Core Memories: Katherine Yeejin Hur
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 our third edition, we interview Katherine Yeejin Hur.
Katherine Yeejin Hur is a Korean American writer from Atlanta, Georgia. Her poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, and she is currently at work on her first novel. You can find her on Twitter @_khur_. Her essay, “Whose Secret,” was published in Issue 70.
What is your CORE MEMORY?
I avoided writing creative nonfiction until I was halfway through my MFA program, at which point I decided it was finally time to take a creative nonfiction workshop. Until then, I’d mostly been writing fiction and dabbling in poetry. The term “essay” scared me, as I have never considered myself to be a particularly good academic and always found writing essays for seminars difficult in a way that was different from the way I found creative writing difficult—less like solving a puzzle and more like filing my taxes.
I don’t remember the exact reason I decided to take that workshop. I think I’d been grappling with a particularly uncooperative short story and figured that at least in creative nonfiction, I wouldn’t have to make up what happened. The story was already there. I just had to figure out how to tell it and why it needed to be told.
How has that moment impacted your current work or current artistic practice?
The workshop was taught by Joshua Wheeler, a mentor I feel incredibly lucky to have learned from. Josh had a lot of smart things to say about writing and also shaped how I thought about writing in many ways, but one of the most important things he taught me was that the essay should straddle the line between clarity and confusion. I want my writing to always live in that space. Clarity as unveiling, confusion as fusion rather than bewilderment. In this way, creative nonfiction has become a way for me to understand what sometimes feels like the impervious truth of experience.