Issue 16: Fall 2023

The HeartWood Interviews: Featured Writer Series

An Interview with Robert Yune

conducted by Larry Thacker, Interviews Editor

As a Navy brat, Robert Yune (AKA Professor Robert Stevens) moved eleven times by the time he turned eighteen. In the summer of 2012, he worked as a stand-in for George Takei and as an extra in movies such as The Dark Knight Rises and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. His fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review and the Los Angeles Review, among other places. His novel Eighty Days of Sunlight was nominated for the 2017 International DUBLIN Award. His story collection Impossible Children was published in 2017 by Sarabande Books. He is presently an assistant professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College and teaches with the school’s low-residency MFA in creative writing program. Robert was the winner of the 2017 Mary McCarthy Prize for short fiction [1].

Paul Yoon (author of The Mountain and Run Me to Earth) writes of Impossible Children:

“This is a collection that is both precise – in language, in imagery and tone, revealing key moments in a life – and vast in geography, events, and the heart. The stories are infused with a loneliness and melancholy […] Children and adults behave very badly, and we delight in their unwise actions and choices. We also root for them as they all, whether they were born in this country or are an immigrant to it, attempt to form a sense of home” [2].

Paul Yoon has it right. Robert Yune’s writing is indeed “vast in geography, events, and the heart.” As if stabbing at a map blindly, Yune adeptly tackles formulating stories of Where am I? What am I doing? And who am I supposed to be? wherever the random finger lands. A GM scrapyard, a Revolutionary War reenactment, an experimental lab, or the Indiana countryside. Yune accomplishes this with uncommon convincing detail. If you’ve ever had the benefit of attending a class or workshop by Yune, you know that this important meticulousness is as common in the classroom setting as it is for story settings. 

LT: A lot of writers attempt to incorporate “place” as an active character in fiction. That can come off as singularly static and too obvious without the right approach. Your use of “place” is like a moving target, however, a fluid participant characters regularly struggle with and against. The inhabitants of your stories struggle to fit, or get away from a fit, or want to be more or less like a type, or feel guilty about not being whole. “Place” in this role works very well alongside your people. Is this a conscious choice as a regular over-arching theme, or as much a subliminal surfacing of your own similar experiences given your extensive childhood travel and connection with South Korea?

RY: Uh, I think it’s all of the above. It’s funny, I used to live in Pittsburgh, which is a busy city—not literally as busy as others, but the hilly geography and traffic chaos and bridges all serve as antagonists, and sometimes they gang up on you.  So you’re constantly trying to outwit traffic or getting stuck in unexpected detour loops.  It can be fun, but mostly it’s just maddening. When people say that a place is a character, I often think of power and permission: certain places allow or prevent you from doing certain things, and those boundaries are interesting in storytelling.

When I moved from Pittsburgh to a small town in Indiana, I marveled at how much quieter life was, since the streets were wide and parking was plentiful and the space was just more…silent due to the decreased traffic.  People say the Midwest is featureless and bland, good for speeding through or admiring from cruising altitude. Living in small town Indiana taught me that if you pay attention to the landscape’s features and rhythms and history, you pick up on these fascinating details that most people overlook.  That’s also important when it comes to storytelling.

This sense of constantly reacting to landscape and paying closer attention of course coincide with race and identity.  My entire life, I’ve lived in spaces where being Asian American meant you’re an outsider. I’m not sure if I view it as an advantage or a disadvantage anymore.  Frankly, I’m not sure if it’s good for my art or not.

LT: You’ve mentioned before writing much of your work in the Pittsburgh area. How has living in the heart of West Virginian Appalachia influenced your toolbox of aesthetics?

RY: When I describe Buckhannon to friends and family (most of whom have never been to WV), I say it’s kinda like a small town in a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie.  If you’ve seen the quaint city hall with its hanging flower baskets or the little art alley and the cafes and Friday festivals in the local park, you know exactly what I mean.  In terms of landscape, I describe West Virginia as a more extreme version of Pittsburgh: the hills are hillier, the intersections are weirder, the forests are darker and more mysterious.  There are stranger cryptids living in West Virginia caves.

The more I think about it, that’s a hard question to answer fully. I moved to Buckhannon in August 2020, so I didn’t spend a lot of time outside of my house, and I was extremely busy with teaching during the pandemic.  I’ve only recently begun to emerge from my house and explore the town and state, and I’m still conditioned by the pandemic to shy away from people and gatherings.

I’ve found that the people here are friendly and chatty, with a deep sense—and appreciation of—their own history. There are also a lot of misconceptions and stereotypes of the state, and it’s interesting to see the ways people surrender to or actively fight them.

So, I guess in terms of aesthetics, West Virginia has served mostly as a contrast to other places I’ve lived.  It’s interesting to compare it to Greencastle, Indiana; Gettysburg, PA; and Scranton, PA.  Those are the last 3 places I’ve lived.

LT: In a few stories, your characters think in a unique phrasing to avoid speaking the uncomfortable. For example, in the story “Alpha,” Eric, the live-in boyfriend “trudged into the apartment after work and glanced at the empty kitchen table. ‘Oh, I thought you’d make dinner. Since you’re just hanging out there all day,’ he didn’t say.” That’s a clever means of characters saying the unspeakable, through omniscient thought and implied body language and tone. Tell us more about your use of this phrasing.

RY: Ha! You mentioned my “toolbox of aesthetics,” and the “not saying” technique is a go-to in my craft toolbox. I’ll be honest, I stole the idea from my writing mentor Cathy Day, who used it in her outstanding novel The Circus in Winter.  Whereas she used it in a chunk to precisely and accurately and painfully characterize a mother-daughter relationship, I mostly use it as a flourish or splash to suggest a gesture or facial expression (as well as the sentiment not expressed in the dialogue).  I do think that most of our communication is nonverbal, and so I try to capture that in various ways.  I’m pretty good at dialogue, and the disadvantage to that is I can sometimes rely too much on the talking.  In general, I do agree with Annie Dillard, who said that there’s too much talking in fiction.

LT: The longer story / flash formatting in Impossible Children is an interesting layout of the collection. What was your process of landing on that formatting design?

RY: There wasn’t really a conscious design to most of it. The first story was meant to be like an appetizer or a hotel lobby, something to invite the reader in.  In general, the length of the stories was dictated by the plot and characters…along with some mysterious needs of the stories themselves.  To some degree, when you’re writing, the story announces its length, and I’ve learned to just go with it.  That sounds mystical, but in reality, once a story has a certain number of characters and events and debris, it takes a certain number of words to have everything move toward a sensible conclusion.  It’s hard to predict how long a story will be when I’m writing it.

LT: The ferocious sibling rivalry in the story “Princeton” seems awfully real (Personally, I wondered if one wouldn’t end up killing the other before it was over.) We all infuse some truth into our fiction. Are some of these struggles on the page rooted in some real life? Are these the original “Impossible Children”?

RY:   Ha! People are surprised when I tell them I don’t have any brothers. But yes.  I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and I think people were wild and tough in their own ways.  Looking back, that wasn’t entirely a good thing.  Often, just getting through the day felt like a Darwinian struggle.  So, yes, “furious” is a good adjective for middle school and high school back then.  It’s a wonder any of us survived.

LT: What’s the one writing / literary project that’s always on your mind, but continues evading you?

RY: I’m currently working on a short story collection and a novel, but the world keeps on insisting that I do other things, so those are two projects that continue to evade me. I’m working hard to pin them down and bring them into existence, though. I just wish they’d stop squirming away.

LT: While I won’t ask you the tiresome question regarding what you do to snap out of “writer’s block,” allow me to ask what I think is a better question that might enlighten young and veteran writers alike: While all writers have experienced frustrating episodes when the “well goes dry,” so to speak, rather than how you recovered, tell us a little about what landed you in that state of writing / creative frustration.

RY:  I’ll answer the first question: I start small and build momentum by writing poems or flash fiction when I’m too tired or rusty to do anything else. I strongly believe that writing is a game of momentum. I just do better when I have a few pages behind me.

The world right now has landed me in a state of writing and creative frustration. As I mentioned before, my work schedule and other human obligations often make it difficult to justify writing time. I consider it self-care and try to practice it as such.  It’s been much harder to write since 2016, though, since life became weirder and scarier than fiction.  Living in the shadow of the pandemic, the slow global suicide of climate change, and World War IIIs has not been conducive to the making of art. At least for me. At the beginning of the pandemic, Roxane Gay wrote a short story where an author-character struggles to write because she isn’t sure that her writing will matter or anyone will care when it’s all said and done.

At the same time, I think the catastrophes of our era can be seen as challenges to write memorable fiction that matters. It’s a tall order, but if you think about it, it’s a fair one.  Winter’s coming for a lot of artists due to AI and economics, but I think the ones who can stand out due to sheer talent or stubbornness might be okay, especially if their stories can provide unique or unusual comfort or explanation or ideas or hope.