Read to Know Basis: Crystal Hana Kim
The author of The Stone Home describes her ideal reader and her alternative career path.
Read to Know Basis is a weekly interview series with authors. It features debut authors and established writers talking about reading, writing, and of course snacks. This series is free to all. If you like what you read considering subscribing to support the work of Unstacked, and of course go out and buy the book!
Crystal Hana Kim is the author of The Stone Home (April 2024) and If You Leave Me (2018), which was named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. She is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, nominated by Min Jin Lee. She is also a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winner. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Guernica, ELLE, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.
What are five words to describe your book?
Suspenseful, poetic, heart-wrenching, based-on-real-history narrative.
What is the strangest thing you googled while researching/writing this book?
In an early draft of The Stone Home, I tried to match Part 1 to the life cycle of a cicada. I spent a lot of time figuring out the exact weeks between eggs hatching, nymphs burying underground, and then finally molting. All that work, and then I ended up changing the timeline!
I also studied my own labor stories to remind me of the immediate, visceral experience of labor. I am one of those (perhaps unusual?) people who loved giving birth, so I had a lot of fun channeling those memories into a particular labor scene.
What is the one thing you can’t write without?
Headphones. A lot of times I don’t even listen to music. I just like to put the headphones on to cocoon myself.
Describe your ideal reader?
A lover of haunting and yet hopeful character-driven novels that explore deeper themes of familial love, structures of oppression, and the reverberations of trauma across generations.
When is the first time you really felt like an author?
When I brought a galley of my first novel, If You Leave Me, to my family in Korea. The first thing I did was show it to my grandmother, who survived the Korean War and inspired me to write this story.
What is a piece of writing advice that you’ve received that you think is really bad? What is a piece of writing advice that you think is really good?
Bad: One writing instructor railed against similes and metaphors. He was an extreme person. We didn’t get along for other reasons, too.
Helpful: If the writing isn’t coming to you, consider what is blocking the way. Is this the right narrator, timeline, point of tension? Writing is difficult, but when it is excruciating, it’s often because my intuition is telling me there is a different, better way into the story.
What are you reading right now? And what book are you desperate to read next?
I like reading multiple genres at a time. Currently reading:
Poetry: Ward Toward by Cindy Juyoung Ok and Root Fractures by Diana Khoi Nguyen.
Fiction: Swift River by Essie Chambers, an incredible debut novel about grief, friendship, the horrific history of sundown towns, the body, and how one biracial girl named Diamond Newberry finds her place in the world. It’s publishing in June, and I highly highly recommend it!
Nonfiction: The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan.
I absolutely cannot wait to read Amy Lin’s Here After, Danzy Senna’s Colored Television, Emily Jungmin Yoon’s Find Me as the Creature I Am, Weike Wang’s Rental House, Emily Raboteau’s Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse", and Temim Fruchter’s City of Laughter.
What book are you an evangelist for?
Paradise by Toni Morrison. I devoured this book a few years ago and now recommend it to everyone. It’s about a collective of women who live together in a dilapidated, forgotten estate, as well as the people who live nearby in a town called Ruby. But of course it’s about so much more. It’s about hope and love and escaping the patriarchy and unconventional women and everything, all at once.
If you could write a retelling of a classic novel, which would you pick?
A feminist, eerie retelling of Rumpelstiltskin would be a lot of fun. That sinister little man, a room full of straw that turns into gold, a promise to give up your firstborn child…
Also, I was going to initially talk about how I’d love to rewrite a feminist version of my favorite Korean folktale, The Tale of Shimcheong, but I found one exists! The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh, which I believe is a YA novel.
Who is your literary crush?
Oh, I have so many. Jesmyn Ward. Samanta Schweblin. Susan Choi. Michelle Zauner. Colson Whitehead. Write a book with striking imagery, probing questions about our humanity, and a story I can’t get out of my head and you’ll be added to the list.
If you could not be a writer what would you do?
Live on the beach and swim every day forever.
You’re invited to a literary potluck, what are you bringing?
Incense for mood. Handmade ceramics as thanks. Yakgwa cookies for dessert.
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Read to Know Basis is a weekly interview series with authors talking about reading, writing, and of course snacks. This series is free to all. If you like what you read considering upgrading to a paid subscription to support the work of Unstacked, and of course go out and buy the book!
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I would love to read that Rumpelstiltskin retelling!