Core Memories: Joan Kwon Glass
We believe the origin of our work as creators is important to consider and hold. In CORE MEMORIES, we ask artists and writers about their own creative beginnings. What led them to operate in their genre of choice? Was it a specific moment, an errant thought, a movement? Was it an insight, a person, a place? Years into their work, does it continue to resonate?
In this edition, we interview Joan Kwon Glass
Joan Kwon Glass is the author of NIGHT SWIM (Diode Editions, 2022) and three chapbooks, including If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). She serves as poet laureate for Milford, CT, Editor-in-Chief for Harbor Review, and a Brooklyn Poets mentor. Joan’s poems have been published in, or are forthcoming in, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), Hayden’s Ferry Review, RHINO, Dialogist and elsewhere. Joan has just completed her second full-length poetry collection, telling the story of women in her family through four generations revolving around themes of hunger and ghosts. You can find her on Twitter @joanpglass and Instagram @joan_kwon_glass and at www.joankwonglass.com.
What is your CORE MEMORY?
I don’t remember the first poem I ever read, but I do remember the first poem I wrote. It was an epistle to George Washington, and I wrote it after reading the picture book Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak when I was five or six years old. In the book, a woman and her children (a daughter around age eight and a toddler) wait at home for their husband/father to return home from war. During that time, the little girl, Ida, has to take care of her baby brother, but one night, goblins kidnap him and replace him with an ice statue. Something about this story felt like a premonition to me. There is a picture of a sailboat in the story, and the mother watches the harbor as it moves away from her. For me, poems usually come together as connections between images, moments, and words in a way that feeds my desire to understand myself and the world in new ways. Poems can be revelations, and they can be revolutions. They are my way of making sense of things that otherwise would not.
How has that moment impacted your current work or current artistic practice?
That first poem really set the stage for the history of my life that would unfold in the years to come. As the oldest daughter in my family, as the daughter of a single mother, as the daughter of a father who disappeared into his own personal wars that took him far from us, and as the older sister to my only sister who died by suicide, I think about Ida and her mother and her little brother. I consider the goblins and the ice statue left in place of Ida’s baby brother. Later in the book, Ida charms the goblin kidnappers by playing her French horn, and she finds her baby brother and brings him home safely with her. My writing often revolves around my experience as a daughter, sister, and now as a single mother. I am always considering cycles, patterns, and ways of surviving the world’s goblins and wars that threaten my peace.