Cover Features

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

Translator's Desk

In Defense of Untranslatability

How many words in all the languages there are in the world! Like a little girl in a sweets shop, I, on some days, feel like bunching my fists and waving them about with glee. But then, like the same little girl who wouldn’t be allowed all the sweets from the shop, I mourn that I will only ever understand a few languages, and therefore only those many ways of describing the world. Oh, but then I mourn too that I could never possibly learn all the words in the languages I do live in, either. Funny, languages are, and what Wittgenstein said: the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. On some days, when I choose to translate, a few Kannada-English dictionaries are within sight on the desk in my studio. One, a classic Bharadwaj with little illustrations thrown in here and there, straying across the sepia pages like confetti left over after the municipal sweepers make their rounds post-carnival. Another, a pocket edition with a red cloth cover that in monsoon season must be stored away for fear of catching mold. A third, the newer classic G. Venkatasubbaiah, the pages crisper, less thumbed, more accessible. On other days, I want none of them anywhere I can see, because the burden of words that I will never learn or remember the meanings of feels too heavy. On those days, I rely only on alar.ink, an incredible online dictionary project for my two languages. On a webpage where one searches word by word by word, the burden of telling stories seems not as overwhelming. It bears constant reminding, that taking stories first written in one linguistic landscape and re-creating, re-interpreting, re-imagining them in another language altogether, two different grammar systems, two histories, two ways of seeing, when two-two everything are at play, is not easy. It is wrestling with two cultures, at home in both, but not quite housed in either.  People ask me, smug, judgy, suspicious all the time, about everything that is supposedly lost in translation. Lost. Lost! Lost? Those that ask so miss the forest for the trees. I want to tell them off, but don’t. The writing desk in my studio is now an antique, made of rosewood, inherited with baggage—land and history from grandpa, a freedom fighter and doctor, reader. On my desk there are notebooks, both stacked precariously, and some scattered here and there. A planner, indispensable. A diary enclosed in a custom leather wrap, a treat to myself last birthday. A jottings book, for notes from research for my writing, like memory-joggers or flash cards. Another general one, red cloth, thick paper, available only in that one store in that one city, so I have stock for the next many years. Then, a vintage porcelain milk jug, gold rimmed, serving as a holder for the unsharpened pencils, for pens that write, those that are dry, those gifted and some best used. Earplugs. Tissue. The mail. Lip balm. Coaster from Australia. A book of poetry. Other books I am currently reading. An antique clock I neglect to wind every day. Old issues of Sunday newspaper supplements that I will get around to reading, one day. A Kindle. Bookmarks I forget to use. Iced water in a beer mug, because it is summer. Music, either the Palestinian online station Radio Alhara, or some Oud, or Pandit Venkatesh Kumar, or silence, depending on the time of the day. My dogs, for brief interludes. These are some of what physically lie on the surface I write on. I would not be able to catalogue the intangible and untranslatable that live in the room. Yet they are perhaps the most important part of my artistic practice. Objects, artworks, library and memories and associations that are infused into the studio, a weathering of me and the idea of a creative space that is years, maybe generations old. I think of the untranslatable often. The part of the writer in me who also translates comes up fists out, ready to argue that there is nothing untranslatable, strictly speaking. But then the part of the translator in me who mainly writes is slower to respond, her practice a little aged now, and grants that while anything can be translated, there is a political need not to translate some things. SJ Kim’s This Part Is Silent: A Life Between Cultures introduced me to the concept of 정. I am misplaced here, trying to define what 정 means to readers of this journal. I understand it as a sense, a regard, a deep connection, a quality that is lost or gained in relation to another. In her book, Kim describes 정 as a fairy tale, as a lie, as home, as the importance of unlearning, depending on where in her book I recognize the shape of 정. For many, many pages in, I resisted looking up how to read the shape. It was so hard at first, because Kim leaves 정 and many Korean words un-transliterated, especially when they occur in sentences where knowing these unfamiliar shapes is crucial to the reading. The mind resisted, yearning for easy knowledge. Only an image search away. But soon it didn’t matter that I was skipping over phrases because words always show the way. It did not matter, a word here, a phrase there, that were in a language I didn’t recognize. The others, in Roman script and in a language that I know well, accommodated the shapes and ideas I couldn’t read. And it was beautiful.  And that is why translation too is such a political act, I was reminded again. We don’t explain everything. We must not. We must leave some things be. Leave some words be. Because they mean ideas and concepts that must travel outside of their cultural boundaries unscathed by crude, easy definitions. Can one hold 정 _for an inanimate being, a physical room, and a mental space? It is not my place to say. But if I could, I would, for my studio. Where every day, I stay in my chair and can travel this little blue dot of earth via her music, her words, her stories. 

by Deepa Bhasthi

Book Shelf

With Even More Silence

It was the last day of March in 2026. I started rereading Young-ha Kim’s I Hear Your Voice in Hong Kong, at the airport in the evening. I had a midnight flight to Incheon, where I arrived at five in the morning, got a coffee, and slept at the terminal for a few hours before boarding another flight to New York to attend a residency upstate, a two-hour train ride from the city. I reread bits and pieces of I Hear Your Voice throughout the trip. Around the same time I reread this novel, I read an essay by Young-ha Kim that was published in the winter 2025 issue of KLN—an essay about his travels, his stay at a hotel, and dreams and memories of his father (or, to be more precise, his refusal to remember his father the way his father wanted to be remembered). Perhaps reading this essay changed my rereading of I Hear Your Voice. On this second reading, the novel said something about masculinity and all the things left unspoken because of it. I Hear Your Voice narrates the intertwined lives of Jae and Donggyu, two boys growing up in Seoul. Jae’s initial connection with our narrator, Donggyu, who is mute, stems from the fact that the former can “read his pain.” Jae speaks for Donggyu, gives him a voice, until one day, out of seemingly nowhere, Donggyu starts speaking. Although Donggyu makes it explicit that there is no direct correlation, his parents separate shortly after he begins to talk. It is the father who leaves. As the novel progresses, Jae and Donggyu grow more distant. It feels as though parts of them are ashamed of how close they have become. In the latter half of the book, Jae becomes a mystical figure—a leader of a motorcycle gang—seen only through the perspectives of Donggyu, who might have been in love with Jae, and Seungtae, a closeted cop. Jae’s own voice effectively disappears, and it is only through these exterior perspectives that we come to know his lore. I was thinking a lot about voice while rereading this book. I had just given a talk at a university about the literary voice—something about Bakhtin and heteroglossia and whatnot. The day after my talk, and before I left for the residency, I performed Displaced Nostalgia. In this durational performance, which lasted eight hours, my performance partner and I sat silently in the shadows behind a curtain. Oranges hung above us. We had no watches, phones, or any way to tell time. When my performance partner felt that an hour had passed, she climbed a ladder and began cutting down the one hundred oranges we had installed, which hung from fishing wires attached to the ceiling of the Black Box Theatre at the University of Hong Kong. During this time, I wrote prompts on the overhead projector behind the curtain. Audience members came and went throughout the eight hours we were there, and they responded to the prompts using the projector outside the curtain. My parents came to see the performance toward the end, I later learned. They had never seen my performances, never attended my talks, nor had they read my books properly. At the end of I Hear Your Voice, Young-ha Kim turns to the writing of the novel itself. In a documentary-like fashion, Kim introduces a thinly veiled stand-in for himself, an author figure who takes on the narrative voice. He begins to describe how he met Donggyu and came to learn the story of Jae through an ex-girlfriend referred to only as “Y,” who had an encounter with Jae, who, by the end of the story, was believed by some to have grown white wings and risen to the sky before becoming a martyr for marginalized youth who have no voice in society. There is a moment at the end of the book when Mokran, a former partner of Jae’s and a former biker who stopped riding after losing one of her eyes in an accident, is interviewed by the author figure. They are at the airport, and Mokran, who is about to leave for Vancouver, tells the narrator that her father is happy about her departure because “nothing good ever happened to her here.” Mokran’s father shows up, and the novel ends with even more silence:  He barely spoke to me—whether it was because he was always reserved or because he didn’t like me, I couldn’t tell. She grabbed her unfinished coffee and stood up. As I walked to the parking lot after we parted, I fiddled with the cell phone in my pocket. I debated whether or not to call Y, but finally I decided not to. She had said everything she needed to in her letter, and my novel was my reply.  It is a silence structured by masculinity, by everything that could not be said, or was never learned to be said. This same silence settles across the novel’s many voices: between absent fathers and their children, between Jae and Donggyu, pulling them slowly apart. In this final moment, in a distinctly postmodern turn, the novel I Hear Your Voice—the author figure’s reply to Y—becomes a form that gathers what remains unsaid, along with the affects that accumulate around it. It was when Displaced Nostalgia ended that a friend in the audience told me that my parents were present. The next day, my father sent an out-of-focus photograph of my mothersitting in front of the white curtain, in the light that cast my shadow. Next to her were the oranges that had fallen. My father later told me, via video call, that the place was too dark, that the booklet that accompanied the performance could not be read in the theater, and that from where he sat, he could not see my live writing projected on the curtain. Because of all this, he did not understand why there were oranges, and the sound of them hitting the floor when my performance partner climbed up the ladder to cut them down frightened him. He said all of this jokingly, with a smile on his face, and, to my tired body, which had spent hours installing, de-installing and performing, my father sounded as though he were playing a game of avoidance, actively finding ways not to need to understand the work. My mother, usually talkative, did not complain; just as in the blurry image, she sat quietly. At the entrance to the performance, all the audience members were given a piece of fabric to cover their watches. Pictures were allowed, but audiences were also asked to turn on airplane mode on their phones. My father said that they waited for exactly an hour before leaving. “You think a piece of fabric can stop me from checking my watch?” he said proudly.Young-ha Kim writes in the aforementioned essay, “The Waltz of Expectation and Disappointment,” that he wondered when his father first disappointed him, and that even having this thought felt unnatural and heavy, as though he were “defying gravity.” Though I can’t say I was disappointed by my father upon hearing his reactions to our performance, his almost childish, passive-aggressive rage baiting annoyed me, causing my entire body to feel drained. I had no energy to respond. Some will never hear your literary or artistic voice; during this conversation, I lost complete interest in the meaning of my own art. I wonder how Jae would read this moment of silence, so filled with fatigue, yet emblematic of the relationship between this sixty-three-year-old father and his thirty-one-year-old son. Now I am far away from Hong Kong, away from any city. I hear birds. It was snowing this morning, but now it is bright and dry and warm. There are deer in the distance, eleven of them standing around in the field, silently. If I walk closer to them, they will run away. Behind the deer are trees that turn golden under the fading sun.  Sheung-King’s Batshit Seven won the 2024 Writers’ Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize and was named one of The Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2024. His debut book, You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked., was a finalist for the 2021 Governor General’s Award and the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and was named one of the best book debuts of 2020 by The Globe and Mail. He forms an artist duo with the artist JeeMin Kim.

by Sheung-King

Essays

All the Best Hurt to Me

Then, I didn’t know my own light So I could  Then, I saw the forest and thought forest I saw the sea and held the waves dear Free to hurt as much as could be So I could  For me there was a time I could believe all I could see  I’m taking a shower and a sentence comes to me. Nothing impressive or fancy, just an ordinary sentence. The sentence is, “Now my day has begun.” The moment that sentence starts, a voice arises within me. A speaker.  I get out of the shower and drink a glass of water as I think. Who does that voice belong to? What life are they living? What is “my day,” and why, now, how has it “begun”? I think it over slowly. I write the sentence on a Post-it note and stick it to my computer monitor. Every time I look at it, I let my imagination grow a little bigger.  I never rush into a poem. Sometimes I think about a single poem for a year or more. There are Post-it notes all over my monitor. They don’t all grow into poems, so sometimes I stop looking at one for a while. But someday, some of them might become poems. Because my poetry isn’t over yet. There isn’t any big reason why I can’t rush into a poem. This is where it starts to get too conceptual, but to put it a bit nebulously, I think of a sentence as something like a seed. You can’t pick it the moment you’ve planted it. It feels like you have to let the thought ripen and grow until it’s outside your control. Of course, it’s all about the feeling, so some thoughts quickly grow into poems, while others don’t work out at all, or take a long time. I’m kind of old-fashioned and stuck in my ways in that respect. But it’s not easy to fix, because I don’t know any other way. Not that I’ve thought much about fixing it. When poetry becomes a struggle, sometimes I think there’s something wrong with my craft, and I wonder how other poets do it. But you can’t just ask another poet how to write poetry. Even if you ask, all you get in response is a laugh.  Now my day has begun.  A single line, cleared away on either side. The time spent looking at a single line, firming up the ground for an idea as it grows thick and lush, is one of the most exhausting but also exciting parts of writing poetry. If I were a farmer, it would be the time spent waiting after scattering the seed. Can this thinking and waiting be considered part of the writer’s labor? Not in the case of the farmer, but the writer must always embody two separate aspects. I can’t just be the farmer; I also have to be the seed in the soil, pushing up a sprout. Even an unsprouted seed is a world within itself, an infinitely stirring window. The preheating of thought is an essential moment to poetry. Which is why I want to claim even the time I spend rolling around in bed doing nothing as my labor time.  The books, shows, movies, and music that I come into contact with in my everyday life have an outsized influence on the brainstorming process. At the idea stage, even happenstance encounters like these can have an effect. This is something I enjoy—watching the chemical reaction within me as the many books I’m reading blend together. There is a strange synergy in reading books from completely different fields at the same time. Drawn into those operations, my sentences and the ideas they catalyze come to a boil. Sometimes, though unfortunately not always, a spark flies, and I can leap to some point beyond myself. That’s the joy of writing poetry.  Some misunderstandings are so sweet I can’t bring myself to quit  I wish you would cry looking at me From behind bended knee Then I want to burst into laughter  I want to become a tangled mess  If you were standing on a cliff, I’d push you off. Once I start writing, I can write. I write, and I read, and I write again. I write until I finally think, that’s enough. But when is enough? Of course, it’s all about the feeling, so I could never say exactly, but I often think I want to go on forever, until I can’t write another word—to the ends of language. I want it to take me somewhere I could never go. Then maybe it would feel like I could go on living. In this tiresome world, what frees me from this body and sends me soaring is literature. Not always, but while I’m writing, for one second at a time, those moments come to me. Moments when everything falls into place so naturally and inevitably. I love that momentary compatibility.  When there are deadlines to meet, I can’t always work this way. While I put all the strength I have into one poem, I’m also writing other poems little by little, whenever I have a free second. Poems that rely on a particular scene, or poems that somehow fall into place at the most precarious moment—those are the ones that are good to write that way. Sometimes a poem just flows out of me without putting much time into it at all.  If I put an apple and a revolving door down on the page together, the tension between the two objects can make the poem poetic. What makes the poem into poetry isn’t the apple and revolving door, but the empty space between them. To adjust that empty space, to play at making it wider or narrower, is one of the most interesting parts of my job. No matter how much you do it, it’s always new. I’d almost dare to say that this is where poetry’s beauty comes from. It’s a kind of experiment—calculating the appropriate distance between words and observing the reaction that emerges between their magnetic fields.  There are no bad people and no good people Some are more bad and some are less bad Some are more good and some are less good  Some may be worse and better at once  The poet, on two endlessly diverging paths, Walks both at one time  Between flows a river It flows and flows  Could all its waters ever be told? How far does it stretch on? Now I write a draft. I keep on writing for as long as I can, until I’m completely drained. My drafts are usually long. Very long. It’s difficult to control a long poem. It’s hard to see it all at once. Once I have a draft, the first thing I do is erase. Thoughts can’t help but follow the tight weave of cause and effect. To create empty space requires adjustments after the fact. When I wrote A Possible World, I delved deeply into this, working with the precision of an entomologist preparing a specimen. I wanted everything to be spoken through the image, so I poured huge amounts of time into heightening image clarity. I was afraid that if the speaker gave expression to anything directly, the poem would move too much through affect. Before I debuted, I was often told that my poetry was too sentimental. That phrase was a chain around my ankle. I worried over how to become drier. It felt as if, when I was hurting, I should never say it hurt. If I cried, I shouldn’t mention tears. I kept hearing the voice of someone telling me that’s not poetry, that’s a diary. They were right, but also they were wrong.  Poetry is made in revision. This is not an exaggeration. Without revision, poetry is nothing more than gathered fragments of image and thought. After my first collection, when I was writing Feeling Helped, I wanted to try something different. I wanted to cough up the voice I’d been pressing down. I was sick of always speaking through the stopover of the image. It felt like the voice of the weak, like I was always hiding behind images. The idea that some things are ineffable felt like a worldview centered on the wound. As if we must hide our wounds and be ashamed of them. I wanted to lay it all bare. I wanted to throw off the cardigan always draped over the scars and reveal the bare skin to the sun. I suppose that’s why Feeling Helped became a collection so full of direct voices.  It’s also why that collection is so loud. I like it for being loud. Sometimes it feels good to put up with a little commotion.  If I say bird, I hope you’ll hear bird If I say red, I hope you’ll think of red,  Not pull from bird wings, glide, soar Not make from red blood, pathos, heat  In bird’s place, bird In red’s place, red Once I’ve erased everything I can erase, I rearrange. I arrange each word and sentence so that they may find their place, in the appropriate spot. Of course, this too I do by feeling. I’ll want to put the knife in the kitchen and the soap in the bathroom. Whenever that happens, I wander around, trying out this place or that—the knife in the vestibule, the soap on the railing. I’m not doing this any which way, but according to some rule or standard that’s personal to me. I’ve never tried to put it into language, but if I did, it might go something like this.  In the first place, it’s similar to installation art. It’s good to move according to some rule, but not one easily ascertainable or obvious to the eye. The standard for the whole flow is whether something feels natural or not. Even the unnatural is ultimately based on the natural. Anything wholly unnatural feels artificial. Some abruption must once in a while break in among the naturalnesses to appear fresh, to draw the eye. Each thing must be distant enough for its presence and form to shine. Each piece of language, too, needs its own space. Sometimes I intentionally set things to disarray by tacking on an overlapping piece of language. In that case, I’m putting forth not the individual word but the effect given by the intersection of these language bundles. Maybe this could be seen as part of my desperate fondness for repetition. The repeated word or phrase attains inevitability through its repetition, so there must be a reason for its selection, but more than the word itself, it’s the effect of the repetition that I’m after.  I like heavy metal. Sometimes I feel it’s colder and closer to silence than more peaceful, calming music. When I want to create an exceptionally quiet moment within a poem, it feels more like trying to make the poem so loud it might explode. In simple terms, a poem traverses three paths—what I meant to write, what I did write, and what others read. In the past, I think many of my poems were trying to bring what the reader read as close as possible to what I intended to write. Not anymore. I enjoy the gap between what I meant to write and what I actually wrote. The rift between the planned and the actual is captivating, and I feel lucky to watch the transformation. I also try hard not to think about what will be conveyed to someone else. If I start considering what others might expect of me, I feel like I should write to meet those expectations. That desire seems like poison to poetry, so it scares me. I always want to write like a total punk, any way I very well please. I tell myself people are going to read it however they want, and I practice letting go of my jitters.  Poets are always doubting the reader. We want everything to come through intact. We want to convey feelings uninjured. We worry the reader won’t understand the poem, and we find ourselves explaining. Like drunk people repeating ourselves ad nauseum. It’s because we’re desperate to be understood. But if you get like that, people don’t listen. They click their tongues and think, that’s the same thing they said last time they were drunk. That’s why it’s better to either put all your faith in the reader or imagine no one will read your poems at all.  I think the best way is to imagine someone very close to you reading the poem. If no one comes to mind, it’s better to be chill about it and think that anyone could read it, however they want, or not at all. But this isn’t really chill. It’s try-hard. It’s fake chill. Still, it’s better to try. If you let yourself get wrapped up in the outside, you lose yourself. You become empty, a mere reaction to the demands and expectations of others. That’s never a good look. People usually react in one of two ways when they read a poem they can’t understand. It’s either the difficult work of a genius, or just a bad poem. This is because they’re constantly looking for meaning. But what’s interesting is that some people locate the problem within, while others find it without. Sometimes, when I don’t get a poem, I start to worry. Am I too old? What if I just don’t get it anymore? Then I get angry. It feels like the poem is a mirror. This makes me think that poetry belongs to the realm of intuition, not understanding. That trying so hard to understand is the tragedy of being human. Or the blessing.  Since the day the tree sprouted from my head  Have I been soil?  Ten millennia passed stewing stone  Swallowing stone  Was it seed? In the mirror, sweet bell pepper  Infinite sweet bell pepper  After erasing and erasing, arranging and rearranging, I start to fill out the poem. I shore up anything that feels like it’s missing something. Sometimes, parts I erased make a comeback. It makes me wonder why I erased them in the first place, but there are light years of difference between a final product that’s been through the full process and one that hasn’t. At least, that’s how I think of it. Sometimes the result of all the time spent repetitively writing and erasing, writing and erasing, is no different from having done nothing at all—when you erase the poem in its entirety, or simply make your way back to the very first draft. But in the process, the poet experiences, feels, and wavers. You learn things you wouldn’t have otherwise. I think that’s why poetry is such a strange and bittersweet genre. And what do I do after I fill out the poem? I erase again, I rearrange, and I fill it out once more. I repeat the three tasks over and over until I feel satisfied. It’s all about the feeling. I can never be completely satisfied, but eventually I find myself thinking, this is enough. That momentary fulfillment is like nothing else I’ve ever felt. I’ve often been asked how I write long poems. I hope this essay offers an answer to that question. It has also helped me to realize once again how much I love poetry. Sincerely. To me, all the best hurt arises out of poetry.  All my light went out.  When we can illuminate nothing We grow harder.  It means I can Not know All that I don’t know Just as well as I know what I do. The revolving door turns inside the apple,  And now my day will begin.

by Baek Eunsun

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