Crystal Hana Kim and faculty member Laura van den Berg on What It Means to “Learn to Write”

Research As a Creative Act, The Limits of First-Person Point of View, and More

After reading and loving Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, it was a great joy to team up with her for a joint paperback celebration. This conversation took place at the lovely Books Are Magic in early September. We talked about what it feels like to be a year out from publication, vulnerability, voice, research, and writing the next book.
–Laura van den Berg

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Crystal Hana Kim: I’m really excited to be here with you, and I’m excited that we can celebrate together. I also want to say that I’m selfishly thrilled about this event because I want to learn from you. You’re so prolific, and we’re at different stages in our writing careers. What would you like to talk about first?

Laura van den Berg: Since this is a paperback celebration, this event is coming at a different moment in the life of these books. What has the last year been like for you? What have you learned? What has surprised you? What challenged you?

CHK: Before If You Leave Me, I had not published much—I went to grad school at Columbia, but I moved to Chicago for four years right afterwards, and I was outside of my literary community. That distance allowed me to sink into the world of Haemi and Kyunghwan and Jisoo. But at the same time, since I hadn’t published anything except for one short story that actually was just an earlier iteration of a chapter in my book, I wasn’t used to the publishing world. I didn’t realize how vulnerable I would feel. Even though my book is set in 1950s to late 1960s Korea, and it’s not autobiographical, I felt so vulnerable this past year. This strange writerly anxiety came over me. Do you ever feel like that, before a book comes out?

LVDB: All the time!

CHK: I was really nervous, as if everyone would be able to pinpoint all of my secret obsessions and fears. But after you get over the initial fear, it’s an incredible experience. It’s been particularly amazing hearing from different readers—from Korean Americans, mothers who told me that the way that I depicted postpartum depression stayed with them, or war veterans.

LVDB: I think it is also a particular thing for novels. I think publishing any book can be anxiety-inducing. But with short stories, people very often publish them in magazines along the way and so other people have seen them and found them legible. With novels, a part of my worries is: will this make sense to anyone who’s not me? Did I just have a weird dream and write it down continually for three years? And a novel is a very private thing for a long time, so I think also that when it finally goes out into the world it can feel like a bit of a loss.

[… continue reading their conversation at Literary Hub.]

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“On the Universal Urgency of Immigrant Literature” by faculty member Christopher Castellani

“On the Universal Urgency of Immigrant Literature,” an essay by faculty member Christopher Castellani, published by Literary Hub.

On the Universal Urgency of Immigrant Literature

“There are only two possible stories,” goes the old adage, frequently attributed to John Gardner: “a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” It’s the sort of thing I’ve said casually to my students over the years as a way to help us organize our ideas, but it strikes me now that every immigrant story I know of falls into one or—in most cases, both—of those archetypes: a character leaves behind a place—a life, really: a home, a language, a personhood—to embark on a personal quest; or a character enters an unfamiliar country, where they are a stranger to most, and finds they must navigate its codes and culture in order to survive. The leaving behind is as much a theme in these stories as is the navigation, and the adventure is as much a loss as it is a journey of discoveries.

[… continue reading at Literary Hub.]

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“A Refusal to Defend or Even Stick Up for the Art of the Short Story” by faculty member Peter Orner

An excerpt from “A Refusal to Defend or Even Stick Up for the Art of the Short Story” by faculty member Peter Orner, published by The Paris Review.

A Refusal to Defend or Even Stick Up for the Art of the Short Story

Because why the fuck should I? Seriously, why the fuck should I?

I should leave it right there but this is a rant, and isn’t the thing about rants that they lurch onward unnecessarily after what needed to be said has been said? A rant by its nature says more than it needs to, which makes it, already, antithetical to the short story but in any case I’m not going to do it, defend the short story again, I’m tired of it, half-drunk as I am on this plane that amid heavy turbulence is flopping over Omaha as we speak. I refuse to grovel, to attempt to put into words what will always be unsayable, which is to say that what makes certain stories reach into your chest cavity and rip out what is left of your heart needs not be discussed. It is itself all the justification a story will ever need. The best offense being no defense at all. And so: none offered. And you, my friend, recently said to me, “You’re lucky you write stories. I mean the form is an ideal forum for today’s uber-distracted society. Don’t you think?” And because I love and respect you, in spite of the pain in my soul the question inflicted, here I am answering by not answering which has been my MO for much of life. No I do not think. Ah, screw it: the short story is, with the glorious exception of poetry, absolutely the least ideal mode of expression for our distracted society because it takes a certain kind of intense concentration. Compassionate concentration? To appreciate. To grasp. To love. I’m talking about a reading a story, a good story. What’s a good story? How am I defining—

You tell me. Because you know. This is personal. To you and to me. And anyway, I refuse to even—

See where this going?

Nowhere it is going nowhere.

[… continue reading at The Paris Review.]

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“The Ordinary Woman Theory” by faculty member Caitlin Horrocks

An excerpt from “The Ordinary Woman Theory” by faculty member Caitlin Horrocks, published by The Paris Review.

The Ordinary Woman Theory

In fifth grade, I picked Abigail Adams from a list of American history topics because I wanted to find out what this woman had done to land herself, nearly alone, on a list of men. I soon despaired to learn that she hadn’t actually done all that much, at least not in the ways that I understood “doing.” She ran the family farm and raised the kids while her husband, John Adams, was off signing the Declaration of Independence. She followed him to France, then Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., then back to the farm. I chronicled these relocations, while thinking that I must be missing the point. Defeated, I turned in my report, aware that it was, as grandiose as this sounds, my first intellectual failure.

I’d gotten plenty of spelling words wrong before, but those were failures of memorization, not comprehension. That a life might be valued in terms other than battles won or lost, institutions raised or razed, was alien to me. The “great man” kind of history was the only kind I’d been taught, and the only kind I knew how to value.

I unlearned that lesson gradually.

[… continue reading at The Paris Review.]

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Interview with faculty member Caitlin Horrocks

An excerpt from an interview with faculty member Caitlin Horrocks on her debut novel, The Vexations, featured on NPR.

Author Caitlin Horrocks Explores Brilliance of Composer Erik Satie In The Vexations

SIMON: What makes someone from Grand Rapids want to write about Erik Satie?

HORROCKS: As a piano student, my teacher assigned me one of the “Gymnopedies.” And as a kid, I just immediately loved it. I thought, I have a new favorite piece. I have a new favorite composer. I really loved that elegant melancholy that you just heard. But when I looked at more pieces, I – very quickly I was running into things like “Flabby Preludes (For A Dog)” or “Dried Embryos,” one of which contains essentially lines of dialogue from the point of view of a sea cucumber. And as an aspiring pianist, I was annoyed. (Laughter) I was disappointed.

SIMON: Yeah.

HORROCKS: And it raised the question, though, of who was this person who had created this handful of very beautiful pieces and then this other more playful, more experimental work? And I just held onto that question for a long time.

[… continue reading at NPR.]

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Faculty Member Nina McConigley Chosen for Harvard’s Prestigious Radcliffe Institute

Faculty member Nina McConigley, an award-winning author, recently was named the Walter Jackson Bate Fellow in Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The 2019–2020 fellowship class includes 55 scholars who will direct their creative and intellectual energy to producing solutions to some of the most complex and urgent challenges of our time.

During her year at Harvard, McConigley will work on a novel about the rural immigrant experience in the American West.

[… continue reading at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.]

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“What Silent Film Taught Me About Storytelling”: faculty member Dominic Smith on the power of an Obsolete Art Form

An excerpt from “What Silent Film Taught Me About Storytelling” by faculty member Dominic Smith, published by Literary Hub.

What Silent Film Taught Me About Storytelling

In 2013, the Library of Congress reported that more than 75 percent of all silent films are gone forever. As a writer obsessed with the gaps and silences of history, this statistic grabbed my attention. At the time, I was working on The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which explores the largely forgotten story of the women painters of the Dutch Golden Age, but the idea of this disappearing medium stayed with me. It seemed less like a gap or silence and more like an entire missing layer of our storytelling history.

[… continue reading at Literary Hub.]

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Listen to “A Woman on the Edge of Time,” a BBC Radio Drama based on the book by faculty member Jeremy Gavron

Listen to Jeremy Gavron’s quest to piece together why, in 1965, his mother took her own life on this BBC 15 Minute Drama Radio Series.


In 1965, Hannah Gavron – a 29 year old, bright, sophisticated sociologist – gassed herself in a flat in Primrose Hill, north London. She left behind a suicide note, two small children, and an about-to-be-published manuscript: The Captive Wife. Four decades later, her son Jeremy tries to piece together the events that led to her death. Jeremy Gavron’s book is dramatized by Sarah Daniels and stars Dominic Mafham, Helen Clapp and James Bolam.

Stream this series at the BBC.

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Interview with poetry faculty member Alan Shapiro

An excerpt from an interview with poetry faculty member Alan Shapiro, published by the Katonah Poetry Series.


“Writing poetry is partly and mainly essentially a collaborative enterprise. Nobody writes anything without the help of someone else. That can be a friend, a fellow poet or another poem you love and want to emulate, or at the very least be in conversation with. More generally, poems exist not just to be read in the isolation of one’s study but to be talked about, to generate communal bonds and insight.”

[…continue reading the interview with Alan Shapiro at the Katonah Poetry Series.]

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“The Palace” by faculty member Kaveh Akbar

An excerpt from “The Palace” by faculty member Kaveh Akbar published by The New Yorker.

“There are no good kings. / Only beautiful palaces.” Kaveh Akbar’s long poem “The Palace” is both magical and matter-of-fact. The voice is by turn declarative and distraught. The poet invokes Keats, and Keats answers back. “The Palace” also captures the pleasures of everyday life as both a delight and distraction—a simple meal, its possibilities and power. Heaven here is a palace, too: a place not always seen but suffused with wishes. The poem’s leaping form is one of forward-moving fragment and enjambment, of stepping toward and stepping around its chief subject: America.

In Akbar’s poem, America is a country both welcoming and withholding, a land where teens wear T-shirts that promise the obliteration of other places. It is a lettuce spinner, sizzling oil, a goat or a dream on a spit. “The dead keep warm under America / while my mother fries eggplant on a stove,” Akbar writes. There may not be any kings in America, but there are families; there is a father who immigrates, as most do, for opportunity, and a mother for whom opportunity is an earthly garden of goodness. Akbar’s poem is about them, too. Finally, the poem is about love, including the poet’s love for a country in which he is “always elsewhere,” with poetry the ultimate homeland. – Kevin Young, poetry editor for The New Yorker

The Palace

It’s hard to remember who I’m talking to
and why. The palace burns, the palace
is fire
and my throne is comfy and
square.

Remember: the old king invited his subjects into his home
to feast on stores of apple tarts and sweet lamb. To feast on sweet lamb of
stories. He believed

they loved him, that his goodness
had earned him their goodness.

Their goodness dragged him into the street
and tore off

his arms, plucked
his goodness out, plucked his fingers out
like feather.

[…continue reading “The Palace” at The New Yorker.]

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