Paul Yoon is the author of four previous works of fiction: Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year; and Run Me to Earth, which was one of Time Magazine's Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in the Hudson Valley, New York. Yoon is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Harvard University.
Yoon will be visiting the Harvard Book Store on October 11 at 7:00 PM for a discussion of his latest short story collection, The Hive and The Honey.
The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Tell us about how you began writing. What motivated you to write initially? Why fiction?
When I was in high school, I was taking a lot of English classes because I loved to read. All the books assigned in class were by these old dead people from a century ago. Don't get me wrong—I love my Dickens and Shakespeare—but then I had a high school teacher in my senior year who started slipping me books of contemporary fiction. I was 17 at the time, and it never occurred to me previously that fiction was an active art form; I just thought it was dead people who did it. It blew my mind that people were still publishing books. There was even a new art form called the short story. So I started consuming contemporary fiction, contemporary short fiction, and novels. I just fell in love with it, and when you fall in love, you want to respond, right? My way of responding was by writing. I would read something amazing and be inspired to write.
We're curious about your method of mentorship, and how that coincides with your writing. What's your philosophy on teaching?
There were very important people in my life who mentored me as I was starting this endeavor—one being my high school English teacher, who I'm still friends with. He's a writer. I didn't do this traditionally: I don't have a graduate degree, like an MFA, so I relied a lot on the kindness of strangers and the kindness of people who saw something in my work. And so, for me, part of teaching is making sure that I do my best to treat everyone the way I was treated.
Another part of it is that I don't ever feel like I know what I'm doing. The more I'm in this art form, the less I feel like I know. At a place like Harvard, there's this presumption that your teacher knows something. But I walk in and I'm like, I'm going to be honest, I actually just don't know. What I'm going to do is that I'm going to try really hard to engage with this art form and question it, be inspired by it, and hope that we can do it together as a group. Otherwise, writing can be such a solitary endeavor. And it's okay that we all don't know anything—there's a kind of excitement to that, too, because it mimics the writing process. Writing is like entering this unknown, engaging with a kind of mystery and being in it, living with it.
We know that you're a proponent of structure when it comes to imagining the shape of a story. Tell us about the process by which you begin to form a story.
I'm a visual learner. I'm always trying to see (maybe because I always wanted to be a painter or something). I'm always trying to build a canvas, I'm trying to paint something, and that's sort of my end goal.
The first thing I need to do when I enter a short story is to figure out what the borders of that canvas is. I won't figure that out for a while, but what I'll do is imagine some corner of the canvas. And I'm going to start painting: I'm gonna throw some color on there, I'm going to add some texture layers—whether that means a landscape, a character, or a situation. I'm just going to stay there for a while, and I'm going to paint that. That's sort of how I start writing: I'm always in a corner of a painting. From there, I'll be able to move across the canvas.
Much of your work seems motivated by the atmosphere of ghost stories, your love of crime fiction, and folktales. To go along with your metaphor, what does the canvas look like in these cases? How do you think about tone and atmosphere in your stories, and how does that come through on a craft level?
I think it's a case by case thing for me. Each story dictates its own world-building and its own rules. With that, the story dictates the tone of whether it's a specific first-person voice, third-person, all that stuff. For example, for this new book, I have a story that's narrated by a young Cossack soldier in 19th century Far East Russia, and I knew I had to embody some kind of first-person voice. That would be different from another story set in contemporary London in the book. A lot of it is just thinking about what the story dictates.
But there's also this other side where, no matter how much I try to bury stuff, it's also possible that it all sounds like me. It's possible that I have a style that I cannot move away from, but it's not something I'm really aware of when I'm working. There are certain things that I'm trying to do book-to-book, which is, I'm always trying to think of how to be as restrained as possible, or minimal as possible. Can you evoke something epic and vast while being spare and restrained? Can you be maximal while being minimal? I'm very conscious of that, and maybe two decades of working on that has formed a style.
Let's talk about The Hive and the Honey. You've said in some previous interviews with The Atlantic and The New Yorker that your work attempts to recover a distant family past. How do you think about The Hive as it adds to or differs from your body of published work, like The Mountain, in terms of how it grapples with this kind of past?
I do secretly think The Mountain is my favorite. That was a kind of intellectual experiment, where I was trying to slip into the different points of view of people all over the world and from various backgrounds to embody something, whereas I think The Hive for me started from a very personal, emotional point of view.
A lot of these stories are not based on anything that really happened or that was true, but it came from this kind of recurring pattern. I never met a lot of my family, and I don't really know where they are. My grandfather was a Korean War Refugee, and by crossing the South during the war, there's a lot of my family that were left behind. I don't know if they willingly stayed or if they were trying to escape. I just don't know.
Growing up, whenever I asked my parents, or rather, my father, about whatever happened to my relatives, he would say something crazy, like, “Oh, you know, your great uncle probably went to China for a little while, and then went to Japan.” Or, “Your uncle, he was probably shot down because he was a fighter pilot or something.” He would just end the stories in these mysteries of diaspora, of traveling, and of being separated and spread out—all these stories that were half-finished. Or actually, even worse than that, the stories never really started.
So then I would start to imagine the paths of all these family members. I started to create an imagined family tree of all these family members that I'd never met, who were scattered about everywhere. The spirit of the book is that I was thinking about the imagined lens of my family tree and where all these people I'd never met ended up. If I can just continue to imagine their stories in some way, maybe I can keep their stories going.
What is your characters’ notion of family and belonging in The Hive?
My characters in The Hive are literally and figuratively orphaned in some way. A lot of the book is about their yearning or desire, or our journey to find a new family of some kind, and to build a new family and make a family of their own. I mean that in the vaguest way possible.
How did you keep true to that feeling of half-finished vagueness, while also keeping in mind the reader—to present a story that has an ending that a reader may enjoy?
I think about that often. Whenever I'm working on a short story, I'm always waiting for that moment where I feel there is closure, but there's also the possibility of a new beginning. Whenever I've reached that moment, that's when I think I'm done, like the painting is complete. Another way to look at it is that I've been living with these characters for a certain amount of time and I feel that I can't go further with them, yet there's also a feeling that their lives are going to continue without me—that's when I know it's time to let them go. So, in my head, their lives continue. They keep going, in whatever form or narrative, but they’re no longer my stories to write. I think in keeping with that idea of the unfinished story, the unfinished life, to me, my hope is that these stories feel like you're peering into a phase in someone's life, or a partial view of someone's life, but you can also imagine the rest of it. There's the door that is open.
Tell us more about the process of putting this collection together. For you, at what point does a story grow into a collection, as opposed to a standalone story?
For The Hive, I knew early on that I was writing a collection since I had this specific project in mind—of this imaginary family tree. It was just a question of, geographically, if you want to write a book set around the world, how do you do that? It was my hope, similar to The Mountain, that if I had a map of the world, and I was following the roots of people from a country, maybe if I selected a few, and did that really well, that could represent a greater picture and the whole. My intention was never to be like, ‘oh, I gotta write a story set here, here, here, and here.’ It was more trusting that I would find some key places and key stories. The accumulation of reading them would represent a greater story.
Many of your stories in The Hive explore this expansive sense of place—Barcelona, or upstate New York, Sakhalin Island—and travel in time, in Edo, Japan. How do you approach research for different places?
I don't know if I really “research,” or maybe that's not the right word. By that, I mean that I love reading weird textbooks for fun. I wasn't a very good student, so I never read that stuff in college. Now that I'm a little bit older, I find great pleasure in picking up weird books about feudal lords, bringing their samurai to the capital city of Edo on foot, and traveling for months because the Shogun demands it. What usually happens is, I'll read these books, and as I'm reading, I'll pick up highly specific details. For instance, there's this one detail about how someone in the Russian Far East would hang a hammock over a stove in the winter, or how they would save a little bit of honey to see if a bee would come right to the honey, and then they would follow the bee to the hive. Weird details like that—or these post stations in the walking routes to Japan. For me, those details began to build that painting, just to continue the metaphor. Those details are the things that helped me to start thinking of possible stories. So research to me is almost backwards—it's like I'm reading and then I'll find something, and then I'll use that as a way into a story.
You mentioned earlier that you began writing stories because you want to respond to the literature that you were consuming, and in your New Yorker interview, you said The Hive is a book about the Korean diaspora. Can you tell us more about your thoughts on Asian American literature today and its trajectory?
I think Asian American literature is as vibrant, ambitious, and amazing as it's ever been right now. There's so much out there, and we have a lot more access to it—so much of writing is about access. There are many writers who inspire me, like Tania James, who just got long-listed for a National Book Award. Something that I love about her work is that she can navigate her Indian ancestry, but then jump to contemporary Washington, D.C., then write something set in the 2000s. There is global diversity in her work, and flexibility and reach. Something that I really love about what's out there these days is that a lot of the writing isn't just talking about one thing, but that it's talking about everything. I just find that really exciting. Like the canvas has just exploded, and there's room for all of it.
Lastly, some fun questions. What does your space look like when you write or revise, and do you have rituals or routines when you sit down to write?
I used to have an office, but I no longer do ever since we got a dog. He's just so high energy that it was near impossible to find a room to write. And so I would usually just sit on the couch wherever we lived, and he would just be beside me—that's my preferred mode. I wrote The Hive just on a couch with Oscar next to me.
If you could ask yourself a question, what would you ask yourself, and how would you answer it?
If I could time travel, where would I go? Like Back to the Future style? I don't know the answer.
Or maybe, if you could time travel to one of the places or times in your book?
Oh, one hundred percent, I would go to Edo Japan. I have a samurai story in The Hive. I would completely go to that story, I would just literally be among that crew.
2025