A Quick Slice
NYC Event of the Week
Lit Crawl NYC: Brooklyn
Saturday, May 19th, starting @ 6:00pm
Various locations in Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill/Brooklyn Heights
(see Calendar for full details)
NYC Literary Events
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Press and Reviews
“Beautiful, compelling, irresistible: Slice will knock you right out. In the best way possible.”
-- Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Slice is among the golden few of modern literary publications, not only because of its fiction, poetry, interviews, and articles, but because it's simply the one everyone is talking about.”
-- Simon Van Booy, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and author of The Secret Lives of People in Love
Issue 8 Spotlight
An Interview with Reese Okyong Kwon
by Tricia Callahan
The theme for this issue of Slice is Lies & Make-Believe. Did that act as a prompt for writing "Let Us Offer Each Other a Sign of Peace" or was this story already in the works?
The story was already in the works, though it’s a strange enough creature that I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. Reading the issue description felt a little the way it must feel to find a personal ad describing oneself exactly, if that self happens to be a flute-playing boxing champ. In other words, I thought the story might fit well with the issue, and I was delighted to learn the Slice editors thought so, too.
I've read you say in other interviews that "nothing's ever really finished"—only abandoned. I really liked how you applied that to story writing. How does a writer know when to abandon? Do you remember what your finishing touch to "Let Us Offer Each Other a Sign of Peace" was, where you were when you decided to press go and send it to Slice?
I think Valéry might have been the first to say that a poem is never finished, only abandoned, though I’ve seen other attributions, too. Maybe because I begin with questions, I start feeling that I could be done with a story when I’ve run out of questions I want to ask of it. Which, of course, isn’t the same as having figured out all the answers—it’s more that I’ve started moving toward possible answers.
I can’t remember what the finishing touches were. In all likelihood, I moved some commas around, then put them back where they were in the first place. I can spend all day playing around with punctuation—it’s a problem. (I can spend all day playing around with punctuation; it’s a problem. I can spend all day playing around with punctuation. It’s a problem!)
The idea of abandonment happens to be central to "Let Us Offer Each Other a Sign of Peace." Abandoning religion appears elsewhere in your fiction, too. Is theme exploration the angle at which you first approach a story's creation? If not, is it typically something else—plot, character, language...?
Often, I begin with a question: what would happen if this, if that? After that, I start fooling around with sentences, looking for some combination of words that feels right, or even, if possible, inevitable. I grew up playing the violin, and sometimes the initial forays into a piece of fiction feel to me like the early days of violin-playing, when I would draw the bow across the string to try to find a note: G, for example. First I get a D, then an F, then a G-sharp, then a G-flat, then some weird almost-G that’s close but still all wrong, and finally the sweet clear G.
What are some of your favorite pieces of fiction? Why?
I had the good luck to grow up in a house full of old books—in both Korean and English; my mother had majored in English literature in college in Seoul—and I was encouraged to read everything. So my first loves were some of the usual standbys, James and Tolstoy and Austen and Dickens and Turgenev and Eliot. This freedom did have its downsides—for instance, I made the mistake of reading Crime and Punishment when I was eleven, which terrified me. It took another decade and change for me to really forgive (then enjoy, then admire, then revere) Dostoevsky.
But favorite books—that’s always hard to answer. These days, I’ve been on something of a novella spree, so maybe I’ll talk about that. A couple of old favorites are Pastors and Masters by Ivy Compton-Burnett and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. The dialogue in Pastors and Masters is so good. And there’s always Kafka—In the Penal Colony is wonderfully frightening. More recently, I’ve become excited about Kyle Minor’s writing, especially his novellas A Day Meant to Do Less and In the Devil’s Territory.
Finally, he hasn’t written any novellas, but I can’t really talk about favorite writers without mentioning the extraordinary Norman Rush.
Are you a good liar?
In Norman Rush’s Mating, there’s a part when the novel’s narrator explains, and I’m paraphrasing, that one of the worst things to hear from someone is that he’s a bad liar, because it usually means that he is, in fact, a skilled liar. I’m not sure how true that is, but I like the idea that there’s no way to answer this question without sounding a little suspect. So, am I a good liar? I wish I were a better one.
CHALLENGE! Let's try to give potential subscribers a snapshot of your story, which appears in Issue 8 of the print magazine. In the spirit of Ernest Hemingway's famous six-word story (For Sale: baby shoes, never worn), can you introduce "Let Us Offer Each Other a Sign of Peace" in just six words? (Without giving too much away...)
The woman I love loves God.
Reese Okyong Kwon’s fiction is published in or forthcoming from the Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Epoch, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere; her nonfiction is published in the Believer and the Rumpus. Her work has been honored with scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. Recently, she was named one of Narrative’s “30 Below 30” emerging writers.
Tricia Callahan is the editor-in-chief of Slice.
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