by Jay Rafferty and Stef Nunez
This week our Social Media Manager Jay Rafferty sat down with the award-winning fiction writer and California native Siel Ju, to talk about her writing practices, her recent reads, the morally gray and how her nomadic lifestyle is fairing during the global pandemic.
JAY RAFFERTY: So, just to start, in ten words or less, how would you describe yourself as an artist?
SIEL JU: I would say I’m a writer of fiction and other stuff.
JAY: As both a published author and poet do you find it difficult to separate both those practices in your head? Like, do you start writing a poem and end up with a flash fiction piece.
SIEL: You know I actually stopped writing poetry to focus on fiction full time. A lot of it just had to do with time, I didn’t feel like I had the energy to— cause you have to read as well as write. There was so much I needed to read and write, in terms of fiction, that I just didn’t have much room left for poetry. Basically, I decided I needed to focus. That’s been helpful. I think I also at a certain point became less interested in poetry, not because it’s not interesting but because I just wanted to communicate with a somewhat bigger audience. I wanted to more easily communicate with people who weren’t necessarily writers themselves and I found that hard with poetry. I felt the world of poetry, there are a lot of poets and the readership of poetry is not much bigger than the writership. I guess, I felt my own writing was becoming less and less communicative in general too, where it could be appreciated by maybe ten people. I think I wanted to communicate with more people than that. I think also, when I was younger, I had a certain contempt for prose and fiction, like I thought poetry was the higher art and I got over myself.
JAY: Well as a poet I’m disgusted. I’m kidding. The next question I wanted to ask was what other writers inspire you? I noticed on your Instagram we have a shared appreciation for Sayaka Murata. Are there any other writers that affect your work?
SIEL: Oh yeah! There’s a lot. Some of the more well-known people are Mary Gaitskill, Lydia Davis, Elena Ferrante more recently. There’s so many writers I like right now, I feel like I gravitate towards writers who are really concerned with the interiority of the mind. They tend to be less plot driven works, more so things that set a mood or a feeling. Not to say things don’t happen in the books of the authors I just mentioned—
JAY: But they’re more concerned with the interior world than the plot?
SIEL: Right, so as much as I enjoyed something like Interior Chinatown (Charles Yu) or The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett) and some of those better-known books that a lot of people read, especially longer historical fiction works that tend to be the best sellers. I admire those and enjoy reading them but they’re not the books that tend to totally grip me and make me want to write something myself.
JAY: I understand completely, the amount of times I’ve tried to get through Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel García Márquez) and it is just boring.
SIEL: I think I read that as a teenager, or early twenties I can’t remember. It’s probably good I read it back then when I tended to finish every book that I started. I felt compelled, you know? Whereas now I’m like “eh, life is short. If it’s not serving me I quit.”
JAY: That’s a good rule to go by.
SIEL: Yeah, I recommend it. Especially after grad school.
JAY: That might be an idea. This is turning into advice more than an interview, isn’t it? Talk about a Doctor Phil session. Your debut novel Cake Time: a novel-in-Stories won the Red Hen Press fiction manuscript award. Did you always plan for the stories to be apart of a collection or did that decision come later?
SIEL: I knew I wanted the publish a story collection and I think when I started thinking seriously about how I was going to get a collection out there I started thinking about how to connect the stories in some way. Which, before, I hadn’t really done that. I just kind of wrote these one off stories, so it was helpful to at a certain point to realize “Oh, these could all be from the point of view of a single person.” and that allowed me to revise some stories, write some new ones and put it together as a collection.
JAY: I was just thinking, one of the stories that sticks out to me (probably because I am a poet) is ‘Locust of Desire’. It was just one of my favorite pieces, because it seems like such a simple concept but it hadn’t been done before.
SIEL: Thanks, that one was actually inspired by Craigslist. I don’t know if they still have it, they probably do, there’s a missed connections section where you can write like “Hey, I saw you getting on the train wearing a red shirt. Our eyes met. Let’s hang out.”
JAY: Nowadays it would be “Accidentally swiped left on Tinder.”
SIEL: So, I felt like that would make a fun way of writing these small pieces about people you ultimately don’t know. At the same time, I wasn’t really latching onto something very clear that I could write. I would go to a place and then write a description of that place in minute detail. That would be my writing day. I felt compelled to write something, but I didn’t know what and that was kinda an exercise I would do. So those two things kinda came together. It was actually a longer piece, at least twice as long as what you see in the book now. But Howard Junker, who was the editor then of ZYZZYVA, cut it way down.
JAY: That’s right, cause it was previously featured at ZYZZYVA, wasn’t it?
SIEL: Yeah, so when he took it and accepted it, he cut it down, which I think worked well.
JAY: It did, it is a gorgeous piece. The book is a glorious hodge-podge of different styles and experimental forms, I was thinking primarily of ‘Locust of Desire’ and ‘How Not to have an Abortion’. I wanted to ask, what was your favorite style to develop, whether it be a change in the point of view or even in the likes of ‘Locust of Desire’?
SIEL: I think I like the ones that, for whatever reason, came more easily. There’re stories in there that I wrote once, then wrote in a completely different way again and even then, in the end I still don’t even love. So, I like the ones that came easily. The first one (‘How Not to have an Abortion’) came easily, just because I was an undergrad when I wrote the first draft of it. I think in some ways you just have less baggage or fewer editors in your head. That was fun. I like the one about the character going to a swinger’s party (‘Easy Target’). That one I wrote relatively quickly too. So basically the ones that stand out in my head as being ones I like are the ones that came quickly because it was less painful.
JAY: So those were your favorite ones to pin down but what was the most difficult one?
SIEL: I feel like the most difficult ones, I still don’t love them. Like the one where she is hanging out with a friend who is about to move to New York (‘Holiday Love Scarf’). Like, that’s the story. I mean there’s a few things that happened but that one, I guess because it got kinda rambly… I’m not being a very good advocate for my own work there. I think the last two stories I mentioned, because they have a built-in plot structure are less unwieldy. You go to an abortion clinic, you go back. Or you go to a swinger’s party, then you leave. Whereas, although these are the types of stories I love reading, someone asks you what the novel is about you go “Well, this woman was thinking…a lot.”. Those tend to be the novels that I love but at the same time I’m still trying to learn how to do it. So, my attempts at some of those less plot driven works I find very difficult.
JAY: That’s a good answer. The stories in Cake Time deal with very unique and morally gray circumstances (I’m thinking primarily of the titular story), would you say the ambiguity surrounding the main character’s identity lends to this theme? Like, as a reader, you aren’t sure if this is the same woman going through each event.
SIEL: Well, maybe. I think to sell the collection I said it was the same girl. But that came a little later, when I had to revise the stories to fit one character. Ambiguities are what I’m interested in. It’s probably one of the reasons I like writers like Mary Gaitskill so much, stories where it is often very unclear who’s in the wrong, or it’s events that leave you uncomfortable but it is hard to put the blame entirely on one person. I’m very interested in why a lot of women and girls just don’t feel they can say no. Women aren’t the ones acting out this kind of violence but then they’re pressured into going along with it. They’re made to feel, later on, that because they didn’t say no in the moment, because they didn’t or couldn’t stop it they are somehow participants in the act. I’m interested in the cultural and interpersonal forces that make women feel undeservedly like they’re complicate in actions that weren’t their own, that they couldn’t control. There’s a lot in our culture that encourages that, reinforces it and that’s what I’m more interested in, rather than looking at more clear-cut cases of rape or abuse or consent issues. I feel like, in real life, things tend to be a lot murkier than things that make the news. Although I suppose these days we have a lot more murkier situations than we used to.
JAY: I think Cake Time either pre-dates or came just about around the same time as the Me Too Movement.
SIEL: It came a little before. Its amazing how people’s expectations and opinions can change in such a short time. I think there are more people now who would look at certain circumstances in the book and say “Well, that’s rape.” or “This is not adequate consent.” Or even maybe just not like the way that women are portrayed in it.
JAY: I think what Cake Time does very well is, it gives a reader to see inside those circumstances as though they were the character, without even giving them a name, you have to experience this yourself through it.
SIEL: I do like that effect although, as an author, I will tell you having a nameless protagonist is not great for pronouns or trying to write the back-cover copy of your book! You’re like “The unnamed protagonist blah blah blah” versus if her name was like Beth, or something. It would have been a lot easier.
JAY: In addition to your poetry chapbooks and Cake Time you also curate the Love Notes series, which features musings on life love and travel. What inspired that project?
SIEL: When I first started it, it was just a monthly writer’s newsletter. I started it maybe six or nine months before Cake Time came out. It was originally a way to keep in touch with people who might be interested in events I was doing, places they could see my work, things like that. Then, to go along with that I started doing interviews with various authors. That was kind of the second incarnation where, once a month, I would interview an author about their first book.
JAY: This must be déjà vu for you then.
SIEL: Yeah, a little bit. Then I guess life just changed. One: I was no longer promoting the book but I did want to keep in touch with people, and then two: the travel only came into it nine months ago because that’s when I started to travel more.
JAY: Has Covid effected your nomadic lifestyle?
SIEL: I mean Covid started my nomadic lifestyle! I was living in L.A., in Burbank to be more accurate. My apartment was $2200 a month, and it was like a modest size one-bedroom, it wasn’t an extravagant place. Then the whole city shut down so you’re kinda doing this same thing every day, in this small space and while I still love L.A., I was like “What am I doing here?” The other thing that happened was, I kept pretty busy before things shut down and then when they did I was afraid I would get depressed or just feel very cut off. But I found that I was fine and even, maybe, a little happier. There were a lot of reasons for that, like I didn’t have to commute to work. I was also just tired at that time, like I think maybe I needed a little break. But that made me start wondering maybe I hadn’t considered moving out of L.A. for a very long time, to the point that didn’t even know if there were places that I would like. Maybe places I would like even better than L.A. . I decided at that point to see what else was out there, so I left L.A. in June. At first there was a lot of different things, I went to Tucson, I went to stay with a friend at Lake Arrowhead, the moth after that I had a writer’s residency in Temecula. So I would say, travelling really began at the start of this year. January I was in Arizona, February New Mexico, March in Texas.
JAY: So, you’re all over the place now?
SIEL: Well, I’m slowly making my way east. By mid-May I’ll be in Brooklyn.
JAY: Wonderful. Have you noticed Covid affecting your writing at all?
SIEL: My writing has definitely changed in the last year but I don’t know if it’s Covid or just everything, you know what I mean? I became nomadic, I’m moving from place to place, I quit one job, I started another, I quit that job again. There’s a lot of random things that have happened in my life, in addition to Covid that I don’t know that it was the primary factor. I would say, since Covid, I’ve just chilled out a lot more. I would feel so much pressure before just only having one hour to write at a time and having to make something of it. There’d be a feeling of only having a finite number of hours in each day and if I don’t make use of it I’ll regret it, nothing will ever get done. But now, I’ve become much less goal orientated, for better or for worse. I feel less pressure to finish things or to publish things. Before I felt like I had to rationalize my existence
JAY: Like you were trying to have to constantly earn your place in the community?
SIEL: Yeah exactly. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to publish another book but there’s also part of me that’s like, well even if I don’t publish another one the world will be fine. I don’t want to make myself unhappy by caring too much about it. Why was it that I felt so much pressure anyway if the goal is ultimately to be happy? Basically, I’m less motivated and I still have conflicts about whether that is good or bad but overall it does feel more peaceful.
JAY: My last question is, apart from your Love Notes, what can we expect to see next from Siel Ju?
SIEL: I’ve been working on flash fiction pieces sporadically. There are some of those in the works. I’m also keeping loose but detailed notes on things that happen as I travel around that I’m hoping one day will become something. But I don’t know what, or even if that will happen.
JAY: So a modern, female version of On the Road (Jack Kerouac) minus the rambles?
SIEL: Yeah. Less alcoholism and womanizing probably.
JAY: And barbiturates, and a lot less Allen Ginsberg.
Thank you so much Siel for sitting down with us for another fascinating conversation! You can follow her on Twitter @sielju and you can also find links to all her work, as well as Cake Time and the Love Notes series on her website: https://www.sielju.com.
Jay Rafferty is the poetry editor of Sage Cigarettes Magazine.
Stef Nunez is the editor-in-chief of Sage Cigarettes Magazine.
