The Storyteller: Interview with E.J. Koh
Hi and welcome to Issue #2 of The Storyteller!
In a way, with everything going on, it seems like a lot more than just a month has passed since I shared that wonderful interview with Beth O'Leary for Issue #1 (thank you for all the kind comments about it - I'm so glad you enjoyed it).
If you aren't yet subscribed to the newsletter, you can change that here. And if you're like me and naturally gravitate towards the comfort of stories, particularly and especially in tumultuous times like these, I hope the following conversation offers you as much respite and food for thought as it did me.
Today, I've got with me the lovely E.J. Koh, whose memoir, The Magical Language of Others was published in January 2020, and whose poetry collection, A Lesser Love was awarded the 2017 Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry. She is a remarkably versatile and sensitive wielder of thoughts and words and I'm so grateful that she took the time out between the book tour for the memoir at the start of the year to have this chat over the phone with me.
AN: What was it about poetry that drew you in and changed the course of your life? Do you think that your experiences and background till then had primed you for the connection? Has the connection to poetry changed since that first time?
EJ: That’s really interesting. Right before I was introduced to poetry, I was a hip-hop dancer. I was really involved in the dance community and I had been dancing competitively about two and a half years. But then, I sort of transferred to a less competitive team and I was also teaching a little bit of introduction so when I was introduced to poetry it really was a complete accident and it really wasn’t something I’d learned before then. I wasn’t a writer; it wasn’t something I was thinking about.
But I think what it was, was that—and this is not something I realised until recently—I had kept in touch with many of the dancers and they’re amazing; they’re such wonderful dancers because they use dance to express themselves and who they are and they’re not trying to use as much skill and technique and mastery—those things are important or important to the end that it allows you and enables you in some way to say what you need to say for whatever craft. And looking back, I wasn’t using dance that way. I was using it as only something that I needed to master, and to make sure I was dancing cleanly and dancing in a way that makes sense. It didn’t go to the centre of my heart.
That’s not something I would have said at that time. It’s something I had dedicated my life to, but I came across poetry and from the very beginning, it didn’t occur to me that I really needed to understand the skills and techniques behind this thing. There was this immediate sense that this was a language I could learn to finally say the things I’ve been wanting to say. All those things I couldn’t say through dance, through speaking—even the English language is very different from any other language. Poetry draws me in because it functions in a way that makes more sense to me than English does. And there was this sense that, "I want to use this to say something.”
When you just called me, I was in the middle of writing a poem. It’s very interesting. I think poetry is my first language. That’s how it feels like. It’s something I come back to, I work on regularly. I work on poetry translation and prose simultaneously. Even if I’m working on a poem, it doesn’t mean that the poem doesn’t have elements of translation or prose or that my translation doesn’t have the elements of my poetry or prose. And same with prose having the other two. [The only thing that has changed] is my ability to bring those things all together. I think initially it was very much a sort of shifting mode; now I’m learning more about how to be multi-model consistently.
AN: What, since then, has led you to explore so many diverse forms? You have managed to remain fluid between them while keeping such a distinct narrative voice across them all. Is there one that you feel a particular affinity for? Whether as a writer, a poet, or a translator, what are your thoughts about genre?
EJ: I love talking about this subject because of what it would have done for me if someone had talked about it or I had read about it back then, [where] there was a sort of stigma–poets writing prose or fiction writers writing poetry. I mean especially because that’s the way the disciplines are divided so that’s the way the programs are divided, that’s the way publication and publishing is divided. I would meet people who did both poetry and prose, but I remember feeling like where do they go between these sort of boundaries and borders.
At one point, those boundaries and borders were something I was drawn to just because of who I am, my own energy. It’s almost like I felt more myself being so fluid because of growing up as a Korean-American and a Korean-American woman artist. It’s such a different place for me to hold and so I was drawn to the fluidity.
I used to study quite a lot of ancient Chinese poetry when I first began translation and it led me to a lot of wonderful moments where I thought, you know fluidity resembles life in the way stiffness resembles death. I mean, think of a dead leaf. You try to bend it and it crumbles in your hand, while with a living leaf it’s so flexible. I think that if nature reflects that, then it makes sense that it’s not only reflected in my mind, the way my mind works—it should stay as flexible as possible—but in my creative works. Most creative works have life in them.
The genres are interesting because they are there to benefit and to rightfully help readers and to help those who accept and determine the genre, who choose it based on what its most obvious qualities are. [But] for me as a creative writer, I don’t think of it that much, to be honest. I’m just writing and because of that—that’s one piece of it—and another piece of it might be similar to the first answer, that I am not focusing on the poetry or the translation as much as focusing on expressing what I need to say and through all the tools that are available to me. So that what is being expressed has this sort of constancy of being of me and of having come from me in the most organic way possible.
AN: I think the search for truth, of many kinds of truths, is definitely an innate human need, but there are different ways of going about finding them and truth means different things to different people. In The Magical Language of Others, you talk about different kinds of truths but also about making peace, finding happiness (in A Lesser Love, you question whether there is such a thing as a happy poem). Can you talk a bit about your thoughts on this? How have you reconciled all of this in your own life through your writing?
EJ: I think about it in a way where I am making peace with all the truths but rather than sort of seeing them as obstacle courses, things that are over one by one, because then it becomes something so exhausting; it becomes very difficult to go on that kind of path. But I think of it in a way that every truth or non-truth that I come across really is more of a curiosity than a truth. It’s something that I’m scared to think about; something that strikes fear but it’s about turning that fear into the curiosity of whether it can be true for me or not. And when I reconcile it, it’s not only making peace but letting it be something I can hold.
To hold something, like my mother’s childhood, let’s say. That means I have to expand on the inside, allow to create space in me to hold that truth. There’s this sort of relationship, right—it does something to me as much as I’m doing something to that thing, and so when I’m holding that I get to get bigger, I get to walk it in my heart…and the more I’m able to widen my heart, the more I’m able to hold.
None of these things, even if they seem to argue with each other sort of...my mom’s idea of the present being a revenge of the past doesn’t need to go against and resist the things that I have decided for myself later on. It’s just that I can hold them both because I have space to understand where she comes from and where that’s the truth for her but also have my own.
It’s similar to the way I write, and the process of writing is similar to the way I live and think about the world and the way I am everyday. I don’t think I think very often of things being one by one or having division or being separated or like one thing having to be right and the other thing having to be wrong. I think that what it is, is that the most compassionate thing is to be as many things as you can and hold as many things as you possibly can.
AN: Could you talk a little bit about what you’re working on now…and what’s coming out next?
EJ: Sure! Well, I’m working on a little bit of everything. Today I’m working on a poem and I’m also working on a novel. I finished a Writer’s Room, so I have officially dipped myself into the experience of screenwriting and I came out loving it. So, I’m also working on a screenplay. I just finished a book of translations, so maybe the next thing that comes out would be the book of translations and possibly the next thing would be the screenplay, and then the novel and the poetry book might come out in tandem. We’ll see where it goes, right, because sometimes, what I think is a novel will be a poetry book or what I think is a poetry book becomes a novel and so, for me, it’s about staying very close to the different things I’m working on and just letting them be whatever they want to be, you know?
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I hope you enjoyed that insight into the mind of a multi-modal storyteller. Stay tuned for news on who May's guest will be. Because of the impact of COVID-19 on the spring publishing schedule, a lot has been shifted around, but I do have some great folks lined up that I'll share with you very soon. If you aren't following me on social media yet, the links to my Instagram and Twitter are at the very end of this email. Hope everyone's holding up okay. Please take care and stay safe.
Thank you and until next time!
Anu
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I'm going to leave EJ's details here for anyone who wants to follow her on social media as well as links to buy or pre-order her work:
thisisejkoh.com
Instagram
Twitter
The Magical Language of Others: Indie Bound
A Lesser Love: Indie Bound