I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War, which is why I started in 1951, but I was mostly interested in the aftermath. When we think about how we learned about war in our history textbooks, it’s always delineated as a discrete period of time. The Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953, but the effects on the people took time to manifest, especially when we’re thinking about intergenerational trauma. . .
My novel is about an eighteen-year-old girl, or woman depending on your nomenclature, who, in a summer, has two emotionally complicated sexual relationships with men she hasn’t known very long. I wanted to write an adventure story like the adventures young men get to have all the time. . .
I don’t prefer one over the other. They are quite different in the fact that they allow for different types of information to be imagined and communicated. They are the same in the sense that both of them have a wide variety of modes attached to them. You don’t write just one poem. You can learn to write an elegy, an ode, a sonnet. . .
I do really identify with being a poet, obviously. And I definitely don’t identify as an academic. I don’t know if I’ll ever identify as an academic. But right now I’m working on fiction, actually. I’m interested in disrupting these boxes that we’re asked to put ourselves in–or not boxes, but categories. . .
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