applekern asked Juhea Kim:

What got you into writing and how did you develop such a descriptive and free-flowing writing style?

Juhea Kim Aww, thank you Applekern for calling my prose "descriptive and free-flowing"! I rather stumbled into writing; I studied art history in college and thought that I would like to work for a museum. But somehow I ended up as an editorial assistant at a New York publisher, where I was naturally exposed to a lot of books. After I quit my job, there was a time when I felt I needed to give myself permission to write—and I wrote a short story over one weekend, which became my literary debut in Granta. There's a lot more drama to this, which I frequently explain in interviews and virtual bookstore events—there is one this evening (December 14) through Chicago's Madison Street Books, with Nicole Chung! You can still register for it at juheakim.com/events. As for my writing style, I fully attribute that to my art history training, actually. (So it was not only useful, but essential for me!) I learned to describe everything precisely so I can guide the reader through what I *see*. I'm definitely a visual writer, which is probably why many people have called my writing "cinematic." It's less important to me to try to find a clever new way to describe something that no one's ever thought of before—I care more for precision, getting as close to the truth as possible. Thank you!

flag