing style of my own. Mornings here begin at a gentler pace compared to the complex, accelerated tempo of the city. Elders at the seaside store often lead with comments on the ever-changing winds: “Strong northwestern gale today.” That single remark rings like a prophecy, predicting the shape and direction of the day’s waves. When I stop by the market for some fish and hear a vendor say, “Catch has been low for days, making fish scarce,” I am reminded that nature’s fluctuations sway daily routines and business, while, at the depths of unconsciousness, currents of being wash through my sentences. And yet, I remain acutely aware that my longtime residence paradoxically places me at the farthest distance from here.  A writer, wherever in the world, is bound to be an outsider. Perhaps I sustain that outsider’s sensibility through the distinct scenes and energies of Geojedo, pressed deeply upon my body and mind. The island allows me to endure solitude, alone amid nature’s quiet breath. It neither denies solitude nor drives me toward it. Solitude, that emotional plane necessary for writing, emerges gently as an intuitively visible natural order, a certain profound spirit. In that sense, the island is for me not a place of seclusion but a house of stillness, where language may quietly grow.  The sea always remains in place. Yet “remains in place” hardly suggests unchanging solidity or permanence. Rather, it emphasizes how the sea holds its place even in constant flux. Walking along the neighborhood shoreline, I readily notice sediments of rocks newly deposited or broken off since the previous day. The hues and cresting heights of the waves shift with each passing moment. So too with literature. Even seemingly repetitive sentences contain subtle fissures and fresh rhythms. To gaze long upon the currents and silences of the sea is to learn to discern these minute differences. The hills and sea of Geojedo serve as teachers, imparting to my body and mind the slow evolution of a sentence.  The locality of literature is often mistaken for a particular location’s images or landscapes. In literature, however, locality concerns how a writer’s lived environment sustains their life, and how that sustenance shapes and transforms temporality within sentences. My way of walking, observing, and breathing among the hills and the sea translates, almost imperceptibly, into the pace and texture of my lines. The slow, steady, ebbing and flowing breath of the sea creates a rhythm in my language, and upon that rhythm, I place my words, one by one. Locality matters in literature—but not to foreground the specificity of a place. If anything, it examines how local distinctiveness widens and deepens a writer’s world. Geojedo, at times, seems to distance me from a certain center, yet that distance allows me to delve deeply into the core of this world and of being. The island reveals the edges of the world, and from those edges, I proceed toward the heart of language.  To tune the rhythm of my writing, I take walks almost every day along the nearby shores or hills. During these strolls, between small gardens tended by villagers, I sometimes pass empty lots overgrown with wild grass. At times, as my eyes linger on a white butterfly darting through the grass in shimmering daylight, I muse that a sentence, too, might radiate its own light between heaven and earth, fluttering erratically until drawn to a path. On gusty days, an old fisherman mending his nets by the harbor might mutter—either to himself or to me—“Testy waves today.” I catch myself murmuring that his words could apply to temperamental sentences. As a longtime resident here, the local landscape can appear rather ordinary, with nothing especially remarkable. Yet I come to notice the delicate day-by-day, moment-by-moment changes—in hues of rocks, directions of the wind, and patterns of the waves. Even in a scene nearly identical to yesterday’s, I find that sentences start to branch out in slightly different directions. Just as nature reveals a subtly changing face each day, so my writing finds its way toward sentences that, through delicate variations, pulsate anew.   My daily walks on Geojedo include the discovery of new paths. By wandering along less-worn trails and coastal cliffs, I gradually develop routes of my own. Stepping off a habitual path resembles the act of pioneering a new sentence— breaking free from prevailing perceptions and familiar syntactic frameworks. At times, I take a wrong turn and meander through the woods, but this misdirection affords me sensations of uncharted sites and energies. Occasionally, I experience the small, quiet pleasure of discovering an unexpected shortcut that leads me home. Repeated walks on the island teach me the significance of walking without a destination, while reminding me that sentences do not strive toward a clear end; instead, they unfold through a process of seeking one’s deep calling, an inner emergence of a form of being. To live and write on Geojedo is, in a sense, to maintain both a measured distance from the world and a most profound gaze upon it. Without the hills, the sea, the sky, the wind, the silence, and the solitude of this place, my literature would have taken a somewhat different course.  In cities and provinces alike, our society and era move at an accelerated pace. The overdriven excess of information and motion within any given space-time can unsettle a writer’s style and mode of thought. Of course, urban rhythms, too, function as forms of locality in their own right, offering meaningful directions and methods by contributing to a writer’s distinctive linguistic breath. To those who write, time and place manifest as a magic both accidental and inevitable, surging through sentences as a literary current.  While some may regard locally situated writing as a limitation of sorts, I have come to realize that living here has fortified my syntactic roots. Cities broaden one’s vision, while provincial life provides a depth of insight no less profound. Here, I forget the notion of a universal center imposed by the world. Being removed from that center perhaps allows me to slow down and deepen my thoughts. Writing from a peripheral place may engender stories that are, in fact, more universal. The center is often a form of particularity masquerading as universality. Writing from here hardly reminds me of my non-central position; rather, it grants me boundless freedom. It lightens me. It empowers me to exist fully as myself. Life at the margins allows my writerly self to peer into the essence of the world, leaping beyond that faintly ambiguous dichotomy of center and periphery.  A writer’s dwelling place, the surrounding region itself, becomes a factor in sharpening one’s sense of the world’s estrangement. Even as I dwell on Geojedo, it frequently and paradoxically strikes me that I might be the person most removed from nature. Instead of inhabiting nature’s tangible particulars, I seem to sense solely its qualities as a word. As I walk amid nature’s untamed and unrestrained qualities, rather than its image, the sense of belonging nowhere grants me absolute freedom. Along precariously narrow, newly discovered paths, I learn that these sensations birth new sentences. Raw, immediate sensations arising where humans meet nature may well be the source of literature. Rawness intensifies their truth. Geojedo’s nature further solidifies my independent ground as a writer. Rather than rendering my solitude lonely, the island’s solitude turns it into a condition for thought. Here, nature ushers my body and mind into the profound depths of writing.  I never imagined that living and writing on Geojedo would leave distinct locational marks on my work. However, retracing sentences I have written thus far, I realize that my worldview has grown deeply reliant on the island’s seasons, its time, and nature’s silence. Existence accounts for only a small fraction of nature. Repeated and varied landscapes, along with the air and sunshine, alter the cadence of my sentences. Nature’s vast silence serves best to empty and replenish language.  To live as a local writer is not an exercise in romantic isolation, nor a sign of seclusion. It is a question of how a being breathes with and absorbs a particular place and time, and how, within that breath, one bears and sustains one’s own language. Here, I sense myself growing increasingly an outsider even as I walk toward the center of the world. Today, as always, I uncover a new trail and gaze freshly upon the currents of the sea—small rituals carried out for the sake of my writing. Amid these accumulating days, I come to understand that sentences are not artificially composed; they must, and do, resemble the rhythms of nature, each time emerging anew.  To write is to forever circle the edges of one’s life, in search of another center. To be a writer is to endure, in one’s own language, that sense of estrangement—the fact that no writer can truly live as a local. A writer is one who always sees the world differently, who peers into the interstices of language, and who touches and retouches the texture of life. In that sense, reading, writing, and living on Geojedo constitute a form of discipline that carries my writing beyond the distance and horizon of the world’s edge. A writer’s placeness is not a fixed coordinate. As a firm center, it remains in place even as it moves. Slightly removed from the world’s acceleration, amid rhythms taught by hills and sea, I find myself watching how far my writing will go. Anticipating the moment when all the rhythmic sensations impress upon my writing, I arrive early to see how they emerge. All the while embracing the fact that my language lies beyond a specific place, freely swaying, standing, and moving forward again as a literary home. 

by Lee Jenny