HEINZ INSU FENKL KNOWS how to fictionalize his life story. His new novel, Skull Water, is his second book that does so. A professor of English at The State University of New York, New Paltz, he is known internationally for his collection of Korean folktales and translations of contemporary Korean fiction and classical Buddhist texts. His previous novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, was a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. An excerpt from Skull Water, “Five Arrows,” was first published in the New Yorker. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write from one’s own life story.
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Marion: Today, my guest is writer Heinz Insu Fenkl. He’s the author of the novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, a PEN/Hemingway finalist, and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. He’s known for his collection of Korean folk tales and for his translations of Buddhist texts, and he teaches creative writing, Asian and Asian American literature and film at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His new novel, Skull Water, is just out from Spiegel & Grau. Welcome Insu.
Heinz: Hi, Marion. It’s great to be here.
Marion: Well, thank you for coming along. My audience is made up of writers and they want to live writing lives. So let’s start out by talking about yours if we can, please. As I said in the intro, you’re a collector and reteller of folk tales, an honored translator, a novelist and much more, but that’s not where you started. So can you recall for us, if you would, how and when your writing life began?
Heinz: It’s sort of started by accident in seventh grade English, I think before we moved from Korea to Germany following my father’s duty stations, I think I tried typing a novel because I was interested in typewriter at the craft shop. There was one of those clunky old underwoods and I had seen somebody typing on it, so I thought that’s what writers do, because I had seen American films where journalists do that two finger hunted peck typing. So I thought I would give it a shot, and I got as far as about two paragraphs and it was just so difficult I gave up. So that was my first failure as a writer. Although when I think about what I was working on then I still remember it was a mishmash of Farley Mowat and Lord of the Flies. So that was my first failed engagement as a wannabe writer.
But then what happened was we moved to Germany and in my seventh grade English class, we were required to write two pages a week on any topic we wanted in one of those spiral notebooks. And I didn’t realize that everyone else in class had the ones with the large rules, so they didn’t actually have to write that much. My notebook had the college rule, and coming from a culture where paper was really precious, even scraps of paper lying around the house were kind of precious. I wrote with a fine tip fountain pen, and I would write two lines in between the blue lines and go from one edge of the paper to the other, ignoring those red margins, which I didn’t understand what they were for. And it was immensely difficult to write two pages like that. And I realized I don’t have much to say, but if I write down the things I remember my uncles telling me, I could write something. And so I accidentally became a translator and a writer all in one go.
Marion: That’s so lovely. And I just adore the idea of the two lines of your writing in between the lines on the page. And you mentioned your father, he was an American GI, your mother was a Korean black marketeer, and you as you describe yourself, were a mixed race kid who had a rough time growing up in Korea. You write beautifully from one of the most difficult places to live in limbo in liminal space from the outside of cultures. Can you speak a bit about the position of outsider and what tools it provides as a writer?
Heinz: Well, one of the aspects of being in between like that is that it amplifies the role of communication and language. And so even though it’s a condition in which you’re being oppressed and bullied and picked on, one of the things that you develop as a necessity is the ability to comprehend things and also to communicate effectively and quickly. And I think that combined with the fact that this was happening in two and a half languages, and I say half because my father also spoke German, that really helped me become a writer. And the fact that I was also from a family of storytellers, Koreans in general are good storytellers, especially when they drink. One time they were called the Irish of the East.
Marion: I have heard that.
Heinz: And of course it means they share not only the good qualities but the bad qualities of the Irish. But in my family, I had two uncles who were very, very good storytellers. One of them lived with us for a while, and I would literally harass him into telling me stories just about every day to the degree that he would purposely tell me mangled folk tales, not revealing to me that he was jamming them together or making biographical claims for what turned out to be classic folk stories. And these were things I discovered much later when I was in graduate school studying folklore formally. So I think the aspect of being in between that intensified the role of all the languages that I had to live in.
Marion: It makes sense. And I love that idea of intensifies and I think that it gives that observational tool a big shine. But I have to say mangled folk tales, you might want to hang onto that for a title one of these days because it’s a pretty good title for a book of stories. Speaking of stories, I read a story of yours and an accompanying interview with you in 2015 from the New Yorker where you talked of this novel Skull Water, this new novel of yours. And the story I was reading was being taken from, as you said in the interview, a work in progress, which is now this novel. So can you talk about that process please, of writing stories along the way to them becoming a novel? Are you testing your material on the public? Are you testing your material on you? What is that? It feels like a kind of quilting or something to me, but I’m not a fiction writer. So talk a little bit about that process, please, of publishing stories along the way to making them into a novel.
Heinz: Well, for both of my novels, Memories of My Ghost Brother and Skull Water, I was dealing with largely autobiographical material. So on the one hand, the process of writing wasn’t setting out to write a fictional work and having to worry about things like plot. The material was all already there. And one of the challenges, of course, was remembering it into being. The other task was to take that material and present it in such a way that it constituted a story. As one of the problems with writing autobiography is that the material is very meaningful to you, but it may not be of any interest to the reader. So one of the ways to work with the material is to turn parts of it into the stories as you go along, and then put those parts together until they sort of organically grow into what would constitute a book.
For Memories of My Ghost Brother, I had think around 80 to a hundred pages that didn’t fit with that story. So I put those aside and part of that became the beginning of Skull Water, but then with Skull Water, because the structure of the work and the nature of the story is very different and the character Insu is older, there was a different challenge to make that work. And there were certain structural things I had done in Ghost Brother that I didn’t want to repeat.
And so the technique I used in Skull Water was actually to incorporate something that came out of the autobiographical part of the narrative, which is my big uncle’s consultation of the I-Ching in a very strange and idiosyncratic way that might have been some secret tradition I didn’t understand. And he does that in the novel, but I thought, what if I turned this into a composition method? And so what I did was I consulted the I-Ching the way he had done in order to structure the book. And that’s one of the reasons why the structure of Skull Water, it’s not a linear plot, it’s more like a woven plot. And I found that following the I-Ching and the intuitions that it sort of released was very effective for that.
Marion: That’s lovely. I have about a billion questions that comes out of that, but let’s just help the listeners along for a moment because the title of Skull Water is so curious. And I want to talk about the autobiographical territory a bit, but I want to just first explain that the title comes from an idea that skull water is the fluid said to accumulate in the human skull and that it can cure any illness. And I have to admit, I was utterly drawn in by the title and then completely carried along by how it’s used in the story. But why don’t you explain, if you would, this relationship that you have to this title and where you got it and how this formed this idea of a story?
Heinz: Well, so this will probably sound kind of esoteric in some sense, but on the one hand, skull water is this folkloric belief. It probably comes from some misunderstood Taoist tradition, Koreans incorporating ideas that come from traditional or Chinese medicine. But in the story, it’s also resonating with the story of the famous Buddhist monk Wonhyo who accidentally drinks water out of a skull in the dark cave in which he has taken shelter on the way to go to study Buddhism in China. And what happens is in the morning he wakes up and discovers that he’s drunk water out of a skull. He’s in a cave that’s also a burial chamber. And when he realizes that, he understands something about the nature of the mind and the illusion, and he doesn’t have to go to China anymore, he just comes back to Korea. His traveling companion continues to China to study there.
So there’s that link to the folkloric tradition, but also the history of Buddhism and the story of Wonhyo. But also in terms of the role it plays in the action of the story, I did go up with my friends to dig up a skull. It had disastrous results, of course, which you’ll have to read about in the novel. So all of those are woven together. But at the same time, because I’m a folklorist and I’m also semiotician, I understand that A, when something is referenced as a folk cure or if there’s some sort of superstition about something, there’s generally a reason for it. Those things don’t emerge out of nowhere. And when I was teaching a course called “Great Books of Asia,” I was looking very carefully at things like symbolism.
And one of the things I discovered was that a lot of the things that we interpret figuratively, if we look at them more literally turn out to be referring to some pragmatic thing. And for skull water, there are a couple of things. One is that it makes sense that as a folk remedy, it would be set to cure anything. Because if you think about skull water, literally what it is cerebral spinal fluid, and that’s where you would find stem cells. You would harvest stem cells from there. And stem cells are things that are a sort of contemporary panacea for things. And of course the other thing is skull water is where your neurological activity occurs. That is the medium through which consciousness is occurring in your brain. All of those things together end up being a kind of thematic resonance in the novel.
Marion: Yes, they certainly do end up being a kind of thematic resonance. Absolutely. It thumbs through the book in a way that’s quite compelling and very, very beautiful. I loved this book. I found myself thinking a lot about many things while reading it. And one of them was this… Obviously you’ve just brought it up before this autobiographical aspect of your work, first novel, second novel. And you touched on very beautifully a few minutes ago, the difference in how you annotated from your life for the first and then the second.
But I get this question a lot because I teach memoir and a lot of people… And you touched on this a little bit about autobiography, but people ask me a lot when they get to this a tough place, should they fictionalize their lives rather than writing memoir? And after many years of teaching and editing, I’d say that those who are considering this are usually those who are confronting the most difficult of topics. So can you just talk a little bit more about the decision to write autobiographically through fiction versus say writing memoir? I mean, you touched on it, you said, “Well, the hardest thing is to make it interesting to the reader.” But from the writer’s point of view, why else would you autobiographically write autobiographical fiction, but not necessarily memoir?
Heinz: Yeah, that’s a tough question. And I guess it has to have both intrinsic and extrinsic components because what happened for me was when Ghost Brother was published, the decision to market it as a novel came from the publisher and not from me. I guess I was naive then and I thought, why couldn’t this book just be released as literature, the way Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior was basically cross categorized, right? Because that book is listed as literature, biography, history, and non-fiction too. So I thought maybe my book could be released and not labeled in any way. But I was told very clearly that that’s not how it works. The book has to be marketed so that stores like Barnes and Noble know where to put it. And their decision was that memoirs by people who weren’t already famous didn’t sell very well, but a novel by a writer of color that was a first novel would attract more attention.
So that was their marketing logic. And of course they were entirely wrong because my book was released the same season as Angela’s Ashes, which totally changed the face of publishing when it came to memoir, although there were reasons why the Irish Revival and everything put a spotlight on that book. But anyway, having come out of that process, I had to look at my own writing in a different way. Now, part of what I’m doing as a writer is the tradition I’m writing in is also a Korean tradition. In Korean literary tradition, writers generally write things that are very much autobiographical and they’re conveyed as fiction, but there’s a tacit understanding from every reader that the fiction is always pretty thinly veiled.
So I understood that tradition very clearly. And then when I was actually engaged in writing, after Ghost Brother, one of the things I also realized was that in many ways reality and therefore writing something like memoir is far more complicated and in many ways less credible than fiction. Fictionalizing actually permits for smoothing out the rough edges of reality and for making a story that would otherwise be less plausible, ironically, more plausible. And if you think of taking things that really happened and then conveying them in such a way that they resonate more… I guess you would say, with more rhetorical power to the reader, then fiction is generally superior to that. I mean, that’s why the Russians once said, political tracts don’t cause revolutions, novels do. And I think that’s very true.
Marion: I think it is too. I think it is absolutely true. We’ve made a lot of comments there about being told what your work is and having someone else decide this is really a piece of fiction and the difference… Such a cultural difference, as you just said so beautifully with what you know to be true of Korean memoir and fiction writing. And so let’s turn our attention back to those who are listening for a minute, because you’ve chosen to write this beautiful book that has all kinds of things that perhaps the governments of Korea and US might rather just leave in the past.
Mixing in with what the dead know and how they inform the living and braiding together the early days of the Korean War with a life of a boy in 1970s Korea. And we talked about that whole idea of you being marginalized and bullied in your life. And I think that some of these are very tough topics. So for those people who also have tough topics on them and in these really pretty terrible times of rights being repealed and libraries being well gutted in America, some writers might not view these as welcoming times for writers who are writing from the outside. So what can you say please to them to keep them telling their tales?
Heinz: I would say it’s times like this that are exactly the time when writers from the outside need to be writing, because otherwise, how will people in the future remember these things? Because the things that are happening as you point out, and in fact a lot of the history that’s in my novel is unpleasant. It’s things that people often choose not to remember, willfully not to remember. And when society does that, the result is disastrous. In Korean tradition, one of the central ideas for a writer, and which by the way is sort of dissolving in this generation with the commercialization of literature, is that the writer is actually the social and historical voice of the people. So one does not take on the task of being a writer lightly.
In Korean tradition, it’s also understood that if you choose to be a writer, you’ll probably be destitute. So it’s not something that’s desirable. It’s almost a calling that you cannot resist. And I think if you’re writing from the margins, that’s one of the things you have to realize, it’s also important to resist the pressure to make your writing more popular or commercially palatable, just to sell more copies of your work. You have to maintain a kind of deep integrity. And I understand that’s a different kind of writing than writing for the purpose of entertainment, but if you’re working on things that are seriously meaningful to you, you really have to try to maintain that integrity.
Marion: That’s a beautiful answer, and I so deeply appreciate it. And I want to follow up on something you said there. According to your interview material, your wife refers to this novel as “the great after-M*A*S*H* novel,” a reference to the American TV show that still runs and for many living Americans is perhaps the best background material they have for the Korean War. And I suspect we can agree that while thinking Americans mostly recognize that we’re a nation of immigrants as a population, we remain wildly undereducated about the home countries of our citizens. So what accommodations does a writer have to make in terms of educating an audience? You had to educate us a bit in this book, but you just made a very strong statement about you’re not supposed to cut… Well, as the great Lillian Hellman said, right? “You’re not supposed to cut your conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” What’s your obligation in terms of giving us the background on a war that we might know only from a TV show?
Heinz: Yeah. Well, I have very mixed feelings about M*A*S*H* because on the one hand, it’s a very problematic TV show, but if you were a fan of M*A*S*H* and followed it, you could see that it became more and more serious as a drama as it went along. I think it understood its position in American culture and people who worked on it, and the actors I think all understood this as the seasons progressed. So early episodes of M*A*S*H* and later ones are tonally very, very different. And of course, M*A*S*H* began as a movie, as a feature film, which I saw in the theater, I think maybe a year after it was released, in a theater full of GIs. And originally it was a allegory for the Vietnam War too. So I understood the different resonances of mash, even when they misrepresented or failed to represent Korea accurately.
And of course, for me, M*A*S*H* was also a very nostalgic sort of thing. I remember when we came back from Korea in 1985, I would often start the day by watching a rerun of MASH, which is a sort of ironic way of resonating with Korea. So when it comes to representing history and not manipulating or leaving things out, I think the writer’s duty in some ways is to convey it with warts and all, so to speak. And that’s why so much of what’s in Skull Water seems very dark, but it’s actually dark because that’s how things really were. And I guess there are in incidents and themes that in contemporary Korea and also in contemporary America, are things that we would rather not have put in our faces again, because we would like to believe that we have kind of moved beyond such things. But as we know from what’s happening in the world right now, in Ukraine, for example, we should not put those things away. It’s only by remembering such things that we hopefully will not repeat them.
Marion: Yes. Well, as we start to wrap this up, I can’t help but ask you about the skills you have on you and how they are utilized. As I said before, you’re a teacher, a novelist, a translator, someone who has retold Korean folk tales. In other words, you’re fully immersed in the world of story and writing, but it’s your translation and your folk tales that I’d just like to pull out a little bit more right now. I wonder how those skills, being a translator, running your hands over the work of others, your eyes, your mind, bringing those stories to us, and folk tales which are ancient and retold by you, they have something in common. I don’t know what it is, translation and retelling of folk tales, but I want to know how they function in you as a novelist. I want to know what skills, what appreciation… Obviously you draw from story from Korea and the whole idea of skull water, I get that part, but as a translator and folktale teller, where does that sit in your novelist heart and mind?
Heinz: That’s a big question. Folk tales. And you could include things like “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” which aren’t exactly fairy tales, but one of the things that’s very unique about folk tales, things that have authentically come out of oral tradition over a long period is that they are tremendously economical and condensed stories. And that is the reason why they’re so enduring. They’ve been told so many times, and in each retelling a story that’s an oral tradition has interacted with an audience. So it’s a story that has become smoothed over the ages into its most pure, economical and effective form. And it’s full of layers and layers of meaning. And that’s why when you hear of a folk tale as a child, it means one thing. And as an adolescent, you discover it means another thing, and as an adult it means another thing. And then when you’re 60, it means something entirely different.
So that’s something you can learn by studying folklore. When you’re translating, and this is something I would recommend to everybody, one of the things you’re doing is you’re not simply turning one language into another by substituting words. What you’re really doing is you’re trying to recreate the effect that the piece had in your mind. And you’re trying to convey that by assembling words in the other language that may not be exactly the dictionary parallels of the words, but words that create the same effect. And what that means is you have to understand the thing you’re translating before you can do that. So translation requires a deeply engaged reading, and it requires a interpretation. You can’t really effectively translate something you haven’t interpreted. So every translation comes from a particular angle. And over the years as I was translating contemporary and modern Korean literature, especially, what I discovered was actually as a novelist, I’m still just a translator.
I’m actually translating the images and feelings in my own experience and putting them on the page. And I think that realization made a tremendous difference to me because I realized that what I was doing as a writer was similar to what Jung would say about the role of dreams, right? Dreams are trying to tell you something, but they communicate in this other language and that’s why they seem so strange and mysterious. But if you understand the symbolism and the semiotics of dream language, you can actually communicate with another part of your consciousness. And translation is that sort of process.
It’s taking things that they may even be visceral or physical impulses and emotions and images and the memories of sounds and sentences and conveying them into language in the most effective form. So I would encourage translation for everybody. I think in my case, when I was translating the Korean Buddhist classic, The Nine Cloud Dream, it’s a 17th century Korean Buddhist classic by Kim Man-jung, and it was written in imitation of Tang Dynasty Chinese. It took me 12 years to translate that novel, and I think that made a tremendous difference in my abilities as a writer. It increased my palette of literary tools
Marion: That is the most generous and lovely answer. Thank you so much for that. And thank you for this. It’s just been a joy talking with you. The book is beautiful, and I just wish you all the best with it and with everything else you do, I will look for more. Thank you so much Insu.
Heinz:
Thank you so much, Marion. It was wonderful to be here.
Marion: The writer is Heinz Insu Fenkl. The book is Skull Water just out from Spiegel and Grow. See more on him at heinz insu fenkl dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of the Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through online classes on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
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