It is very rare that I come across a writer who is a master of many genres. That’s why it was so refreshing when I met Hyun Woo Kim, a Korean writer and translator. I set about interviewing Hyun Woo and he gave me very insightful answers to my questions.
When I asked him what piece he was most proud of he had a tough time answering. “I am proud of almost all my works, and I believe it to be a work ethic for writers to never let the public read something if even its writer is not proud of it” Here are some accomplishments to date: “Recently, I was notified that my short story “The Squid’s Mouth” became a finalist of the 2023 Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Award and I feel greatly proud and honored by the news. There is also a one-act play called “Out of the Depths”, and I consider it to be one of the greatest works that I have written so far. I am currently trying to find a place for it. Last but not least, I wrote a historic novel in Korean titled “Gamdo”, which translates into “dare to paint”
Hyun Woo was first published in 2023 at the age of 29, though he started feeling a pull to writing when he was eight (he also wanted to be a scientist saying the movie Flubber “sure had a great impact on me”). “Though one may say that some essays that I wrote in Korean were ‘published’ when I was 28, I do not consider them to have been published in a traditional sense as they were delivered via emailed newsletters only and it happened that the book which had been promised to me never came out”
Hyun Woo is fluent in Korean and English. 2022 was a very prolific year for him. “During that year, I finished a novel, about a dozen essays, more than a dozen of poems, and many more short stories, all in Korean, only to be accepted nowhere; not a single piece was properly published” So Hyun Woo switched to English and had almost instant success after merely a few months. “The irony is in that you still feel that your works in Korean are more sophisticated than those in English. I am not implying here that what I write in English is necessarily bad; nevertheless, I am unable to―and not deliberately choosing not to―write sentences in English like those of Ruskin or Conrad, while I feel no such limitations in Korean. Then why weren’t my pieces in Korean accepted anywhere during all those years, while ones in English are getting their due chances?” He says it is a small frustration, but he wished he had started writing in English sooner.
I asked him about his piece "Deserted Small Pretty Things". “It started out as a response to an open call for any short writing that deals with desert but ended up getting accepted elsewhere first. While writing, I limited “Deserted Small Pretty Things” to be a light piece and it is indeed a small, light reading in itself; the theme which it briefly touches, however, is one of the themes that almost all my literary works deal with―mutability. I am surely thinking of the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley here, but to be frank, I do not have a precise English vocabulary or expression for what I have in mind and the word “mutability” feels more like an inadequate attempt of beating around the bush. Thus, I would rather cite the Japanese concept of mono-no aware, whose direct translation would be “the pathos of things.”
"Mono-no aware can be explained as admiration for the impermanence of things, or a recognition of beauty in that nothing lasts forever, first raised as a term for literary criticism by Norinaga Motoori. Although my literary approach could be phrased as a radical reinterpretation of mono-no aware in that my premise is a Platonist-Christian one, or “time is the moving image of eternity” as Plato put it, my works tend to be mindful of the beauty of things that vanish in time and what makes them beautiful, even when I am not consciously striving to bring the theme into them."
“I consider myself to be a young writer too, even though these days I am finding more strands of grey hair from me each morning. I would say that my career in writing in English is less than a year old as of now and my career in writing in Korean is practically non-existent, which makes me quite young as a writer. Nevertheless, my advice for other young writers out there would be: don’t give up, and do whatever it takes if you truly want it from your heart. Though a pabulum this advice may be, the least you must work on is not to give up and keep trying. A year ago, I could never have guessed that pretty soon I would be writing in English and getting my works published on foreign magazines after all. Maybe you could learn Korean and write in it!”
Hyun Woo lives in Seoul, Korea but he’s visited the United States and noticed several differences like “the people in the US tend to answer back even when they are declining my works, while in South Korea silent declines were more prevalent. Another one is a reading fee. While submitting works in South Korea, there was no incidence in which I had to pay a penny besides the postage costs”
He urges for those looking to write micro-fiction to “Please, please read works of Chekhov and Yasunari Kawabata. They are the ones who have christened me to be a writer. Kawabata was already writing “palm-of-the-hand” stories even when terms like “micro-fiction” or “flash fiction” were yet to be coined, and Chekhov was the grandmaster of capturing moments that often go unnoticed in our daily lives. Every time I open their books, there is always something new to learn or be inspired from them”
My favorite story by Hyun Woo is “Chopsticks”. I asked if it was based on a true story, particularly the part about him being left-handed and forced to write with his right hand. “It is partly based on a true story and I am a left-handed person taught to write with my right hand. Where I grew up, such “corrections” were rampant in the 90’s. Meanwhile, other parts of it are fictional: for instance, it was not my father who forced me to write with my right hand, I have never worked in Japan or dated someone who is bad at splitting chopsticks, etc”
One challenging feat he has done is writing a one-minute comic play. I don’t know if I could be funny even if I had ten minutes but he did it in one, saying “It is hard to make a one-minute play to be comic. One classic understanding of laughter is that people laugh when their expectations crumble away in a relieving manner. The problem is that one minute is hardly enough time to build certain expectations, let alone breaking them. There are some talented writers who manage to do that all in just a minute but I tend to use another strategy. I let the already-existent expectations in the audience crumble away by taking an absurdist approach. When I am writing a longer drama, my approach certainly changes”
Hyun Woo says that for the new year he wants to be a better person by not snapping at others, to sacrifice himself more and to be more understanding and loving. He is contemplating on either a novel or a short story collection but hasn’t decided. His goal is a publishing deal. “A chapbook could also be a good landmark. In addition, I have recently begun to work on a picture book project with a partner and hope that this will be published too” Like a true writer, he has a million projects and we have a lot to look forward to from him.
I have linked to Hyun Woo's website here: (https://www.chillsubs.com/user/hyunwookim
Please check out his work!
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