Chin-Sun Lee [Host: Erin Slaughter]

On today's episode of The Lives of Writers, Erin Slaughter interviews Chin-Sun Lee.

Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (Unnamed Press 2023), listed among Publishers Weekly’s Big Indie Books of Fall 2023, and is one of Poets & Writers’5 Over 50 for 2023. She’s also a contributor to Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing 2023) and the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014). Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Joyland, and The Believer Logger, among other publications. More at www.chinsunlee.com. 

Erin Slaughter is the author of the short story collection A Manual for How to Love Us and the poetry collections The Sorrow Festival, and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Realize That You Are the Sun. She is the managing editor of Autofocus  and was formerly the editor/co-founder of literary journal and chapbook press The Hunger. Her writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, CRAFT, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere

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PART ONE, topics include:

-- finishing a first book tour

-- seeing a first novel go into the world

--previous work in the fashion industry

-- life in LA after movie young from Korea

-- arts and writing growing up

--publishing a debut novel in your 50's

- pressure and expectations on following-up a novel

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PART TWO, topics include:

-- Chin-Sun's debut novel Upcountry

-- balancing three voices

-- process changing from short stories to the novel

-- process changing from completed book to WIP

-- cults

-- class

-- the unknown

-- penance

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PART THREE, topics include:

-- place as character 

-- writing about 2009/10

-- the possibility of writing something into being by accident

-- living in New Orleans

-- the next novel

--Erin's WIP 

--the beauty and cosmetic industry

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Podcast theme music  by Mike Nagel, author of Duplex and Culdesac. Here's his music project: Yeah Yeah Cool Cool.

The Lives of Writers is edited and produced by Michael Wheaton.

Episode and show artwork by Amy Wheaton.