Susan Choi on Identity and Belonging
THE AWARD-WINNING NOVELIST TALKS ABOUT HER BOOKS, HER WRITING PROCESS, LIFE IN GENERAL, AND HER UPCOMING VISIT TO THE BERKSHIRES
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
From the pages of our August 2022 Issue.
Susan Choi is one of the speakers at the inaugural Authors Guild Foundation’s Words, Ideas, and Thinkers (WIT) Festival, held September 22-25 on the grounds of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox. She will be in dialogue with Ayad Akhtar on the topic of “Identity and Belonging.” Choi’s novels include fringe characters who are both alienated and self-sufficient, unwilling to paddle up the mainstream.
Her first novel, The Foreign Student, is the story of a young Korean man, scarred by war, and the deeply troubled daughter of a wealthy Southern American family. This won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, is about a young Japanese-American radical caught in the militant underground of the mid-1970s. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, draws on the Unabomber case and writes about a campus bombing and a beleaguered Asian-American professor. Her fourth, My Education, which received a 2014 Lammy Award, is the story of a young woman’s mistakes that begin in the bedroom and end 15 years later and thousands of miles away. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. It focuses on a group of 15- and 16-year-olds who attend an elite high school for the performing arts in a small, unnamed southern city in the early 1980s. And her first book for children, Camp Tiger, also was published in 2019.
A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, Choi will be shifting from teaching fiction writing at Yale, to teaching in the MFA program at Johns Hopkins. She spends her summers in Vermont as a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. In a series of ongoing interviews published in Berkshire Magazine, Editor-in-Chief Anastasia Stanmeyer is in dialogue with authors who will be talking at the WIT Festival. She recently caught up with Choi.
Why did you decide to write a children’s book? I love children’s books and children’s literature. My younger son is now 14. When he was going on 5, we went camping, and he said he had a dream. He said a friendly tiger came and talked to us at a campsite. A tiger in the Northeast U.S. seems very striking, especially where we were, on beautiful Mongkok Lake in the southern Catskills. In the book, I was not specific about the location. John Rocco, who is based in Providence, R.I., created illustrations that looked like where we were. And it could have also been in the Berkshires. The response to that book has been amazing. That book was my magic trick, and I am indebted to my son.
How do you get your ideas to write? It’s organic and generative for me. I find a spark that catches my attention. It’s usually a situation. There are characters and people, and something interesting is happening
to them. Then I just start writing. I start at the beginning of the situation, and I have a sense of how they will end up. It’s always some sort of situation involving people that is intriguing to me that I want to explore.
How important is setting in your creative process? Very important. In my second novel, American Woman, I was fascinated by the situation of radicals in the ’70s who were involved in the anti-war movement and went too far and were sought by authorities. What caught my attention was that they were hiding in a farmhouse in the Catskill Mountains, where I had spent time. I really wanted to find a way to tell a story about a remote idyllic location and about people who weren’t there for the usual reason. So I had a setting. Another setting in that book had to do with my infatuation with Gilded Age mansions in the Hudson Valley. They are mostly tourist attractions, or they’re falling into total disrepair. I visited a house in Rhinecliff, New York, that belonged to a cousin of FDR. They’ve since found a budget and are taking care of it. But back then, it was almost to the point of falling apart. I was so fascinated by the house that had belonged to such a wealthy, well-connected lady.
In my imagination, one of the gun-toting radicals on the lam from the law is going to work for an old lady in this old house—an Asian woman whose employer is an elderly white woman. There’s some stuff there about identity and American social mores. It was fun because it was adapted into an independent film released in 2019. Ellen Burstyn played the mildly racist woman who was the employer of the young Asian. Setting played a big part in this book and plays a big part in the storytelling. Plot is always a struggle with me. I’m a very place-oriented person. I like landscapes and houses, and I’m always needing to know where characters are physically before I am writing at all.
How long does it take you to write a book?
It takes me several years, and I have more than one thing going at a time. The writing process, in an ideal world, means waking up on the morning, brewing some tea, going straight to my desk, and writing for several hours. No checking email, no making lunch for my children, etc. Sometimes I go to writers retreats and they prepare the meals and I sit at my desk, and I get so much done. If I lived like that, I’d write a book a year. I don’t. Very few of us do. My process is trying to steal time here and there in a life that’s pretty full. I have two teenage sons, and I work.
How do you prepare/research to write your book? Each of them is different, and over the years, I learned to keep the research on a shorter leash. Research can gallop away, and it’s a way to procrastinate. I’m doing an essay on Virginia Woolf and rereading her books. I don’t need to reread the books, but I don’t know what to write, so it’s a form of procrastinating. For my first two books, I didn’t know how to research, so I over-researched. The problem is that there is no end to any topic. With my third book, I realized that I needed to do enough research to get the writing going, and then I just needed to write. If my imagination was taking me into realms that I was totally mistaken, I would deal with it later. Don’t go down that research rabbit hole. Fix it afterwards.
In Trust Exercise and some of your other books, the power disparities between student and instructor come up a lot, as well as the educational context. Why is that? The main reason why I’m writing about education settings and institutions is because I’ve spent so much time in them. For my third book, which is set in university or small college, a dear friend said that I just can’t let the university go. My father was a university professor, my mother was a university administrative secretary. I’ve taught many years in that setting. It’s not that I think it’s so corrupt. There are fascinating issues in any world.
What are some key points that you tell your fiction writing students at Yale and at Bread Loaf? There are no rules. Don’t write for some external purpose. Don’t write for fame, glory, money, and even publication. Writing is an incredibly meaningful and powerful activity to engage in oneself. If you do that authentically, you will engage and benefit others. That’s just the way it works. You
have to find yourself in it. You have to find whatever way it is that writing gives meaning for yourself. You’ll benefit others in ways you can’t predict. I’m a big believer on things that end up on a page that you didn’t expect. Face down a blank page or a screen and just fill it.
Can you give me an example of how a story grows? I published a story a year and a half ago about a family in a situation. I have been writing more about them, and it’s quite unstructured. I know who they are and their situation. Only now am I getting to figure out the plot and series of events and writing about them. I’m in a very generative stage. I’m in a fictional world, and I know who lives there and I know some things that are happening. “Flash- light” was published in The New Yorker in 2020. There’s a young girl, her dad’s gone, and something bad has happened. In that piece, the Dad’s death is referred to, but not explained. I felt strongly that it was a work in progress, and I left a lot out delib- erately. It felt like I left a window open and I can see certain things, but I know that there are other things in there.
Are you looking forward to coming to the Berkshires and the WIT Festival? Lenox is beautiful. And I will be speaking with Ayad Akhtar, whom I have enormous respect for. Hang out in Lenox on a beautiful autumn day talking to Ayad? How can I say, “no”?
Why is it important to connect authors with the public through events such as the WIT? The Authors Guild does important work. It supports authors. We don’t have a lot of cultural weight to throw around. We are important to the culture, but not anywhere near the top bracket of being lucrative. We live in a capitalist society where values are assigned to the money involved. The older I get, the more shocked I get to see money controls everything. Authors contribute
to the intellectual and cultural life of this country, and we need to band together. Our voices are under threat, too, in so
many tangible ways. It’s shocking how we have gone backwards in this country: book banning, authors in danger of expressing their views, and the elevated views of a loud minority are threatening. They don’t want books about diverse young people being read by diverse young people. To be able to see yourself reflected in a nation’s literature makes an enormous difference.
To have all that progress rolled back in the space of a year is insane. Strength in
numbers protecting writers and expression, with organizations like Pen America and Authors Guild, is no longer a nice decorative function. It’s necessary.
Can you give some insight on what you’d like to talk about with Ayad on the topic of “Identity and Belonging”? The concern of all of my books can be summed up in that topic. I’m a daughter of an immigrant and granddaughter of immigrants. I’m biracial.
I’m someone who grew up not being around others like me. Not seeing someone like me culturally. Wanting to be blond and blue-eyed and Laura in Little House on the Prairie.
I felt inadequate because of my name, my appearance, and my background. It took years to recognize that, and that’s through positive social change. That’s very important in my work. I mostly write about people in situations that often have to do with identity and belonging. There’s been a historic surge of hate crimes towards Asian women in NYC now. I never thought I would need to think of that. Now, what I think about in the subway is Will someone kill me? Now I know how certain groups feel that way all the time. We’re all starting to confront in various de- grees an acute shared danger, felt differently and to a different degree for different people.
What are you reading now? I just finished a new novel by a Mexican woman Fernan- da Melchor called Hurricane Season. I’m now reading a couple different things because of my over-researching tendency. Moments of Being, autobiographical essays by Virginia Woolf. And I’m reading her diary. My next published work is an introduction to a reissue of one of her books, To the Lighthouse, next month. Virginia Woolf is one of my lifelong favorite writers. I never read these essays I’m reading now and the diary. She has had an enormous influence on me. I find her work electrifying.
WIT 2022: Reimagining America
(All events are at Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox unless otherwise noted.)
Thursday, Sept 22
5 p.m. “When Religion Meets Science” with Dan Brown
6 p.m. Book signing, reception
7 p.m. Dinner at The Mount for speakers, sponsors, and ticketed guests
Friday, Sept 23
10 a.m. “America and China: Comes the Moment” with Simon Winchester and Admiral Harry Harris, U.S. Navy (Retired)
11:30 a.m. “What Animals Know” with Geraldine Brooks and Jane Smiley
3 p.m. Pop-up reading. Letty Cottin Pogrebin: Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy at The Bookstore in Lenox
5 p.m. “Reexamining American History” with David Blight and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
6 p.m. Book signing, reception
7 p.m. Food Truck Music Party at Shakespeare & Co. for speakers, sponsors, and ticketed guests
Saturday, Sept 24
10 a.m. “Climate Change Solutions” with Elizabeth Kolbert
11:30 a.m. “Does the Supreme Court Have a Future?” with Linda Greenhouse and Nikolas Bowie
2 p.m. Wild Symphony reading with music with Dan Brown
5 p.m. “Identity and Belonging” with Ayad Akhtar and Susan Choi
6 p.m. Book signing, reception
7 p.m. Dinner By the Bite at a private Stockbridge home for speakers, sponsors, and ticketed guests
Sunday, Sept 25
11 a.m. “Community Service: A Comedy with Heart” written by Laura Pedersen, performed by Paula Ewin and David Rockefeller; fundraiser for WIT
For more details and updates on the Authors Guild Foundation’s WIT Festival, which is free and open to the public, go to authorsguild.org/wit-festival