Poured Over: Jung Yun on O Beautiful

“…And I had arrived at McDowell, with about 200 pages in the summer of 2018…And the great thing about these writing retreats is that they give you a chance to do nothing but just think about your work. And that was a real gift to me, because it was both time and peace and quiet, to just think about this book. And to be really honest with myself about what was doing well and what it wasn’t doing well at all….” Jung Yun had our attention from the very first page of her debut novel, Shelter, and we’ve been waiting for her terrific new novel, O Beautiful, set during the North Dakota oil boom. Jung joins us on the show to talk about The American Dream, shame (and hope), when it’s time to scrap a draft that just isn’t working, and more. Featured books: O Beautiful and Shelter by Jun Yung.

Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.

…From this Episode…

B&N: Where did Elinor come from? And what was it like living with her while you were writing?

Jung Yun: She was a late comer. Actually, when I first started out the book, I had this brilliant, but absolutely not brilliant idea to write it as a novel in short stories. I wrote seven short stories before I discovered Elinor and all of those short stories, well, actually six out of those seven short stories were written about men, people who had moved to the Bakken in search of work, people who’d grown up in the Bakken, and every single one was just a gigantic pain. It was just painful to get through it. And I would talk to my husband, and I was like, I don’t think this is working. But then I would like to get up and still sit at my desk every day and just right through thinking that maybe it would get better. One story, two story, three story — I’m seven stories in and it feels terrible. So finally, I write the eighth story about this woman who returns to the area to write an article about it. And it’s a very early version of Elinor and everything just kind of opened up and became not easy but easier than the mud that I was just slogging through because she has that lens piece of someone who knows the area and has a memory of it and has a memory of the things that happened to her while she lived there. But she also has a responsibility as a journalist to seek out people, people who in her daily life she would probably like run from or like not approach at all, she has to talk to everyone who comes into contact with her. She has to ask questions, she has to be curious. And that’s a stretch for her because she is a person who has experienced a lot of pain at other people’s hands but has also sort of doled out a fair amount of it as well. So, it puts her in one of these positions where she has to be expansive, and she is not an expansive person. And yeah, she’s a tough cookie. I think with both of my books I wrote about people who I would never want to sit down and get a beer with never want to like hang out with. But there I was, every day for four and a half plus years of hanging out with Elinor and she grew on me, she really did. I had difficulty with her because there are parts of her that are sort of my own DNA strands kind of woven in. There’s a lot of reckoning that goes on in the novel. And yeah, I’ve grown to appreciate her over time, but she’s a complete pain in the ass.

B&N: That is the best way to describe her. There were some moments with her. And I appreciate her as a character because her evolution and her journey is really interesting to me, she does. And we’re obviously not going to spoil the novel for folks, we’re going to let them experience Elinor for themselves. But she does have more than one moment that I, as a reader, knew was going to leave her changed that her own ideas of the world are challenged that her own ideas of the place that she holds in the world are challenged. And as much as she keeps trying to avoid certain people and certain things. She really can’t. And it’s fascinating watching her learn to ask questions.

Jung Yun: Right? Yeah, she’s, like I said, really green, struggling to find her way. And she has found over the course of her lifetime, that’s safer, easier, to not be inquisitive, to not reach out to people to not seek out people who she knows are very different from her. I think it’s a condition that a lot of people can probably relate to, especially as the sort of political landscape of our country has just become so, so much more fractured, I have a tendency to talk to other people and come in contact with other people who think like me, but when she returns to North Dakota, and she’s surrounded by people who have lived there for most of their lives, and then all of these newcomers are coming from all over the place. It’s this feeling of being thrown in with a whole bunch of strangers. And her job is literally and figuratively to seek out these strangers, despite the discomfort despite the feelings of encroachments that she sometimes has.

B&N: Okay, so O Beautiful starts as a story collection, you realize it’s kind of a non-starter? When did it start to become the novel that we’re reading now?

Jung Yun: You know, I was at a writer’s retreat. I was at McDowell in New Hampshire. And I had arrived at McDowell, with about 200 pages in the summer of 2018. And those were the pages that were the short story version. I also had hundreds of pages before that I’d kind of discarded. And the great thing about these writing retreats is that they give you a chance to do nothing, but just think about your work. And that was a real gift to me, because it was both time and peace and quiet, to just think about this book. And to be really honest with myself about what was doing well and what it wasn’t doing well at all. So that was kind of the turning point where I realized like, I have to get rid of basically 180 pages of work that I’ve labored over, researched, in order to write and then start again. But I was lucky that I had Elinor’s story by the time I got to McDowell and I was lucky that I had this really privileged month to just focus on her and I left McDowell having written like, close to 100 pages. And then like I said, it wasn’t easy at any point, but it was easier. So, I quickly caught up. And I think the speed at which I was writing was assigned to me internally that I finally caught on to the right thread.