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Behind the Byline

Ji Hyun Joo

February 26, 2021

Alicia Romero talks to fiction writer Ji Hyun Joo about mothers and daughters, the risks of assimilation, and the Korean bathhouse.

Alicia Romero: Ji Hyun, as I reflected on your story, I wondered how you came to your story title, “Queen’s Luxury Spa” (NER 41.4). How does it become symbolic in how Mother and Daughter communicate? How does the scrubbing and washing at the spa reflect the emotional condition of both of your main characters?

Ji Hyun Joo: I’ve always found the Korean public bathhouses, called mokyoktang, to be really interesting spaces, mainly because my relationship with them throughout the years has changed. When my mom used to take me to them during visits to Korea, I was terrified of them. I was terrified of being naked around so many other women, whose bodies had progressed and experienced so much farther than I ever imagined for my own. There was a violence in scrubbing so hard that rolls of skin fell off. Now, I understand it as a form of bonding, one of the best kinds, and I yearn for access to them in ways that I didn’t before. As I was writing this piece, I continued to return to my altered view of this space. For Mother, the scrubbing and washing is a form of solace, the mokyoktang a space where she can bond with women who have experienced similar pains. While for the daughter, there is still a level of detachment from finding comfort in these actions.

AR: Assimilation for those of us who come from immigrant families can be complicated and sometimes painful. Can you discuss how the tension between the mother and daughter characters gets amplified as they adjust to a different culture? How, in your opinion, does assimilation manifest itself differently in parents and in their children?

JHJ: For Mother, she’s had a specific way of envisioning life for herself and her daughter, which Daughter finds suffocating. When daughter is unable to follow these dreams that Mother has set for her, her view of Mother shifts; in a way, Mother has become fragile. Daughter hides important details of her life from her, which, of course, creates distance, even though the intention is to protect Mother from the drastically different person she’s become. I can’t speak for everyone because the experiences of immigrant families are different. I feel they shouldn’t be grouped simply into one collective bundle. But from what I’ve experienced with my own family, assimilation has created significant emotional distance on both parties. My parents live in Korea now, and the few times that I get to see them, I am someone different. I’m constantly taking on an altered shape, but they can’t articulate what the shape is, just the complexities that contribute to the changes I exhibit.

AR: As part of the plot in your story, the reader gets a glimpse of your character’s life on the East Coast in New York and even in her marriage to her white husband. Can you explain why her life there unravels?  

JHJ: I’m always so interested to see different interpretations about the ex-husband, as information about his background is very sparse. The ex-husband is not white. Her life unravels because she can’t handle the heaviness of the secret she’s keeping from Mother, that she married a man outside of her own culture. Within the secret of the marriage hides the truth that she’s become someone unrecognizable to her only family.

AR: What were some of the decisions you had to make while editing your final text, and what did you learn from them? How does having two languages and two cultures play into your editing choices? Does it affect it at all? 

JHJ: I wanted my readers to understand my characters deeply. Both Mother and Daughter may not be likable. In a way, they are both selfish in their wants for their own lives, and their expectations for one another. I wanted them to be understood. Even for those who’ve never had to hide parts of themselves to their family, I wanted them to see why Mother and Daughter chose to. For this piece, having two languages and two cultures didn’t sway my editing choices. I think both aspects made space in the story quite naturally in the writing process.

AR: The ending of your story presents some questions for the reader.  For example, what will life be like for these two women in the future?  Your story suggests that Mother and Daughter are more similar than they are aware. If you were to look into the daughter’s future, what do you think it might look like? Are you hopeful for her?

JHJ: This is such an exciting question, one that I hadn’t thought about! My hope is that Mother and Daughter will better understand one another. I’m not sure what that might look like because I think it’ll take lots of time and dialogue, but I’d like to think it’s a possibility in their far future.

AR: Tensions between mothers and daughters run deep and complex in all cultures. How do you think mothers and daughters can learn to support each other and improve their relationship in difficult times?

JHJ: This may be the most obvious response, but my heart is very honestly grabbing on to this one answer: Talking to one another. 

AR: How do you, personally, feel about immigrants assimilating into a second culture? How much is too much or too little and do you think there are consequences for both?

JHJ: Again, I can’t speak for anyone but myself. It’s very complicated. I remember when I was growing up in San Diego, within a very small, tight-knit Korean community, assimilation was both applauded and frowned upon. Assimilation was both survival and the catalyst for abandoning one’s roots. Personally, I don’t like the idea that one must assimilate, primarily because assimilation indicates change on a deep level. It instills the belief that people must alter themselves completely to belong, and I don’t believe that’s productive.

AR: How is decoding more than just words, in your opinion? 

JHJ: Decoding is love. Understanding what someone is saying without them having to say it, or saying something completely different, that’s a level of intimacy that’s deep, born from lots of observation.

AR: Thank you, Ji Hyun. Your story reminds this reader of the indelible value of reading between the lines.


Ji Hyun Joo is a writer from San Diego based in Astoria, New York. She is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where she is a recipient of the 2020 Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship. Her works have been published in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s online magazine the Margins, the online publication Winter Tangerine, and the journal Bomb Cyclone.

Alicia Romero is a fiction reader for NER.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline, Featured, News & Notes Tagged With: Alicia Romero, Ji Hyun Joo

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Elana Schrager

February 25, 2021

Elana Schrager ’17 talks to Maia Sauer ’22 about her path from NER intern to campaign manager.

Elana (right) during a recent campaign.

Maia Sauer: When did you intern at NER and what were some memorable aspects of your experience?

Elana Schrager: I interned with NER in the summer of 2016, between my junior and senior years. I had just arrived back in the US from my semester abroad in Dublin and was grateful to spend a whole summer in Vermont.

Interning with NER gave me the opportunity to think about writing, and short fiction in particular, in ways I hadn’t had time before. Reading from the general submission pile every week was different from reading the literature of the classroom. I was able to peer into the process of writing and the labor that goes into shaping stories, as they become greater than themselves when read.

Outside the work itself, I most enjoyed getting to meet and work with Carolyn, Marcy, and my co-intern, Natalie. As interns, we got invited to be part of their little on-campus haven, and it was a pleasure to get to know them and learn from them. 

Elana (left) during her time at Middlebury College.

MS: Your career path has gone in a political direction, if I’m not mistaken. How did you arrive where you are today, geographically and professionally?

ES: That’s a story without much of a defined narrative thread, but I’ll give it my best shot. When I was at NER, I remember talking with Marcy about maybe wanting to go work for a lit mag after graduation, and then maybe going on to grad school.

I led backpacking trips the summer after I graduated and drove around the country. When September came, I started driving east and applying to jobs—I wanted to write. While en-route from Sacramento to Maryland, I got a communications and research internship with End Citizens United, a campaign finance reform group. It turns out that political communications and research is very different from the academic writing and research I’d loved at school, but my internship ended the winter before the 2018 midterms, campaigns were hiring, and I wanted to leave DC. So, I decided to look for a campaign job.

While I was visiting Midd for Feb graduation, I got an email about a finance and communications job on a congressional race in Southern Illinois, and I moved out there nine days later. After it ended, I decided that I wanted to manage a campaign, which I’ve now done twice, in Virginia and Minnesota, moving to a new city every year for a new race.

MS: What was a skill that you developed during your undergraduate years that has been beneficial to your current work?

ES: I couldn’t have dreamed up a job more different from the work I did in school. Still, there are so many skills I learned there that I use every day. School rewarded me for being detail oriented and able to produce work efficiently and without error—both of which are important for managing campaigns. But the skill I truly learned at school, and the skill that’s the most valuable to me now, is how to build and maintain relationships. I learned how to talk with professors as people, not just authority figures, and built friendships with classmates that have lasted for years. That simple skill has helped me as I’ve worked with different people all over the country.

Also, learning Photoshop by messing around with it in the Axinn basement is always worthwhile.

MS: I could imagine that working within our current political climate is, at times, incredibly frustrating. How do you stay motivated, inspired, and committed?

ES: Working in electoral politics—and House politics in particular, which is where I’ve spent most of my time—is very humbling. Each campaign takes millions of dollars, massive amounts of resources and effort, and when it’s done, the chess board is reset and it’s done all again. It’s also easy to get burned out, because campaigns demand your all. You’re playing a kind of zero sum game: you win or you lose. It’s the worst thing in the world to be on the losing side on election day, wondering if you could have given just a little bit more, and whether that little bit more could have gotten you over the finish line. It’s also, critically, not a game—the people we elect result in policies that affect the lives of millions of people.

So, I try to pay attention and give importance to the tiniest things that I tend to overlook: drinking a whole cup of coffee on a bright morning without receiving an email or a phone call; going for a walk with a friend; reading a long-form article or a book. There are moments when I can’t see the delight and importance of those small things, and that’s when I know I need to take a breath and get some sleep.

MS: What have you been reading recently? Do you find yourself gravitating toward certain genres or themes right now?

ES: Last year, I basically read Twitter, newsletters, article headlines, and ad copy. In the weeks since election day, I’ve tried to ease myself back into more pleasurable reading. I started by rereading old young adult novels while I was at my parents’ house for the holidays, letting myself slip back into stories that required no thought or effort on my part. Now, I’m gravitating toward gentle books outside of the here and now, and the struggles of today and tomorrow. I’m currently reading Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. I let it pour over me as I take a breath and figure out what my next year will be, and what job I’ll decide to do next. 

MS: Thanks very much for your time, Elana. It was wonderful to connect with you.

Filed Under: Featured, Interns, News & Notes Tagged With: Elana Schrager, Maia Sauer

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Alicia Wright

February 19, 2021

Will Koch ’21 talks with former NER intern Alicia Wright ‘11.5 about her pursuit of a doctorate, her experience as an editor, and how NER has shaped her career pursuits.

Alicia Wright on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia

Will Koch: Where are you now, geographically and professionally?

Alicia Wright: At present, I’m tucked away in an old stone house overlooking a small swamp and the Etowah River in northwest Georgia, where I’m from, in retreat from the Colorado winter. I’m happy to be surrounded by birds, ferns, and trees, to take my dog out canoeing. Because I’m working on my dissertation for my PhD, and because I have the good fortune to be able edit Denver Quarterly remotely, I’ve been able to come back to the place I focus on most in my scholarly and creative work. To that end, I’m finishing one poetry manuscript, in the midst of a new one, honing my critical reviewing skills, reading submissions for Annulet, the literary poetics journal I’ve just started, and applying for jobs, as I’ll be finishing my degree in the summer. It’s a good thing I like my several hats.

WK: That’s a great lead in to my next question! You’re currently a PhD candidate at the University of Denver. What has that experience been like for you? Did you know you were going to pursue this path while you were a Middlebury undergraduate?

AW: Working on a PhD has been precisely what it may seem like: challenging, invigorating in a kind of crazed way, sometimes daunting, and so rewarding. The faculty have been incredible to work with, and it’s such a seismic experience to simultaneously develop your creative and critical thought in conjunction with each other. My program in particular is geared towards creative writers, so there’s been a great deal of flexibility afforded to my studies: I focused on women makers and writers of Black Mountain College (I cited Lisa Mullenneaux’s essay in NER 36.4, “Hilda Morley: Lost on Black Mountain”), the ecopoetics of the US South, and narrative theory for my comprehensive exams. My dissertation is a collection of poetry, and an accompanying critical essay on southeastern ecopoetry and lyric theory that’ll eventually become a monograph (that’s the hope, anyway).

Truth be told: as an undergraduate, I never thought I’d go down this path. I loved creative writing (I took every possible course the department offered), knew that I wanted to somehow be involved with publishing, and spent many long, weird hours in the library basement working through the poetry section. Even though I received truly kind attention from Middlebury faculty, I wasn’t convinced I was “smart enough” to be an academic of any kind. In many ways, I was just squeaking by in my classes—although, I remember, I did split up my thesis into a small poetry collection and a thesis essay, prefiguring my work now, funnily enough. After a foray into the New York publishing world, I realized what sustained me were things like taking poetry classes, going to readings, lurking in bookshops, and volunteering at places like Ugly Duckling Presse. The more I stayed with poetry, especially during my MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I began to realize that poetry was teaching me how to think through and with it, and that what I thought in it and about it might actually be good. I’ve kept an editorial perspective on all my work, which I suspect has been a useful metric for how I want to position availability of meaning and feeling in my writing.

WK: It’s interesting that you mention an editorial perspective influencing your work. Were there any skills you developed at NER that you’ve applied to your pursuit of a PhD?

AW: One important skill, among many, that I picked up during my internship was more a habit of mind: I learned that I could be interested in archival material and literary criticism, that there’s a fortuitousness and felicity to research and varied approaches to the essay, and to see that the transhistorical and cross-disciplinary pieces published in the journal’s different discursive sections complement and complicate each other in a way that makes those connections themselves sparkle. The arrangement captures an intellectual feeling. Perhaps most importantly, that part of the work of editing a literary journal is the work of nurturing and following an active appetite for different modes of writing. That literary disposition I absorbed there has steered me ever since.

WK: How did your time with NER and literary magazines at Middlebury prepare you for your position as Associate Editor for Denver Quarterly? Are there any notable similarities or differences that you can discern between the two publications?

AW: I remember having to seek the blessing of the mastheads of Blackbird and Sweatervest [two Middlebury undergraduate publications] so that I could serve on both of them! There was such joy in poring over the submissions for each, particularly when I served as the editor of Sweatervest, with my friends and peers—seeing what came out of Middlebury’s creative world, reading the work out loud together. The efforts we put into making that issue of Sweatervest are not so different from my efforts now with Denver Quarterly—the masthead is similarly comprised of my friends and colleagues. In that sense, I understood then that collaborative work from the heart is what fuels literary magazine work. With New England Review, I learned about literary sociality and citizenship from its more professional standpoint. I’ve based my own editorial approach on these values and practices. One way to think of it is that a literary journal is ultimately an epistolary object: missives are sent from writers, passed between editors, editors write with good or disappointing news to submitters, edits and payments are likewise sent, future or back issues are mailed. The journal as a made object communicates its own messages between its pieces and to its readers, almost as if they’re letters that make their way to their reader as chance permits. 

One difference is that the Denver Quarterly masthead is populated mostly by doctoral students, who move through the masthead as they do their time in the program, so the nature of what kind of work has been published very much reflects a more mercurial and shifting, through related, taste. Denver Quarterly announces itself as being a journal of a kind of experimental bent—its editors are happy to publish pieces that have never met realism or conventional narrative before, or that operate in their own, sui generis universes, particularly in prose. The poetry it has published recently runs contemporary poetry’s aesthetic gamut, which is to say even formally-inflected poems attend to their material nature as much as poems styled “experimentally.” The grip’s a little tighter, and differently exploratory, in a New England Review poem. In terms of method, Denver Quarterly’s table of contents doesn’t distinguish its creative contributors by genre to complicate those distinctions, while New England Review publishes a wider range of texts and forms of criticism and names them as such. Though they may seem very different aesthetically, both journals are homes for rigor, particularly for critical work.

WK: What was your most memorable experience with NER? Are there any pieces or moments that you remember particularly well?

AW: My interview with Carolyn was particularly formative: it was the first time I’d been regarded in a literary-professional way, and was likely the first nonacademic conversation about literature and editing with a professional that I’d ever had. I was practically shaking when I was assigned to copyedit Frank M. Meola’s “Emerson Between Faith and Doubt” (32.3), and I am certain that I had many neurotic queries. In that issue, I also was introduced to Isabella Bird [Bishop]’s writing through proofreading Stephen Donadio’s selection from her one of her travel narratives, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, which is still out of print (though I’ve since tracked down a copy). My love of writers’ diaries and letters, alongside her work, began then. I remember fondly being pretty impressed by a cover letter in which the writer said they couldn’t with regularity be reached by mail, as they lived on a houseboat.

WK: What do you read for pleasure? Have you read anything good lately? Do you ever have time to read for pleasure?

AW: Right now, for me pleasure in reading comes simultaneously with reading as work. I’m always reading to be impressed, for immersion, to enter into a kind of co-constitutive meditation with a text. But for nonliterary pleasure? I read clothing, or fashion magazines. I’ll confess to some European interior design magazines too, while I’m at it. I still have yet to truly fall back into novels since I worked in publishing—right now I read them pretty sparingly. The last novel I read for a kind of edgy fun was Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet, Or, The Origin of the World. Books I like that I’ve read recently are Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig, Juana I by Ana Arzoumanian, translated by Gabriel Amor, Emporium by Aditi Machado, and Time Being by Oni Buchanan. I’m also revisiting Pliny the Elder, who is so great. With regard to time, no, and yet one absolutely has to read for pleasure, if you want to keep reading at all. Pleasure reading only becomes more and more specific, though what’s pleasureful mercifully continues to surprise me.

WK: Thanks so much for taking the time to answer some of my questions, Alicia. Best of luck to you as you finish your PhD!

Alicia Wright during her time at Middlebury

Filed Under: Interns, News & Notes Tagged With: Alicia Wright, Will Koch

NER Award for Emerging Writers 2021

Announcing the Finalists

February 16, 2021

It is with enormous pleasure that we announce the finalists for the seventh annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. 

Su Cho (41.1)
Justin Danzy (41.3)
Lydia Paar (41.4)
Kate Petersen (41.3)
Laura Schmitt (41.2)
Samyak Shertok (41.4)

This award provides a full scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference—the exact details of which are still to be determined for 2021—and is given annually to an emerging writer who offers an unusual and compelling new voice and who has been published by NER in the past year. The winner will be announced in March.

Congratulations to all six finalists!
We are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in 2020.

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes Tagged With: Justin Danzy, Kate Petersen, Laura Schmitt, Lydia Paar, Samyak Shertok, Su Cho

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Vol. 42, No. 1

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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