Author R.O. Kwon

Josh Hamilton: I’m Josh Hamilton.

Joe Skinner: And I’m Joe Skinner.

Josh Hamilton: And this is the American Masters Podcast, where we have conversations with the people who change us. Today we talk to author R.O. Kwon.

R.O. Kwon: No external and no external achievement has ever begun to match, let alone exceed, the joy I have found when I’m writing and when I’m deep in a sentence, and when I’m just really trying to get at what it is I want to write down, and most miraculously when I get there.

Josh Hamilton: R.O. Kwon worked over the last ten years writing her debut novel, The Incendiaries, a book that explodes off the page with spare prose written from the point of view of several unreliable narrators. In this story about a young woman drawn into a violent cult at an American university, Kwon has deftly fictionalized her own history. The novel is largely a result of grappling with her own fallout from Christianity when she was 17.

Joe Skinner: It’s rare to see a book that deals with these issues so head-on and without judgment, and for that reason it’s been praised by religious and non-religious readers alike. She’s definitely writing what she knows with The Incendiaries, and I think confronting her own history in her writing has led to more compassionate storytelling.

Josh Hamilton: The book is a national bestseller and was named best book of the year by over 40 publications. She’s also had her writing in the New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. And she’s a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts, among other accolades.

Joe Skinner: The conversation gets kind of heavy at times, but something I should reiterate is that the book also just a pleasure to read, it’s a thriller about love and grief, and it really keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Josh Hamilton: Joe recently sat down with R.O. Kwon while she was touring the paperback edition of the The Incendiaries in Washington, D.C.

Joe Skinner: So The Incendiaries is now in paperback, and you’ve been able to share it and talk about it for a while now. What have you discovered about your book or about yourself as an artist through this process of touring with it and talking about it at festivals and universities and in interviews like this?

R.O. Kwon: The genesis of this book came from the fact that I grew up very Christian and thought I was going to be a pastor until I was 17 and then I left the faith and it was and is the pivotal loss of my life. It sort of divided my life into before and after and I feel very much as though I’m living in the aftermath of that loss. And I think in writing this book, I was reading and rereading the Bible, I was reading religious thinkers, and I spent almost as much time with God or with the idea of God as I would have if I’d become a pastor after all and I was listening to religious music like church music from the 1800s, 1700s, and, I think in a lot of ways, writing this book might have been a last way of being with this God whom I don’t think I ever stopped loving. It’s just that I don’t believe that this God is real.

Joe Skinner: As you were bringing it around did you ever have somebody you know say something that kind of changed your own opinion of your work?

R.O. Kwon: That’s a really interesting question. On the one hand, external validation and/or criticism can feel really good and/or hurtful, of course. That said, there is something about–for me and I think for a lot of writers that I know–I needed to satisfy myself and I needed to get the book to a place where I could live with being done with it. And once the book was finished to a point where I no longer wanted to change it or play with it, I knew I’d gotten it to where I wanted it to be. And I don’t think there’s much of anything that anyone could have said that would have changed how I personally felt about it. And I mean that on the language level, on the sentence level, on the level of, I really wanted to get the book to a place where I could open the book at random and read a sentence and not want to just rip that apart and then the whole book all over again. I love sentences so much I love language so much. And I think I essentially, I felt very much as though if one sentence was off then the paragraph was off. If the paragraph was off then the whole book was off and I just wanted to get it to a place where it felt final, where it felt as though it had achieved–I love something Sontag says about– She talks about the prose of poets having lexical inevitability. When you read something and it can sometimes feel as though it couldn’t possibly have been any other way. And that’s what I wanted from this book. And that’s what I was working toward. And that’s probably partly why it took 10 years.

Joe Skinner: Yeah I was about to say, you know, I read that it took you 10 years to write. How long did it take to have a first draft? Was most of that 10-year process about revising and trying to achieve that perfect sentence that you talked about?

R.O. Kwon: Much of it was about revising but I spent the first two years just reworking the first 20 pages over and over again because I was so hung up on the language and I thought I just really needed like a perfect first 20 pages or as perfect as I can get it since language is flawed and no book is perfect. That said, after that, I threw all of that away and I started over and then I tried to write the next several drafts as fast as I could and I use various techniques to just try to get over my obsession with sentences, to get over my obsession with language. At least for those drafts. It wasn’t that it was any less important to me it was just that I needed to get through more drafts to get to know the characters better, to understand better like what they want from one another. What they want from me, what they want from the book.

Joe Skinner: Do you feel like you’ve evolved as a writer over that 10 year period of time? I mean, I feel like, when I was working on a creative project ten years ago and I look back on that project now it’s not necessarily something I’d be super proud of or feel even represents my identity in a major way.

R.O. Kwon: That was, you know, that was an abiding question for me and an abiding concern was–especially as like the years stretched along, where like it was like year five, it was year seven, it was year eight–I was just like, “Oh my God how am I going to”–like, I began this book a while ago but I will say that in some ways I still feel very close to like my 18 year old self and a lot of the selves that come after that. I don’t feel nearly as close to my 16 year old self and I think a lot of that has to do with just how gigantic and how devastating of a break it was for me to leave the faith to stop being Christian, which happened when I was 17. And I think because of that, it’s changed my notions of time in some ways. So like, 18 to now still feels like one unfolding and the time before that was a very different time. I will also say that, I mean, I revised this book so many times I have no idea how many times it could have been like 40. It could’ve been like 90. But it’s like something like that. Like it’s like a big number. And, so, toward the end especially I was revising really fast. I was going through it over and over and over again, I was doing things like recording myself, reading it out loud, and then listening to the recording and looking for things that I missed. And so I was able to– especially toward the end– I felt that I could almost see it like as a unit and so I and so it didn’t feel very much as though it were–It didn’t feel fragmented if that makes sense. It felt like a whole to me that I was playing with and working with.

Joe Skinner: There’s a part in the book where Phoebe talks about discipline. The seduction of discipline in her religious experience seems to intersect with the seductive nature of discipline in the arts, I think, in a lot of ways, and I just feel like that connects in some way to this 10 year process of just trying to achieve this artwork.

R.O. Kwon: I love that so much. So my, so my family was and is Catholic and then when I was in junior high and high school I started going to a lot more of my friends’ church services and they belong to a lot more like non-denominational, charismatic, ecstatic branches of Protestantism and so I experienced these varieties of Christianity. But something that really has stayed with me from Catholicism and something that serves me and helps me a lot with art is the power of acting “as if”. And so, in Catholicism, or at least in my experience of Catholicism, there’s a lot less emphasis placed on how you feel about a certain thing. You know, like, there’s a lot less emphasis placed on, “oh, like, right now I feel worshipful. Right now I feel that I love God.” There’s a lot more emphasis placed on going to mass, doing the prayers, going through the rosaries and there’s something about the power of acting for me when I write. So if I sit down to write, if I can sit down as though I’m going to be able to get something out of it, as though it’s going to be a good writing day even if it doesn’t feel that way. Even if that’s the last thing I want to do, even if I would so much rather spend five hours f****** around on Twitter, that I think that that faith, that the action itself can lead to something has stayed with me with writing.

Joe Skinner: That idea of being faithful to the process.

R.O. Kwon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for me, I know a lot of writers don’t–don’t feel this way but for me I work best if I write everyday. If I take even like a day off I can really feel it. If I take a day off it takes like a few days for me to recover and get back to where I was. I’ve jokingly compared it to– it feels like having like a very jealous lover. Like if I ignore the book for one day then it’s just like, “I don’t want to talk to you like I’m not– like, what? What do you want from me?” And then I have to like coax it back.

Joe Skinner: How was reading important to you when you were a kid and what kind of stories did you like to read or hear?

R.O. Kwon: I was, you know, as I know a lot of writers were. I was a voracious and omnivorous reader you know like I would read anything that was put in front of me. Including like, you know, like cereal boxes and shampoo bottles like I was just like, “Words words words like give them all to me.” I loved even like the vocabulary flashcards that you that you study for whatever. Like the standardized test. I loved all of it. I–my first memories of just like really loving books though. Well I also loved—I love some of the books that are more geared toward children like Christopher Pike I was really into. He is sort of kind of surreal horror writer. He’s like a much less tame version of like R.L. Stine and/or like Goosebumps kinds of books. Anyway, he was creepy as hell. He was great. But, my first memory of really loving books and really falling in love with literature, it was a lot of, there were a lot of books around my house and my mother was an English major in Korea which is where she went to college. So there were a lot of books around my house by like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky– just like extremely dead white people. And I think those are the books that really made me fall in love with books and with and with re-reading in particular. For a long time, I’d have said Portrait of a Lady was my favorite book. I’m not sure I would still say that but it’s still way up there, and I don’t know how many times I’ve re-read that book but I loved it and I still love the ways in which a really rich book will yield its riches on the hundredth reread on the 150th reread. A passage I love will still be fascinating 160 reads later and that’s something that I find to be so fascinating about literature that there’s so much there. I almost feel as though on the first time–when I read a book for the first time, I really don’t feel as though I’m reading very much. I get so anxious about, like, the characters and their fates. I’m like well is that person going to marry that person? Like, what is going to happen to that character’s father? And I get very stressed out by that and it’s only by the second read that I can really start to slow down and really appreciate the language and the structure and like the things that are happening behind the scenes.

Joe Skinner: Did this experience falling in love with reading as a child, did this dovetail at all with your experience with Christianity at the time?

R.O. Kwon: Mmmm. It didn’t at the time but I think it did in some ways contribute to my loss of faith. I think there was something about–and this wasn’t the only reason I lost my faith, there was just a growing accumulation of questions and of pressures that cannot be accommodated within the framework that I had of Christianity. But there was something about the fact that you know reading was my favorite thing to do. So I was spending so much time in the heads of people who did not believe what I believed. And I remember like in high school I would just get so stressed out like I would read like Plato and I’d get stressed out about like everyone’s souls and I had like a very shaky grasp of theology but I would like start like praying for these people because they hadn’t known Jesus Christ. So like possibly they were going to hell and I was like this makes no sense. They were alive before Jesus? Like how does this even–like what is, like, and so I kept getting worried about the souls of people who did not believe what I believed and increasingly, the more I spent time in other people’s heads, it became difficult and then impossible to believe that all these people were condemned to hell because they didn’t hold my beliefs about the world.

Joe Skinner: I can’t help but think about how powerful of a tool storytelling can be in the church and in other religious environments. I was really young when I lost my Catholic faith. I was in probably eighth grade, but I still remember being really wowed by some of the stories that you would hear during the Sunday service. And so I guess I was wondering: did you ever learn or find inspiration from any of those storytelling techniques that you would experience while you had faith?

R.O. Kwon: This is an interesting question. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked that before. I’m not sure that I would necessarily tie anything in particular back to the stories in the Bible or the stories that I heard about like Catholic saints. That said, I mean, because I was also you know like I was also obsessed with like Greek myths like there were a number of storytelling modes, I think, that were formative for me. There is though–let’s see–I have been left with an appetite for ecstasy, an appetite for transcendence, you know? I seek it out in a lot of ways– an appetite for joy. And that’s something that I think I’m very interested in exploring in my writing as well. And of course there is transcendence aplenty in religious stories. There’s ecstasy aplenty in religious stories, but I don’t know which came before or after. You know? Like, I don’t know which came first. Was I drawn to religion because I was already, like, really enjoyed the ecstatic or am I still drawn to the ecstatic because I was so religious for so long? There’s no way for me to tell because it was all I knew for so long.

Joe Skinner: Often I feel like the creative act can imbue meaning or purpose. People find many ways to find meaning and purpose in their lives. Do you think that writing gives purpose in much the same way that religion can give purpose for people?

R.O. Kwon: Writing does give me a great deal of a sense of purpose. So much so that you know if I go like a day or, God forbid a week, or any longer, without writing fiction, I feel that I am losing my sense of purpose. I can actually sort of feel like parts of myself dying inside is what it feels like. But, I don’t know that it has necessarily to do with-and I’m very not religious at this point, I think especially given my religious past–But there is something that I do love about the Buddhist notion of: it’s not the destination, it’s the path getting there. And something that a lot of people told me and that I never believed until I experienced it for myself was that no external affirmation, no external praise and no external sort of achievement has ever begun to match– let alone exceed–the joy I have found when I’m writing and when I’m deep in a sentence. When I’m just really, really trying to get at what it is I want to write down. And most miraculously when I get there. When I write something down and I’m just like, “Yeah. Like that gets out what I wanted to say right there.” That’s the purest and deepest joy I know. And I feel so lucky to get to have that in my life. And it isn’t enough of a consolation, you know? If I could have stayed Christian I would, if I could have stayed believing in this all powerful God who made everything OK I would have. But it was impossible for me. But there are ways in which knowing that these joys that I have now through writing, just through even just like hanging out with people I love, through all of that, through reading, knowing that those joys are finite, knowing that those stories will certainly come to an end because it always ends, they have sharpened the amount of the joy that I get from it because I know how ephemeral it is. And so there’s that sense of preciousness each time because I’m not sure it’s going to come back. And, you know, at one point it’s all going to come to an end and that does bring me additional joy.

Joe Skinner: Well, when you finished the novel, did you at least approach some sort of resolution towards your loss of faith?

R.O. Kwon: I don’t know that I found resolution. I think what I realized– what I’m still realizing– is that maybe sometimes grief doesn’t end because sometimes love doesn’t end and one way to look at grief is it’s love for an object that has become unavailable for whatever reason and maybe that’s something I am going to live with for the rest of my life and so will probably keep writing about.

Joe Skinner: Yeah I mean I think some of the best artists they kind of oscillate around the same central idea their entire career whether it’s grief or something else.

R.O. Kwon: Yeah. And you know, so I’ve been work on my new novel. I keep calling it my new novel but it’s been three years it’s not new anymore. So I’ve been working on my second novel for almost three years. And for the first two years, I tried really hard to keep out any mention of God or faith, like, I was just like, “OK. Like, look dude. I spent like 10 years on you. Let me move on. I have other things I think about.” But there was just something about the book that kept feeling like it didn’t have the depth I wanted. It didn’t. It wasn’t really exploring some of the questions I wanted to explore. And finally I was like, “Oh, no. I understand what’s missing. It’s that jerk. He’s sliding back in.” And the minute I let God sort of back into this book I was working on I was like, “Oh, okay, like I can see how it’s, like, deepening things here. I can see it’s, like, bringing things to life there.” So he’s in there too.

Joe Skinner: How have religious people responded to the book?

R.O. Kwon: That’s been one of the loveliest surprises of having this book out in the world. So I like lowkey was concerned. Lowkey but was ongoingly concerned about, I was like oh, you know, like I wonder if some like hard right religious group is going to ban this book. And if this gave me some sort of problem but then like friends were also saying you know if someone like that banned your book like it would actually help your book sales like you should actually kind of hope for that. And I was like, still you know, like I don’t want people out there like loathing me and my book based on — based on ideas of what it might be about. But almost entirely across the board, so, people, religious people, very religious people of all kinds who read the book have said– they write to me or they come to readings and they tell me afterward– that they really appreciate the ways in which the book takes faith very seriously; The ways in which faith is not a punch line. Believers are not a punch line. Faith and belief are not a joke. And I think that there isn’t very much fiction that takes faith like this seriously. Especially not fiction that is–Yes, there is fiction that’s intentionally geared toward believers of one faith or another. But fiction like this that isn’t geared toward a particular audience like that. I think that that’s relatively rare and so I’ve really enjoyed talking with believers of various kinds about this book and about their faith and yeah.

Joe Skinner: Is there a character that you most relate to in the story?

R.O. Kwon: Not really. I mean there’s something my mentor Michael Cunningham used to say in grad school which was, “We must love our characters as God does and not more,” which I love and think about a lot. And for me, at least, that means I love all my characters but, I’m always following them, you know, like I am asking them to tell me who they are. I’m asking them to tell me what they’re gonna do next. I very much don’t feel like– like a puppeteer with strings. I’m more just– I’m more–I more feel almost like a–like a medium, I guess, but not really a medium. Anyway, I’m just like– I’m just like on the sides like taking notes and like trying to learn about them but I will say, John Leal, the cult leader, was, relatively speaking, very easy for me to write and this always like stresses out my parents when I say this because it was like wait stop identifying yourself with the like–with the like scary as hell cult leader, right. But I think, you know, there’s something about–about John Leal where, he is channeling perhaps the part of me that did want to become a pastor, you know, that–and the ways in which he uses language to convince people. I found that to be in some ways, in some ways–yeah it was just like tapping into a part of myself that had gone just like totally dormant for a long time I think.

Joe Skinner: I feel like characters in stories are drawn in all different kinds of ways. I’ve heard people say that all the characters in their stories are different fractions of their own being or they come from people that they know or they’ve just completely invented them. Do you feel like your characters have come from one of those places or another?

R.O. Kwon: I mean I think there are ways in which they are all pieces of me but they’re all very much not me, too. And so, this will sound suspect but it’s almost what I believe. It’s not quite what I believe because that doesn’t–it doesn’t make any sense. But when I’m writing, I feel very much as though I’m working toward a book that praises me. I’m working toward an ideal shape and it’s out there and I almost have to dig my way toward it. And that’s true of every character. That’s true of every line of the book, it’s true of every sentence and so I don’t feel as though I’m, like, making; I feel more as though I’m discovering. And I say I almost believe that because that doesn’t–I mean, like, the book doesn’t pre-exist me, like I wrote it so, but I feel much more like a discoverer or like–or like, I don’t know, an explorer or something.

Joe Skinner: The book feels like it’s as much about class, culture, gender identity as it is about religious identity. How has your own identity impacted your writing and how did it influence some of the decisions you made with The Incendiaries?

R.O. Kwon: I think I think about this a lot in terms of audience. So you know, like, a very common interview question is, “Who did you have in mind while you were writing?” You know, like who–what was the audience you had in mind while you were writing? And I used– I used to think that my answer to this was– was like super straightforward and and boring and that my answer was when I’m writing, I’m just writing for myself because I– because it’s so incredibly absorbing that I– there’s no space for me to think about anybody else. Like, there are no other readers in my head. But then I realized that that actually does have political implications because if I’m centering myself as a reader, that means I’m centering a Korean-American woman, who’s an immigrant, who’s queer, as a reader and my body–bodies like mine– have not very often been centered in American letters as an audience. And so that, that played out in the book in various ways. So. For instance, there’s a point early on in the book when Phoebe, who’s Korean- American, when her mother calls her Haejin, which is her middle name but it’s also her Korean name. And at some point someone asked–a reader asked– like, hey this is a little confusing, like, do you want to clarify that–just like clarify like, this is her middle name, this is her Korean name. This what her family calls her. And, like, I just, like, very, like, instinctively was like absolutely not. Like, why would I explain that? Any Korean American reader I can think of would immediately understand. Most Asian-American readers I could think of would understand. Lots of readers would understand and if anyone else who doesn’t understand is briefly confused, that’s OK, you know? Like, the people who are going to be confused don’t have to be centered. And I just keep thinking about all the ways in which, like, I have looked up so many sailing terms over the course of my reading life. Books by people who love to sail, WASP-y people who love to sail, and I love a lot of these books but I never –you know, like– I’ve like been on a sailboat once like I don’t f****** know sailing terms. I’m always like, “what is a jib? Damnit I’m gonna go look it up again.” And like, that’s fine, we can all look up things, like Google is right there. Looking upwards is fun.

Joe Skinner: Yeah, I mean, I feel like there’s very few people that could read Moby Dick with a pre-loaded amount of knowledge to really absorb everything in there.

R.O. Kwon: Exactly! The depth of knowledge about whales like, we all looked up words while reading that book and that’s great we’re learning.

Joe Skinner: So do you think the act of writing is political, every time?

R.O. Kwon: I think there’s no way for writing to not be political and I feel as though– I feel as though like in the U.S. in particular there still seem to be people who believe that their acts in life and this like extends like way beyond our, like, how you move through the world can be apolitical and I just don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think it was ever possible and I especially I don’t think it’s possible right now when so many aspects of who people are and how they move through the world and how I move through the world are being politicized and are being attacked. And of course I think that extends to writing and art.

Joe Skinner: Does your next novel dig as deep into a well of this personal history or is it going into completely new places?

R.O. Kwon: So my next novel is, it’s centered on two women artists. One is a photographer, one’s a choreographer and the photographer becomes professionally and then personally obsessed with the choreographer and so with this book I’m very interested in exploring questions of what I, as a woman, have felt, that I am allowed to want– and not only allowed to want but often encouraged to want and that often revolves around caretaking and various kinds like people– I have people in my life who just like really want me to have a baby. And as it so happens, at least so far, I don’t want babies. And I’m curious about the ways in which that is a laudable desire. Whereas when I’ve wanted things that don’t involve caretaking, when I want things that have to do with my art, with ambition with, with a job, with my body, with sex, with–with even just like having like, you know, I don’t know, having a day to myself for no good reason except that I want a day to myself. The ways in which that feels more suspect, the way that the ways in which that feels as though that has to be defended and/or even hidden and I’m just fascinated by that and I’m– so, with these two artists, they both are women who are very serious about their work and very serious about their art and they want and want and want and want and I want to see what happens when want like that is on the page.

Joe Skinner: What advice would you give to aspiring writers who are trying to, you know, tell personal stories?

R.O. Kwon: My friend Alice Sola Kim is a wonderful writer. She said something– I don’t have it memorized; I’m gonna paraphrase a little. She said something like, “Write as though everyone you know is dead, everyone you love is dead, and you’re dead too.” I think if you’re– If you’re writing something that feels really personal, if you’re writing something that maybe because it feels so personal, feels harder to put into the world, for me it helps a great deal too, sometimes when I’m writing, actually, lately almost everyday when I’m writing, I just keep whispering to myself like it’s okay. No one has to see this. No one has to see this. It’s all right. This is just you. That helps me a lot when I when I am having trouble putting something down.

Joe Skinner: That’s great. Thanks so much for coming in.

R.O. Kwon: Thank you so much. This was delightful. Thank you.