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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

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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

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Busan, from Near and Far

“Where do you live?” This question carries weight, reflecting the sense that people are connected to the place where they have arrived. As we know all too well, a place of one’s own forms the basis for claiming rights in the world. Human beings are, inevitably, people of a place. From that place, we practice literature. Although place and writing may appear unrelated, they often feel inseparable. A writer’s account of life in a particular place serves as a vital testament to its placeness, while the fellowship of local writers shapes that place into a universal macrocosm. We invite you to hear from two writers as they each share their stories: about living and writing in their own (local) place, and about the activities of their local literary community. by Sin Yong-Mok First comes life, then comes fiction. Seonsaeng-hujak (先生後作). Most novels follow this pattern. A writer’s experiences, direct or indirect, are reborn over time as literary works. Yet every so often, a rare reversal occurs. Seonjak-husaeng (先作後生). First comes fiction, then comes life. This is the case for me, as I pen this essay in my study on a seaside hill, having serendipitously left Seoul to settle here in Busan. The eastern coast of Busan’s Haeundae Beach is dotted with three small ports: Mipo, Gudeokpo, and Cheongsapo. One autumn, I was invited as a writer to visit the nearby Dalmaji Hill, an area rich in cultural and artistic spaces. After the scheduled event, my host guided me on a tour of the seaside village below the hill, as well as the ports. At the foot of Dalmaji—or “moon-watching,” so named for being the first to greet the glowing moon—the shore was lined with lush clusters of cherry blossoms, pines, and camellia trees. Slender footpaths branched off in several directions. Along the ports, the Donghae Nambu Line railway ran parallel to the coast. At the far end of a breakwater stood a white lighthouse, its green light blinking in serene solitude. The time arrived for my return to Seoul. Darkness fell; waves splashed. I could hardly tell whether the sea was Namhae or Donghae—South or East Sea. It seemed both at once. Far off, a large vessel glided near the horizon, lights aglow. Small fishing boats huddled by the port. Beyond that horizon—is it the North Pacific? I wondered as we reached the port. “Cheongsapo,” said my host, almost in a whisper. Cheongsapo? When in unfamiliar places, I had a habit of searching for road signs. I glanced around. Nowhere did I see the name Cheongsapo. The peaceful port sat in stark contrast to the dazzling lights of Haeundae Beach. Night had yet to deepen, but the port was already hushed. Watching waves ripple in the dark, I repeated in my mind, Cheongsapo. I had never heard it before, despite knowing so many other ports. As a linguistically attuned writer, I often found my imagination stirred by the auditory resonance and texture of words. The moment Cheongsapo reached my ears, my thoughts began to whirl. Does Cheongsa mean “clear sand” (淸沙)? “Blue sand” (靑沙)? Or “blue snake” (靑蛇)? Reveries that began in Cheongsapo carried all the way back to Seoul. Perhaps the sea breeze of Haeundae and Cheongsapo still lingered in my mind. I penned a short story in three days, then sent it to my editor. The words Busan, Haeundae, and Cheongsapo had echoed in my ears like a melody sung in a round, eventually taking shape as the story “Blue Sand.” The seemingly impossible feat brought a rush of exhilaration. I had been facing a deadline, but since the Busan event had been scheduled in advance, I had no choice but to make the trip. Even if I had canceled, my chances of meeting the deadline were slim. And yet, like an unexpected lifeline, Cheongsapo became material for the story, gifting me “Blue Sand.” To my astonishment, I now live in the very scene of that story. Fortune must have played its part. I never imagined it while writing “Blue Sand,” nor when I first accepted the invitation to Busan and reluctantly boarded the train. It simply came to be, as if by magic. I was neither born nor raised in Busan. I became acquainted with the city as an author invited to literary events at universities, bookstores, and literary organizations. The year after publishing “Blue Sand,” I relocated to Busan upon being appointed to a professorship at Dong-A University. Work and childcare responsibilities prompted the move (for male writers, the family usually stays behind), but my writing career still required frequent travel between Seoul and Busan. Outside of writing, most of my time was devoted to teaching contemporary literature and fiction writing as a faculty member of the Korean literature department. I also collaborated with the local community to develop and implement projects that explored Busan’s narrative archetypes from multiple perspectives, shaping them into literary fiction. I worked with university departments, schools, education offices, and local district offices to identify notable aspects of Busan from an outsider’s perspective. The Humanities City Support Project followed, along with initiatives to uncover narrative archetypes and conduct fiction-writing workshops. Through these successive projects and practices, I immersed myself and discovered a connection with Busan, engaging with its language and sensations, even as a complete outsider. More than a mere setting for “Blue Sand,” Busan became, after Seoul, Gyeongju, and Paris, a city of deep personal significance.  In my new life in Busan, the axiom “First comes life, then comes fiction” largely held true. Arriving as an outsider, I absorbed daily rhythms, seasonal cycles, and oceanic tones, and from those sensations and stories, I wrote my fiction. Busan and the Haeundae area served as the backdrop for ten or so stories, including “Blue Sand,” “A Single Cloud,” “Hospitality,” “Archaeology of Memory” (winner of the 2012 Yi Sang Literary Award), “After Dinner” (winner of the 2013 Yi Sang Literary Award), “Origin of Shoes,” “White Night,” “Haeundae,” and “Yeongdo Island.” Busan’s literature has been shaped by writers born and raised in Busan who stayed to write about the city and its people. As for myself, I occupy a more ambiguous position.   Writers may relocate their home and writing environment in two ways. First, a writer who balances professional work with writing may move to their place of employment. Second, a writer may select and settle in the ideal location for writing. In the former case, the end of employment often prompts a return to one’s original home. In the latter, one may put down roots, move elsewhere, or eventually return. I fall into the former category. While I write fiction in Busan, my life extends beyond the city, with book launches and publications taking place in the Seoul metropolitan area, including Paju Book City. Writers falling into the latter category include Kim Sung-jong, the mystery writer best known for Eyes of Dawn, who relocated from Seoul to Busan. In 1992, he established the Library of Mystery Literature, Korea’s only library dedicated to the genre. Mediating between domestic and international mystery writers’ associations, he has overseen various programs in partnership with the local community, continuing this work to the present day.  As a novelist and educator, I explore fiction alongside young literary enthusiasts born and raised in Busan, sharing their joys and sorrows while helping them find their way as writers. In the creative writing workshops I have developed, participants explore Busan’s sea, harbors, ports, islands, and river mouths, crafting stories steeped in these places. Several hundred stories have been created in the process, launching the literary careers of new writers. I have endeavored to extend their creative reach beyond Busan—to the rest of Korea and to the wider world. Even here, two patterns emerge: some debut through new writer’s contests held by Busan-area newspapers and continue their literary activities based in Busan, while others debut through newspapers outside Busan and subsequently work between Busan and Seoul. Even in the first case, most writers aspire to publish their first story collections in Seoul rather than Busan, and, if circumstances allow, prefer to publish later collections there as well. Since these writers occupy the heart of locality and local literature, it is worth reflecting on both their ambitions and the significance they ascribe to publishing non-locally in Seoul.  At this point, I pause to reflect on Busan’s locality and the scenes and currents of its local literature as I have come to understand them. Led by the novelist Kim Jeonghan (1908–1996), pen name Yosan, Busan’s community of literary organizations has established deep, robust roots unrivaled by any other region. Busan launched its own quarterly Literary Criticism Today in 1991, ahead of other cities. Busan has also established and maintained distinctive literary awards, including the Yosan Literary Award (est. 1984), the Ko Sukgyu Critique Award (est. 1996), the Korea Ocean Foundation Literary Award (est. 2007), and the BUMA Democratic Uprising Literary Award (est. 2020). The city has sought to enrich and revive its literary map by retracing sites where writers from outside the city once sojourned and worked, recording and reanimating the meaning of those places. As a notable example, the Mildawon Literary Festival has been held annually since 2015, inspired by Kim Dong-ni’s short story “Mildawon Days,” a fictionalized portrayal of historic literary and artistic figures—including Hwang Sun-won, Kim Su-Young, Kim Whanki, and Lee Jungseop—who fled from Seoul to Busan during the Korean War. The festival allows contemporary readers to rediscover the significance of their gathering place, the Mildawon tearoom or dabang, in Busan’s Gwangbok-dong area. Whereas wartime Busan, as a locality, functioned as a temporary refuge rather than a voluntary destination, today’s writers actively seek out the city, often for extended stays or creative residencies. This reflects a broader phenomenon: short- and long-term residencies, both domestic and international, have become key platforms for writers’ creative work.  Despite Busan’s geographical advantages as a maritime capital and its historical heritage as a wartime refuge, writers based in Busan who have shaped the city’s local identity are rarely able to extend their literary activities to the national stage. The same holds true for other regional cities. Creative drive and passion do not necessarily result in published works or sustainable literary careers. Even for those who become writers and pursue creative practice, the question remains whether their efforts can be recognized as a form of economic production. Literary journals published by major national presses offer limited space, and payment for submissions has long stagnated. Local literary journals, funded by national and municipal cultural foundations, provide publication space to regional writers on a rotating basis, yet author compensation remains largely symbolic, merely enough to offset the costs of self-publication. Circumstances change little, even when writers publish with support for first-time publications or other creative grants. Busan writers may depict the city’s life and environment in their stories; whether Busan readers prefer these works is a separate matter. Readers, regardless of their own locality, select books in much the same way. The moment a work is labeled “local literature,” it encounters the dilemma of being narrowly confined. For this reason, I have refrained from assigning particular value or labels to locality or local literature, especially in our age of AI and digital nomadism, which has rendered both living and creative spaces increasingly fluid and mobile.  In my capacity as a professor of creative writing in Busan, a mentor to writers, and a reviewer of applications submitted by individuals and publishers for creative support and grants, I wish to comment briefly on the realities of local literature. First, for local literature to flourish, works written, presented, and published locally must reach broader national and international audiences, thereby cultivating and sustaining a stable readership. What, then, is the current reality? Consider the state of local literature and local publishing within today’s hyper-capitalist economy. Creative writing and publishing, as well as publishing houses themselves, rely on national support and municipal cultural foundations to remain active and viable. Writers who debut through local newspapers still face limited publication opportunities, while local publishers struggle to bring their works to print without public funding. Nevertheless, recent developments suggest ways for Busan’s local writers to find solidarity and empowerment while preserving their distinctive traits . The Busan Publication Culture and Industry Association (BPCIA) and Bibliotheca Busan have gained fresh momentum, alongside a vibrant ecosystem of independent bookstores engaging readers across generations. Comprising some thirty publishing houses in the Busan region, BPCIA seeks to decentralize Seoul-centric publishing structures and establish Busan as a publishing hub through the Busan Global Publishing Culture City initiative. Since the success and sustainability of this initiative depend on discovering local writers and investing in their publication, the interdependent growth of local literature and local publishing warrants particular attention. It is hoped that BPCIA’s dynamic and pragmatic expansion will help transform Busan, with its rich geographical, historical, and cultural-artistic heritage, into a vital center of literary publishing.  Several pressing problems must not be overlooked: the demographic cliff, regional decline, the steep drop in university-age population, and cutbacks in humanities departments that cultivate potential writers and literary publishing talent. These trends will only accelerate. So who will write, and who will read in the future? The writer-reader ecosystem continues to evolve. Imagined realities and realities of imagination are continuously and simultaneously renewed within an interconnected network. From here, one thinks of there; living there, one also lives here. Perhaps Seoul, Busan, Gwangju, and Jeju should all be termed moving, hetero-localities. What is local should not be condemned to remain so; localities should permeate, mingle with, and circulate among other localities; local writers should engage with writers from home and abroad. The writer from Busan, in this sense, writes from near and far.  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: Ham Jeungim, “Blue Sand,” in Blue Eyes of Your Soul (Munhakdongne, 2006) 함정임, 「푸른 모래」, 『네 마음의 푸른 눈』 (문학동네, 2006) Ham Jeungim, “Archaeology of Memory: My Mexican Uncle,” “After Dinner,” and “Origin of Shoes,” in After Dinner (Munhakdongne, 2015) 함정임, 「기억의 고고학-내 멕시코 삼촌」, 「저녁 식사가 끝난 뒤」, 「구두의 기원」, 『저녁 식사가 끝난 뒤』 (문학동네, 2015) Ham Jeungim, “Haeundae” and “Yeongdo Island,” in Loving Love (Munhakdongne, 2020) 함정임, 「해운대」, 「영도」, 『사랑을 사랑하는 것』 (문학동네, 2020) Ham Jeungim, “A Single Cloud,” “Hospitality,” and “White Night,” in Phantasm (Yolimwon, 2009) 함정임, 「구름 한 점」, 「환대」, 「백야」, 『곡두』 (열림원, 2009) Kim Sung-jong, Eyes of Dawn (Namdo, 2003) 김성종, 『여명의 눈동자』 (남도, 2003) Kim Dong-ni, “Mildawon Days” in Mildawon Days (Munidang, 2006) 김동리, 「밀다원 시대」, 『밀다원 시대』 (문이당, 2006) 

by Ham Jeungim

Cover Features

The Birth of a Life-Challenged Author

  The literary establishment in Korea operates on a unique “literary debut” (deungdan) system, which serves as a rite of passage for aspiring writers. This often places the author in a passive position, in need of critical appraisal from official institutions to begin a literary career, with further publications dependent on commissions. The debut system has staunchly persisted even amid concerns over this reduction in authorial autonomy in the name of discovering new talented writers, as well as questions about the power wielded by critical institutions. In recent years, a new and significant current has formed around authors who have sought different paths to publication. Declaring themselves authors on their own authority, these writers have taken an active, assertive stance in finding their own entryway to the literary scene. These are their stories.  by An Boyun   George Orwell said there are four motives for writing: political purpose, sheer egoism, historical impulse, and aesthetic enthusiasm. I had four motives as well: no friends, no money, no energy, and no dreams for the future. The only thing I knew for sure as a young university student was that I didn’t have these four things. I spent my days going from class to my part-time job, and back. On the first day of summer break, I lay in bed looking up at the dorm-room ceiling and muttered to myself, “One thing. I need just one single thing I can call my own.”  I turned on my netbook and stared at a blank Hancom Office document. More nothing. I was so tired of having nothing. I decided to fill up the page. Maybe I could at least do that. It was just letters, after all. The page was its own world—if I pressed a key, a letter appeared on the screen. Was there a more honest world than this? To fill up the page, I tried to imagine the most talkative speaker in the world. Who would have that much to say? Someone who’d never spoken before, someone whose voice would go unheard even if spoken. Then I thought of the pigeons that gathered in the courtyard in front of the dorms. My first narrator would be a pigeon. A pigeon was bound to have plenty to gripe about. After all, the world acts so petty toward pigeons. One minute they’re pest birds that represent poor, dirty city life, and the next they’re held up as a symbol of peace and the Holy Spirit. Everyone, including me, skirts around them in the street like they’re filthy, then steps into the grocery store to buy cleaning products like Pigeon fabric softener or Dove soap. Suddenly this behavior felt so rude, but also funny. Caught in this contradiction between hatred and holiness, what would a pigeon say if it had a voice? I decided to hand the mic to a pigeon working in the circus as a magician’s assistant. The pigeon preened its feathers and checked the lights in preparation for the performance of a lifetime, recounting the generational story of its family through the world wars, industrialization, and the Olympics, spanning a century of modern history. When I finished the story, I was in a daze. Sitting quietly in my practically empty room, I had created something. It didn’t look like I was doing anything at all, but I had become an author. In what must’ve been a stroke of beginner’s luck, my first short story made it to the final round of a spring literary contest. Then it was rejected. After that, I had to drink from the bitter cup of defeat several more times with several more stories. Of course, it was encouraging to occasionally make it to the final round. I read and reread the judges’ comments so many times I lost count. I could leave it at that and look cool, but I have to admit that sometimes, I let those comments hold me back. The flaws they pointed out made me self-conscious about my limitations as a writer. “Am I rushing this character offstage again?”“Is this story going anywhere? Every story needs a strong beginning and ending.”  Slowly, the standards of “good writing” were starting to form in my mind. When I got frustrated, I watched stand-up comedy. I felt liberated whenever I saw a set that went all out on heavy topics like religion, death, and sexuality. I was captivated by how well the genre juggled right and wrong, success and failure, beauty and ugliness. Soon I was memorizing the silly, vulgar jokes. When I saw an exceptional stand-up comedian, they reminded me of a character in a classic work of literature. It felt like watching Holden Caulfield step out of Catcher in the Rye, snatch the mic, and start chattering away. I enjoyed being swept away in the cascade of grievances and self-contempt. Moreover, many of the comedians I liked also had roots in literature. Norm Macdonald read widely from Russian literature, Anthony Jeselnik wanted to be a novelist, and Ari Shaffir majored in English literature. When I found out the highest honor in English-language comedy was the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, I was happy because it felt like an acknowledgment that literature was the source of comedy’s spirit of satire and wit. Reaching the rather audacious conclusion that there wasn’t much separating the stand-up comedy scene from the literary scene, I decided to try stand-up. As it turned out, I had as much to say as a pigeon. I had so much to say—as a vegetarian, as a daughter, as an “ugly” woman, and simply as a human being in Korean society. Plus, to start out as a stand-up comedian, there are no job interviews or any other institutional hoops. Anyone can sign up to experiment in the joke laboratory of the open mic. All I had to do was get on stage, watch my jokes fail miserably, and slowly gather up the few that were passable. At night I tested out my jokes, and during the day I wrote stories. For a long time, I spent every day holed up alone in my room, but fortunately that life suited my personality well. After a few years I’d gathered some jokes and completed a novel.  Around 10 p.m. on January 31, 2024, Park Hye-jin, a well-known critic and editor at the publisher Minumsa, followed me on Instagram. I’d been waiting for a response from Minumsa ever since I submitted my novel to them for consideration. I stayed up all night trying not to read too much into that follow. Getting my hopes up was an all-too-familiar hell. “It’s probably just a follow. Sometimes people do that. I do it too, following and liking things for no reason. You don’t mean anything by it.”“No. There’s no way she just followed you for no reason. That would be . . . too much,” my partner of ten years whined. I snorted out a laugh. Normally my partner would be the one trying to calm me down. The next day, the first of February, I received an email a little after lunchtime. It was from Park Hye-jin. She said she was excited to work with me on my novel!I read the acceptance email again, then caught my breath, read it one more time, and left for a stand-up gig. That night, the other comedians in the waiting room all looked lovely. Even the cough drops and scattered pens on the dressing-room table made my heart ache. To top things off, my set was a success. My LPM (laughs per minute) rate was one of my best. For the first time in my life, someone left me a 50,000-won tip, along with a sticky note that read, “Soyoon Won, thank you! See you again next time.” As I stood there smitten with my note, K oppa looked at me and said, “They must know a thing or two about comedy.”I’d like to take this space to thank that audience member. When the show finished, I went out for drinks with the other comedians. The soju went down smooth, and the kimchi jeon was nice and crispy. I thought I might get carried away if things kept up like this. I turned to P oppa and made him promise to get me home. “I’m having a really good day. I can’t tell you why yet, but something amazing happened. But I don’t wanna get too drunk and have this end up my ‘lucky day,’ * so make sure I don’t die before the night’s over.” * Translator’s note: A reference to colonial-era author Hyeon Jin-geon’s short story “A Lucky Day,” in which the protagonist finally has a good day at work, so that he can afford to buy his ailing wife a bowl of nourishing soup, only to find her already dead when he gets home. The protagonist also stops by the bar and gets drunk on his way back. He must’ve been pretty confused. If it was such a good day, I should’ve been offering to buy them all drinks, but here I was demanding he catch me a taxi. Safely on my way home, I pulled out my phone and read the Minumsa editor’s email a few more times. Then I reviewed my recording of my set from earlier. My phone is full of recordings of my performances. Of course, the recordings are a mishmash of laughter and silence, people coughing, and shot glasses shattering on the floor. The same kind of things that fill my fiction.  The theme for this KLN essay was “the birth of an author.” While I was writing it, comedian Jeon Yu-seong passed away. He was the comedian who coined the term “gagman,” the word for comedian in Korean, along with his own comedy troupe, the first university “gag department,” and the long-running TV comedy show Gag Concert. I never met or even so much as exchanged a few words with him. To be honest, I never felt much camaraderie with him, either. I considered him an institutional elder comedian. But my fellow stand-up comic K oppa spent several years in his troupe. It was K oppa who informed me of his death.  “I think your book was the last one he read in the hospital,” he told me. “When he got done reading, he looked up and said, ‘This kid’s got a way with words.’”P oppa added, “Your book’s such a snoozefest, I bet it put him to sleep. He thought he’d just take a little nap. Then BAM! Dead of boredom.” After that, I had to attend the funeral.On the way there in K oppa’s car, nothing but sad songs were playing on the radio. I didn’t want to cry in front of a bunch of comedians—in other words, I didn’t want to get made fun of—so I quickly searched songs by PSY, but somehow every single one was sad.“What’s up with these songs? This is supposed to be PSY,” I said.The other comedians in the car nodded and said PSY had a lot of sad songs. When I finally found something with a beat, the mood in the car actually sank, and everyone looked sadder. I wondered what sort of jokes Jeon Yu-seong told during his life, so I searched.“We call someone who can’t keep a beat ‘rhythmically challenged.’ Someone who’s tone-deaf is ‘tonally challenged.’ Someone who’s always getting lost is ‘directionally challenged.’ I can’t figure out how to live. I don’t even know how I ended up here. I guess I’m ‘life challenged!’”* * Jeon Yu-seong, Like It’s My First Day on Earth (Huckleberry Books, 2023). It didn’t even sound like a joke. It just made me wonder what end awaited the life-challenged. When I stood before Jeon Yu-seong’s portrait at the funeral hall, I looked down and noticed his baseball cap resting among the bed of chrysanthemums. Printed unmistakably on the cap was the word “comedy.” Seeing that cap made the distance I felt between us seem totally immaterial. As I went to eat, I could hear the boisterous clamor coming from the dining room. I’d never seen such a noisy funeral hall. I let out a laugh. I’d also never seen funeral guests with such wild hairstyles. I laughed all through the meal. At the other tables, I recognized so many familiar faces from the entertainment world. There was no way to know who’d gone through the proper process and who was an unconventional hire. Yet here they were, all gathered in one place. And so many magicians, too. Apparently Jeon Yu-seong loved magic. “Let’s get the magicians to bring him back to life right now. Then we can have them send him back again after an hour or so,” P oppa said. “P hyung, that joke’s already been made about a hundred times since yesterday,” K oppa told him. P oppa smiled sheepishly. I turned to K oppa. “I wish I could’ve met him to say thank you for reading my book,” I said, knowing it was silly. “Or maybe not. Was that not his style?” “I’m sure he would’ve liked that,” K oppa said. Caught off guard by his certainty, I said, “Oh, come on. I’m nobody.” K oppa doubled down, “He’d have absolutely loved it.” To be honest, whether in comedy or literature, I’ve always felt a certain sense of pride in not having properly debuted or joined a prestigious troupe. I suppose I relished the idea of myself as some sort of maverick of K-literature and K-comedy. But now that pride feels silly. I can recognize the long and storied tradition that came before me. In the end, we all just have something we want to say. And we’re mesmerized by whatever form expresses it best. Caught up in that fascination, we go on saying what we have to say, even without the proper qualifications or conviction, writing life-challenged jokes and life-challenged fiction.

by Soyoon Won

Cover Features

Becoming a Poet

  The literary establishment in Korea operates on a unique “literary debut” (deungdan) system, which serves as a rite of passage for aspiring writers. This often places the author in a passive position, in need of critical appraisal from official institutions to begin a literary career, with further publications dependent on commissions. The debut system has staunchly persisted even amid concerns over this reduction in authorial autonomy in the name of discovering new talented writers, as well as questions about the power wielded by critical institutions. In recent years, a new and significant current has formed around authors who have sought different paths to publication. Declaring themselves authors on their own authority, these writers have taken an active, assertive stance in finding their own entryway to the literary scene. These are their stories.  by An Boyun   Long ago, when I was only an essence, like mist floating through the air, I slowly took form in my mother’s womb, until one winter I was born in the shape of a tiny person. Being born is similar to becoming a poet in at least one way—you can’t choose your own birthday. Sometimes you meet poets who became poets by chance, much as birth itself is a matter of chance. I’ve heard many stories from poets who never had any big hopes or profound intentions of becoming one. Maybe a friend secretly submits your writings to a contest, and you win a prize. Suddenly, you’re a writer. There are plenty of stories like this. If you ask these poets how they ended up as poets, they invariably respond, “Who knows?” I barely knew how to become a poet, but I knew I’d do anything to make it happen. To explain how I came to that decision, we’ll have to go back to my childhood. In elementary school, I was actually more interested in drawing than writing. I drew in my notebooks until the pages were tattered, with my classmates watching over my shoulder. My notebooks filled up with their faces as they clamored around me, asking me to draw them too. Back then, we had a separate computer class. The desktop computer sat like an immovable slab of rock alongside a monitor with rounded corners. During class, we learned to turn the computer on and off, save a file, and create a new Hancom Office document. I made my first email account in that class, too. I tried to draw in MS Paint, but the mouse didn’t move the way I wanted. Pen and paper were still more comfortable. So I opened up Notepad instead and started jotting down something that was not quite a story, and not quite a diary entry, either. It contained too much fiction to be a diary, too much of my real life to be fiction. The .txt file slowly filled with stories about me. In the late 2000s, when I was in middle school, the academic pressure in my neighborhood was so intense that I got swept up in it as well. One day, while I was studying for the entrance exam to a prestigious foreign language high school, one of my classmates asked me if I’d heard about the creative writing program at a certain arts high school and suggested we take the exam together. Swept away once again, I found myself sitting for the exam. (Back then, as now, I was a person easily swept away.) On the day of the exam, my friend failed to show up. I took the test alone and was lucky enough to pass. It was during the high school creative writing program that I saw a real living poet for the first time and started learning to write poetry. Before that, I’d only read poems in textbooks, and all of those poets were long since dead and gone. I also competed in countless impromptu poetry contests, known as “baegiljang,” because awards in such contests would make it easier to get into university. Unfortunately, throughout my three years in high school, I rarely won anything. Poetry was too hard. The collections I read were thinner than my little finger, and when you flipped through the pages, there was so much empty space that it seemed like a waste of paper. The margins were wider than the text. I filled the blank space with notes as I read. One hundred books of poetry were sitting on my bookshelf by the time I decided I wanted to be a poet. It was my second year of high school. I was eighteen years old. I changed the password of my first laptop, which I got when I started high school, from my birth date to “deungdan+@.” Every day, I opened my laptop and thought about how to secure my debut. My desire to become a poet slowly crystallized like clear, solid ice. By the late 2010s, I had graduated from the creative writing program of an arts university and was working part-time while attending privately run poetry workshops. There were two ways to learn poetry from an active poet in Korea—creative writing lectures held at a university, or courses run privately by publishing houses or bookstores. These private lessons were usually relatively small, lasting from four to eight weeks with around ten to twenty students, and functioned like a typical workshop in which students bring in poems they’ve written to read and discuss. The university classes were so large that most students could only workshop three to five poems per semester, so many students signed up for private courses as well. Whether in the university classroom or in the private workshops, the aspiring poets were every bit as intense as anyone studying for a high-stakes test, but we all tried not to let it show. That sort of intensity didn’t seem to suit a poet, I suppose. With my feigned expression of nonchalance, I kept on dreaming about the moment I would become a poet. As of October 2025, there are a few basic ways to start a career as a poet in Korea. They are as follows: Spring Literary Contests (Sinchun Munye)Held annually by major newspapers including The Chosun Ilbo, The Dong-A Ilbo, Hankook Ilbo, Kyunghyang Shinmun, Seoul Shinmun, and Segye Ilbo. Contest entries are accepted each October, and the winners are published on January 1 of the following year. In the poetry section, poets submit three to five poems each, with every newspaper receiving thou­sands of entries. (A total of 5,404 poems were entered into The Dong-A Ilbo Spring Literary Contest in 2025.) Emerging Writer Awards (Sininsang) by Literary MagazinesAwards bestowed by established literary journals upon new and emerging writers. Submission periods and length requirements differ by journal, and win­ners of the poetry section typically publish their first collection in the selected poetry series of the publishing house affiliated with the journal. The major magazines include Literature and Society, The Quarterly Changbi, Munhakdongne The Quarterly, and Hyundae Munhak. The Daesan Literary Awards for College StudentsPresented by the Daesan Foundation and only open to university students. In the past, the reception of this award was not recognized as constituting an official debut, but this has begun to change recently with the successful careers of winners like Kim Yeon-deok. Independent Literary MagazinesLiterary journals that are not affiliated with a major organization or publisher and are published independently by an individual or small group. The independent literary magazine Begae, for instance, accepts submissions regardless of debut status and publishes poetry collections in its own selected poetry series. Publication of a Poetry CollectionPublishers such as Achimdal, Samin, Paran, and Geodneun Saram accept submissions and publish collections of poetry regardless of debut status. There is no limit on the number of poets selected, and curators or editors personally arrange and select the manuscripts. Kim Suyeong Literary Award (Minumsa Publishing)Open to poets regardless of debut status. Poetry collections by the winners are published in the Minumsa selected poetry series. Mailing ServicesSubscription services in which the author sends writings directly to readers, in the manner of YSRA’s Daily YSRA. This makes it possible to achieve a writing career outside of traditional institutions of print publishing.  Of the options listed above, the spring literary contests and emerging writer awards from established literary magazines constitute the traditional literary debut system. The other alternatives have appeared largely over the past five to six years, broadening and diversifying the available routes to debut. In Korea, to become a poet typically means to debut—that is, to “deungdan.” The literal meaning of the word “deungdan” is “to go up onto a pile of dirt.”* In other words, to go up onto the “mundan” (literary stage or scene), for all to see. This has traditionally meant being selected as the winner of a spring literary contest held by a major newspaper or an emerging writer award granted by an established literary magazine. The single person who breaks through the thousand-to-one odds receives the title of poet. * Translator’s note: This phrasing is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The “pile of dirt” referred to here is better described as a ceremonial earthen mound or altar, and the word is more commonly understood today as “stage” or “scene,” as in “the literary scene.” To be selected in this way is to be called up as a poet. At that moment, a poet is born. The day a poet debuts is their poetic birthday. Like me before my “birth,” the poems I saved as files on my computer existed only in faint, mercurial form, to be born only once they were granted a body as print on paper. I anxiously awaited the day my poems would appear in the pages of a newspaper or magazine and eventually take material form as a book that I could actually touch with my own hands. I had already made it past the preliminary round of a spring literary contest when I was in university, so at first it felt as if my debut was within reach. Just as I began to tire of waiting, I heard about a new publisher called Achimdal Books. Word was getting around among aspiring poets that Achimdal would accept submissions regardless of debut status. The debut system was slowly showing signs of change. The shift began around 2016 with the emergence of a selected poetry series by the publisher Samin. The online purchase page for the first collection in the series, Eugene Mok’s The Book of Love, featured the following statement on the publisher’s intentions: “Many poets have long since made the persuasive argument that it’s impossible to judge a poet’s potential from a few short poems.” They were criticizing the spring literary contest’s method of judging based on three to five poems. The statement went on, “Our goal is to fill this series with collections by talented poets, who will be evaluated on submissions of fifty to sixty poems at once, enough to fill a collection.” This example is often cited as an important early effort at diversifying the debut system. Another background to the debut system’s diversification was the 2016 Sexual Violence in the Literary Scene movement, which predated and overlapped with the #MeToo movement in Korea. It was then that incidents of sexual abuse by teachers in arts high schools or private workshops against their young students entered the public discourse over social media. There were many victims and perpetrators. The argument that the problem was not merely individual but systemic gained traction, and for aspiring female poets like myself, it was painful to see that literature, which should be something beautiful and free, was wrapped up in violence. The root of the problem lay in the debut system. The limited options for starting a literary career reinforced the hierarchy between poet (teacher) and poet aspirant (student). Young, aspiring poets desperate to debut were easily exposed to gaslighting by their poet-teachers. The call grew louder for changes to the debut process and for a healthier literary ecosystem. The literary scene was like a forest populated by various plants. If diversity were respected, the chains holding back aspiring poets would loosen naturally. In 2018, Achimdal Books posted their Featured Poets series as a project on tumblbug. The crowdfunding platform was the best method available to a young publishing company without the capital of major publishers. Achimdal said their goal was to discover new poets regardless of their debut status, and they tried to avoid the hierarchical implications of referring to editors as “judges,” opting instead for the term “curator” to express the horizontal relationship between reviewers and submitters. While the earlier effort by Samin had emphasized a strict standard for publishing a poetry collection, Achimdal was placing more focus on diversifying paths to debut. I submitted a set of around thirty poems to Achimdal, and they soon sent me a publication offer. However, I made the decision to hold off on publishing and keep trying for the spring literary contests and emerging writer awards. I was still afraid of trying something new. The curator, poet Kim Un, kindly respected my hesitation. Turning away from the open door to publication, I fell back into my position as an aspiring poet. In the fall of 2018, Achimdal released the first nine collections of its Featured Poets series at once, and gingko nuts squished under my shoes as I walked down the street. The pungent smell filled the air, but it still didn’t really feel like fall to me yet. Another curator at Achimdal, poet Kim So Yeon, said something that stuck with me. “What if you just declare yourself a poet right now, from this day forward?” Those might not have been her exact words, but that was her point. The idea that I could just call myself a poet gave me courage. It was also the reason curator Kim So Yeon had joined Achimdal’s project in the first place. Of course, the publication of my first collection was only possible with the help of the publishing house, the curators, and so many others, so I couldn’t really say I’d become a poet all on my own. And it was no different in the sense that I became a part of the system. Nevertheless, publishing my poetry as a collection was a new path. In the existing debut system, I’d have been judged on three to ten poems, then published in magazines and journals for three to four years before putting out my first collection. It would be similar to a singer putting out single albums with a couple of songs each until they have enough to perform a solo concert. Debuting with a full collection, on the other hand, was like putting on a solo concert for my debut. I was worried I’d feel like I was standing alone on stage in front of a stadium of empty seats. That’s how reckless an endeavor it seemed to me at the time. Though my fears remained, I decided to go forward with the publication. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I still had a lingering attachment to the debut I’d dreamed of for so long. What I feared most of all was that I might still not be a poet even after I’d published my first book in this way. But amid the courageous efforts of so many writers, poets, and publishers in the literary community to dream up a new approach for a healthier literary ecosystem, I could finally feel that winter had arrived. On January 31, 2019, I released my first poetry collection and put myself out into the world as a poet. When I did my first reading for the collection, someone asked me, “When do you most feel that you’ve become a poet?”“Whenever other people call me a poet, it feels like I’m becoming one bit by bit,” I said. I could really feel that I’d made it because of all the readers and fellow writers who read my collection and shared their thoughts with me. I am always grateful to them. It’s thanks to them that I’m now working on my third collection—to become a poet again, just as winter comes around once more. I do my best never to forget the gift of being read, and to read the poetry of my fellow poets as much as I can. I hold my breath and focus on the voice of another poet. It’s like tilting your head to hear the birds chirping in the forest. This is how we help each other be born as poets.

by Jo Hae Ju