May 8, 2019 Inside the Issue How to Buy a Rock By Jessi Jezewska Stevens George Plimpton, illustrious patrician multi-hyphenate and longtime editor of The Paris Review, helped establish the genre of “Participatory Journalism.” In terms he almost certainly would have disapproved of, that means “doing stuff just to write about it.” Plimpton stepped into the ring with a professional boxer, played triangle for the New York Philharmonic, swung from a circus trapeze, and far more, resulting in essays that shaped the landscape of nonfiction for decades to come. In keeping with this legacy, we’ve invited contributors from our Spring 2019 issue to live the experiences they depicted in their fiction. In J. Jezewska Stevens’s story “Honeymoon,” the narrator works behind a jewelry counter. “In my line of work you get a sense for the truth,” she writes. “The jewelry nook is a confessional, a place of transience and vulnerability, where what you’re vulnerable to is yourself.” For this assignment, Stevens headed to New York’s Diamond District to explore those long-standing confessionals. There’s a self-contained atmosphere, a throwback sense of endurance, on West Forty-Seventh Street. It’s an attitude that fewer and fewer Midtown streets can claim; most of Manhattan seems to be converging on the sterile luxury of Hudson Yards. But on this modest one-block stretch, bookended by Fifth and Sixth, there are no experience spaces, whitewashed cafés, or glassy high-rises that double as malls. The storefronts are cramped, indifferent, tinged with elbow grease. The famous arcades, where narrow aisles maximize the number of jeweler’s booths, are brassy but austere—at least in comparison to the corporate mansions of Tiffany’s and Cartier. On Forty-Seventh, the whole street buzzes with the modest energy of the hustle, which only serves to heighten the intrigue of the diamonds on display. Read More
May 8, 2019 Inside the Issue A Night With a Bouncer By Nick Fuller Googins George Plimpton, illustrious patrician multi-hyphenate and long-time editor of The Paris Review, helped establish the genre of “Participatory Journalism.” In terms he almost certainly would have disapproved of, that means “doing stuff just to write about it.” Plimpton stepped into the ring with a professional boxer, played triangle for the New York Philharmonic, swung from a circus trapeze, and far more, resulting in essays that shaped the landscape of nonfiction for decades to come. In keeping with this legacy, we’ve invited contributors from our Spring 2019 issue to live the experiences they depicted in their fiction. In Nick Fuller Googins’s story “The Doors,” a city’s doormen go on strike. “We demand set schedules,” Googins writes. “Reimbursement for our protein powders our gym memberships. An emergency fund for those stabbed on the job. We are the doormen of the city. The guardians against Nightworld. Yet the nightclub owners they reject our demands every one of them.” For this assignment, Fuller Googins headed to the Venice Beach boardwalk to shadow a doorman for an evening. Venice Beach, LA It’s Friday evening on the Venice Beach Boardwalk, and we can hold three truths to be self-evident: The breeze shall be skunky with the scent of mostly legal cannabis. A stupidly gorgeous sunset shall band the horizon in pink. Tony shall be working the door at the Sidewalk Cafe. For the past six years, Tony Wingo, age fifty-five, has worked at the Sidewalk, an indoor/outdoor spot where tourists eat and locals drink. Tonight I am working the door with Tony, which means I am standing next to Tony, shadowing Tony, and trying to stay out of Tony’s way. In case you cannot tell us apart, please allow me to help: Tony is the big guy wearing the Lakers hat and black hoodie. I am the not-big guy wearing the green thrift-store flannel and Dickie’s shorts. Tony, you may have guessed, is a professional bouncer. I am not. Read More
January 16, 2019 Inside the Issue Inherited Trauma: An Interview with Emily Jungmin Yoon By Lauren Kane Emily Jungmin Yoon. Photo courtesy of Emily Jungmin Yoon. On the phone, Emily Jungmin Yoon is gentle. When we spoke, she was situated in a café on the campus of the University of Chicago, where she is at work on her doctorate. There was the usual ebb and flow of people in between classes, and at a certain point she moved tables to get away from the background commotion, politely apologizing for the noise. Yet quietude is not a word one would use when describing her debut collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species. In her poems, Yoon unflinchingly illustrates the horrors suffered by Korean “comfort women” and grapples with trauma both experienced and inherited. As Bk Fischer wrote, “Retelling the testimonies of the ‘comfort women’ forced into prostitution for the Japanese Imperial Army, Yoon takes up the charge of amplifying the voices of an often-overlooked history.” That there exists a disconnect between her tone and her content is an observation Yoon has heard before. “I’ve been told, tonally, my poems have been kind of quiet,” she said. “I don’t disagree with that, but I do suppose I compensate for it—to get the effect that I want, I have to use stronger language, more grotesque vocabulary and diction to bring out the horror of these stories.” Yoon was born in Busan, in the Republic of Korea. She balances the personal inherited trauma against a respect for her historical subjects. When I asked when she learned the history of comfort women, her reply was straightforward: “I’ve known it as long as I can remember. It is very much present in our collective memory. In Korea, it is something very immediate and urgent. There is a protest every Wednesday in front of the Japanese embassy asking for the recognition of their history.” Yoon moved to Canada as a girl, then came to the United States for her undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. After that, she went on to do an M.F.A. at NYU, and then her Ph.D. The academic rigor of Yoon’s career thus far is exemplified in the extensive research behind A Cruelty. She is also currently at work on a translation project, as well as serving as poetry editor for the online magazine The Margins, a fledgling venture headed by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She is young, for someone so accomplished, midway through her fourth year of doctoral work and still in the process of shaping her dissertation proposal. In the meantime, she’s teaching, making the switch in the spring from a teaching assistantship to teaching courses of her own: advanced Korean and a poetry workshop. INTERVIEWER When did you stop writing in Korean and begin writing in English? YOON I moved to Canada from Korea when I was around eleven. I started journaling in English because I wanted to practice the language and because I felt really shy, since I couldn’t talk to anyone. Journaling was also a way to write down everything that I couldn’t say to other people. I started writing creatively in English in high school because I was taking classes in Anglophone culture. There wasn’t really a conscious decision to shift from Korean to English, it was just the environment I was in. I do think that in the future I could pick up writing in Korean again. It’s a little daunting because not everyone who speaks Korean feels comfortable writing poems in Korean, and that’s the same for all the languages, right? It will take a lot of practice to get my own natural rhythm writing in verse. I will just have to read a lot more and write a lot more before I can create something that I can proudly call a poem in Korean. Read More
December 12, 2018 Inside the Issue Reading While Nursing By Leslie Jamison Hyuro. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena) This year I read mostly while nursing. My daughter was born in January, and those short winter days gave way to long nights spent with her sleeping against my chest—a tiny burrito in zip-up pajamas, her rhythmic breath against my neck—or waking up to eat, nearly falling asleep in that primal bliss, with the radiator hissing and clanking behind us, my finger stroking her cheek to wake her up again. I read so much about motherhood. Or maybe it was that everything I read seemed to be about motherhood. Grad school had taught me new ways to read, through various theoretical lenses, and so did my daughter. She taught me how to read with one arm, in stolen chunks of time, in half-delirium, in the long hormonal soup of the fourth trimester. Read More
December 6, 2018 Inside the Issue Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Fabulist and Fabulous Singer By The Paris Review Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. Photo: Anastasia Kazakova. © Anastasia Kazakova. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s bio describes her as “a world-renowned writer and singer.” We were aware of the former—her story “Two Sisters” appears in the new Winter issue—but knew nothing of the latter. We decided to investigate. On the page, Petrushevskaya is sneaky and brilliant. Onstage, she sings cabaret songs, wears big hats, and saunters about like Cruella de Vil. Below, join us on a journey into the annals of Russian YouTube as we explore the musical career of one of Russia’s greatest living writers (with occasional comments from her fans). Старушка не спеша дорогу перешла – Л. Петрушевская 2010 HD (The old woman slowly crossed the road – L. Petrushevskaya 2010 HD) “Патрушевской браво. Давно не испытывал такого восторга.” (“Petrushevskaya bravo. I have not experienced such delight for a long time.”) —Witaly123 Read More
September 13, 2018 Inside the Issue In Tribute to Joyce Carol Oates By Nell Freudenberger Still from Smooth Talk, the film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” When Joyce Carol Oates’s canonical story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” was made into a film in 1985, the author mostly approved. Of its lead actor, Oates says, “Laura Dern is so dazzlingly right as ‘my’ Connie that I may come to think I modeled the fictitious girl on her, in the way that writers frequently delude themselves about motions of causality.” Oates writes this in the New York Times in 1986, but I didn’t read it until this year, after I’d written my own story modeled on “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” “Rabbits,” which appears in the Fall 2018 issue of The Paris Review. As Oates observes, writers writing about why they wrote something are not especially reliable. The original story was based on a Life magazine article about the “Pied Piper of Tucson,” a psychopath who seduced and sometimes killed his teenage female victims; his story later inspired two novels and four more films. Oates says she never read the complete article about the killer because she didn’t want to be distracted by the real-life details: “I forget his name, but his specialty was the seduction and occasional murder of teenage girls.” This casual statement gets at what is so dazzling about Oates herself as a writer: the ability to treat graphic and even lurid material in a way that is not at all graphic or lurid. She doesn’t attempt to conceal violent or perverse behavior—on the contrary, she often emphasizes it—but she is interested in those details only for their potential to reveal surprising human truths. In an Oates story, there is no contempt for people who are down and out, nor is there any false lionizing of struggle (that flip side of contempt). If Oates has scorn for any class of people, it’s for the judgmental mainstream—those “who fancy themselves free of all lunatic attractions.” “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” made a huge impression on me when I first read it as a teenager, and I suspect it still has that effect on high school students today. I’ve read the story several times since then, but like Oates (probably like most writers), I didn’t reread my source material before starting to write. I knew I wanted my story to begin with an older man, dressed as a younger one, approaching a teenage girl in a playground, and that the tension between his appeal and the pull of the girl’s family would be what propelled the story. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Read More