For my second Women in Translation Month post of 2022, I’d like to tell you about Winter in Sochko (Open Letter Books, 2021), which I devoured in May on the flight home for my grandmother’s funeral and back, the first novel I have been able to devour since becoming a parent in January 2021. Its spareness, and its tense family relationships in relation to food, reminds me of another favorite work in translation, Lise Tremblay’s Mile End (trans. Gail Scott, Talon Books, 2002), though here the anger is more subdued and there’s no psychosis. The comparison to Marguerite Duras on the cover also feels apt. The writing is quite fluid and poetic. In fact, perhaps because of its fluidity, I read it too fast to truly appreciate the lyricism.

Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited.

Here is a characterization of Sokcho, the resort town on the border of South and North Korea. The protagonist is a young French-Korean woman working in a hotel, relieved to not be living with her mother anymore, who stuffs her with food and comments on her appearance and suffocates her each weekend visit. It’s the off-season, windy and raw; few guests are in the shabby hotel: a woman recovering from plastic surgery and, just arrived, a French graphic novelist who asks the narrator to show her around town. She has a boyfriend, an aspiring model, but surprise-surprise, it’s an unsatisfying relationship and the graphic novelist, an older man, holds a certain amount of intrigue. While she cooks for him she thinks:

Beef and raw fish smells were wafting together, heavy and pungent. I pictured Kerrand at his desk. Lips pursed, hand drifting through the air before landing at exactly the right spot on the paper. I always had the finished dish in mind when I cooked. Appearance, taste, nutritional balance. When he drew, he gave the impression of thinking only of the movements he made with his wrist and hand, that was how the image seemed to take life, with no prior conception.

An image taking to life with no prior conception: this seems to bring together for me the themes of identity in this book, of how to forge one’s identity through creative acts and how to try to live comfortably within one’s own skin. The many accolades this book has received comes as no surprise!

I'm back from a family trip to Orcas Island. Waiting for the ferry in Anacortes, we spotted skittering kingfishers and a great blue heron in flight--its path strangely loping. Then, in Orcas, there were the requisite cows, sheep, and horses; a buck crunching on dead leaves; and sweet doe eating dandelions. We went to the old strawberry barreling plant in the hamlet of Olga, where there are no longer any strawberry fields. And M & I baked our bones in a sauna that may have been close to 200° F. How refreshing!Now I'm in back-to-school mode. A few tidbits of note:

• On Sunday, September 18, I'm teaching a free one-day class on contemporary fairy tales at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library.
• On Saturday, October 22, I will be one of 40+ featured artists at Artist Trust's 30th Birthday Party. Tickets are $25 and proceeds support this amazing organization and all the hard work it does in Washington State. I have felt their impact profoundly as a recipient of their inaugural Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award. But they have been a helpful resource for me long before that; I attended a number of their grant writing workshops and compiled some of my notes in a post here.
• Finally, I'm pleased to be offering one-on-one writing coaching via Hugo House's new manuscript consultation program. You can learn all about here.

In other news, I have a few pieces forthcoming--a collage essay about a fruit (in the meantime here's a post I wrote about nectarines), a short story inspired by my recent trip to the Netherlands, and two short-short fairy tales. I'll be sure to post links to these pieces as they become available.

Women in Translation Month is around the corner! Last year, I compiled a list of translated books by women that I enjoyed and created a Women in Translation Bingo game. I also wrote about novellas by Marguerite Duras and Eileen Chang and poetry collections from Rocío Cerón and Angélica Freitas.This summer has been a bit more hectic as I've been teaching more, taking my second novel through an eighth draft, and researching my third novel. However! I'm excited for Women In Translation Month and wanted to share with you four books on my to-read pile.What have you been reading?

I like big cities and I cannot lie. They've fascinated me for a long time. Spike Lee, Woody Allen, Lena Dunham, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sapphire, and Betty Smith all have wildly different visions of New York City. Sometimes I feel apologetic for writing about New York, because of some perception that most writing about New York is stereotypical and/or because New York stories dominate the landscape and are therefore overdone.But, having grown up in Brooklyn, it is impossible for me not to write about it. And, as with any piece of writing, of course, the deeper you dig into something, the more you unpack a city or character's complexities, the farther away you get from tired old narratives. Write the story only you can write, advice I picked up at the Tin House Writers Conference, has been enormously valuable to me in moving forward with stories and novels and embracing my own peculiar vision. New York is the city I know best and the one I can endlessly burrow into.New York is not, however, the only city that fascinates me, whose identity offers multitudes. I fell head over heels in love with Tokyo and can't wait to get back there one day to walk its ancient alleys and zoom by its blinking towers. Reading 1Q84 after experiencing Tokyo made palpable the dreamy and unsettling alternate universes cities offer.Working on my first novel, I swam in a pile of books set in Buenos Aires. Fiction, memoir, reportage, poems. Anything I could get my hands on, starting with Borges. Then I was fortunate enough to take the leap and visit. That city's mix of architectural traditions (Spanish, English, French) creates the strange sensation of being in South America and Europe simultaneously. And the simultaneity feels more real because of my different encounters with the city through literature.Chicago is a place close to my heart, but whose literature I'm less steeped in. I love how the El downtown feels like a mash up of the outer boroughs of New York with stately old Chicago buildings. I know Saul Bellow writes Chicago, and he's been on my to-read list for quite some time, but I'm wondering about all the literary versions of Chicago. Other than say, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, also in my to-read pile.I'm wondering, too, about the literary versions of Seattle. Truth Like the Sun, Where'd You Go Bernadette, and Blueprints from the Afterlife have been in my to-read pile for some time. Now that I've lived in Seattle for over five years, I may find myself writing about it too. That is, after I get through novels two and three. One day.What are your favorite writers who have particular visions for the cities they write?

Greetings from Kyoto! Just a short note to share my review of Vitomil Zupan's Minuet For Guitar, up on the Ploughshares blog. This time, I tried to do something a little different, composing the review in lists, and had a lot of fun changing things up this  -- I just might do it again!More on my trip to Japan in mid-April, when I return. In the meantime, here's a picture of the rabbit that delivers cherry trees to the moon.