Introductions

Hi, Pleiades fans! I’ll be editing the website starting today. I first read Pleiades when I was an MFA student at Emerson College. Emerson had a stack of journals to look through, and I remember Pleiades had the best reviews section by far and some great fiction. I was working on a screenplay about a Korean War POW that eventually became a novella (The Last Repatriate) but in the middle, between screenplay and novella, was a short story. Pleiades published that story. And now, many years later, I get to join the staff.

I thought, as a way of introducing myself, I might recap some of my 2015, which saw the publication of my novel The Hundred-Year Flood, the sale of two more books, and even the opportunity to give the convocation speech at Wheelock College. It was an amazing year.

Here are some things that were on my mind:

1. Creative Writing pedagogy. I helped curate a little forum on creative writing pedagogy and writers of color for Gulf Coast, where I’m Online Fiction Editor, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to run a workshop in new ways. How one goes about teaching how to revise more than pointing out what to revise. How the power dynamics in the classroom work for or against certain pieces. What the conditions of a great workshop dynamic are. What the role of the instructor should be. Even how to bring all of that online.

2. Elena Ferrante. I read Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet this year, and they were the best books I’ve read in forever. I also read a lot of other great books this year, like Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Mat Johnson’s Loving Day, Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Laura van den Berg’s Find Me, Carmiel Banasky’s The Suicide of Claire Bishop, Helen Zia’s Asian American Dreams, Yoko Ozawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, and many others.

3. The difference between learning and learning things. My daughter is going to kindergarten next year, maybe, and we’ve been sending her to a Waldorf school, where, through play, she learns so many things that could never be tested. I’ve learned so many things in my life, and yet the lessons that have been most helpful are ongoing and perhaps never-ending. Not how to add, but why I always want more. Not history, but asking why history is so hard to change.

4. Social media. What the hell? Also: I love you?

5. Asian American representation, and what happens when someone grows up without the ability to see any future, or even a wide variety of futures, as possible, without projections of oneself in various roles and positions? Or what happens when someone grows up seeing those possibilities only for people who look different from them? Who do you become? Who do you model yourself after?

6. Adoption, always adoption. Today I sent out a DNA test. My great hopes with this test are to find relatives and to find out something about my medical history. 2015 is the year my daughter started asking why I don’t look like my parents. My medical problems, unknown, are her medical problems, unknown. We pass down our ghosts.

7. K-dramas. This wasn’t a good year for k-dramas, but k-dramas are always a way for me to enter a world where the problems begin above race. They’re also a way to pretend to a culture I was forced out of, and a way to get closer to my (Korean) wife, my (Korean) self. They’ve also taught me as much about writing and what people want from stories as books.

8. The incredible power of stories that make and make up our identities.

Maybe we’ll touch on some of these things over the next year. Stay tuned. Happy 2016.