Reading fuels the writing in the same way as listening to music, walking the beach or seeing an art exhibition, just more so.
My new book … A story of two sisters, one in the US, the other in Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart.
Years ago I started writing a true ghost story about my maternal grandfather. The story kept growing and wouldn’t let me go. Though that writing is still unfinished, it was a touchstone for the wealth of family lore I’d heard throughout my life. I also discovered there were very few books in English about Korean life during the Japanese occupation and even fewer from a woman’s point of view. With Asia’s long tradition of suppressing the female voice, this vacuum felt more like a silence than an oversight, intriguing me further. The writings grew and I soon realized I couldn’t do justice to the vividness of my family’s stories unless I could make them come more alive — through fiction.
The True Story of the PTA Scene in THE KINSHIP OF SECRETS The day after my father attended a PTA meeting at my high school, a teacher stopped me in the hall. “Your father is…
Check out this interview with author and Washington Post book critic Bethanne Patrick. We chatted about lots of things having to do with books and writing. This video pilot is…
I was pleased to be interviewed by Jodi Stapler on the “So Many Books, So Little Time Podcast about my book, The Kinship of Secrets. Jodi’s podcast is for people who “lo…
I wonder what my father, who was born in North Korea long before there was a North and a South, would think about tonight’s summit between President Trump and North Korea’…
Though your novel is set against the backdrop of the Korean War, can it help explain the larger divisions of North and South Korea that exist today? The Korean War is at the r…
When Phillip Lopate wrote an essay of this title (found in his collection, Against Joie de Vivre), he had already published several books. As I await my second novel’s r…
I was the youngest of six kids in a Korean immigrant family. There were eight of us in a two-bedroom house in Takoma Park, just north of Washington, DC. Outside of school and …
A while ago my son and I went to a DC jazz club to hear the young group, Slumgum, whose pianist, Rory Cowal, is the son of a friend. The musicians at the time on tenor sax (Jo…
Learning where to begin a story I’ll never forget Colm Tóibín’s presentation almost ten years ago at the bookstore Politics & Prose, preceding his reading of the nov…
