Feature Friday - Jinwoo Park
Name
Jinwoo Park
Pronouns
He/Him
Bio
Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer based in Montreal. Born and raised in Seoul, he has lived in various parts of North America and the UK since the age of 11. He obtained his master’s in creative writing at the University of Oxford in 2015. In 2021 he won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers’ Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop. He has also been actively working as a literary translator after winning the Emerging Translator Award from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea in late 2023. Oxford Soju Club, published by Dundurn Press, is his first novel.
Instagram
@jinwoopark0721
Website
jinwoo-park.com
Where in Montreal are you located?
Saint-Henri
What do you love about that neighborhood?
What I love the most about Saint-Henri is that everything I would ever need for my daily life is all within ten minute walking distance, whether it's a grocery store, a bakery, or a flower shop. Plus there's great bike path access from Saint-Henri, so I can ride my cargo bike easily from my neighborhood to anywhere else in the city.
What’s your favourite art space in Montreal and why?
Well I don't frequent any art spaces except bookstores, and my favorite one in this city is definitely Librairie Saint-Henri Books. They have amazing curation, and the staff feel like family. I am a bit biased since they are the neighborhood bookstore, but that's also what makes them so precious to me. I've now worked with them to do various book events and every time it's such a pleasure.
Describe your art in your own words.
My art is really just whatever I’m deeply interested in. I wrote my first novel because I wanted to combine two of my favorite film franchises, Rush Hour and The Bourne Identity series, with one of the topics I think about most: the division of Korea. Over time, I also folded in my own lived experience as a member of the Korean diaspora. So in many ways, my art is simply a reflection of who I am, what I love, and the questions I keep returning to.
What drew you to writing?
Fun. I started posting absurdly bad fanfics when I was nine or ten on these Korean novel forums. But they were a lot of fun to write. And to this day, I try to stick to that feeling. If I'm not enjoying what I'm writing, I know that it's not the writing I should be doing.
What have you been working on recently?
I've been working on my second novel. It's about a fictional scenario of the reunification of the two Koreas following the collapse of the Kim regime, focusing on the experience of an immigrant who returns home to do her part in 'rebuilding the homeland' and becomes an essential part of a secret project that makes her question whether she is truly doing the right thing. For long, I've thought a lot about the relationship between diaspora Koreans and native Koreans, and I explore that quite a bit in this book. I'm also always working on new translations of Korean novels. Most of them are sample translations through agencies trying to pitch them to English publishers, but I have started to get a few book projects as well.
How would you describe your voice?
I think my voice on the page is simple and to the point. I like to write economic prose, where I try to convey as much as possible with less words. In that sense, I don't like to spoon feed the reader. I'd love my books to be a discovery, not a lecture. I also detest telling people how to feel, and I'm very allergic to adjectives that try to label an emotion. Rather, I want to simply portray what's happening and let people feel what they feel. Most of all, I wish my voice to be authentic to who I am. I want my writing to reflect my identities and my lived-experiences.
Where do you find your inspiration?
History, and in particular, Korean history. A lot of my ideas go, 'hey this part of Korean history is interesting, what if this happened during that time?' That and reading other books. There's something about a really well crafted sentence that just gets the word-factory in my head going.
Describe your writing process.
At first, I get an idea, and then immediately after there is just chaos. I go through this process where I just regurgitate what's in my head. And at around 20- 30k words, I get a better sense of what I'm trying to write, where I'm going with it. This is where I'll start outlining because I've learned the hard way that not knowing what's where makes life incredibly difficult in the later stages. Then once I have my outline, I'll begin to write the whole book. I also have this thing where I'll sometimes write from the middle of the story, or write the ending first. It's how I deal with writer's block. If I don't know how to continue the story, I'll just move to a different section of it, and then later on fill in the blanks.
Who are some of your favorite writers?
Kazuo Ishiguro, Han Kang, Sayaka Murata, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Monika Kim.
What do you love about Montreal's literary scene?
That it doesn't overly rely on taste makers who dictates from top-down, and instead is very community-oriented. Anyone can kind of start something here and find an audience. I think that's great.
