Book Review: The Korean Word For Butterfly by James Zerndt

The Korean Word For Butterfly
by James Zerndt
Publisher: Create Space, March 27, 2013
Available in: Print & ebook, 329 pages

I was in my late twenties when I was first introduced to novels featuring the interplay between two or more cultures.  It was the late eighties and one of my Literature and Creative Writing professors (Lawson Inada, later Poet Laureate for Oregon) assigned us a book by an Amer-Indian woman.  Silko?  I was entranced and began to seek them out and have continued to favor them ever since.  Trust me when I say, James Zerndt compares favorably with some of the best I encountered with his The Korean Word for Butterfly.  I am grateful to him for introducing me to the Korean/American relationship.

This story set in 2002 is not so long ago.  Not even pre-Internet and yet the misunderstanding, biases, judgmental arrogance and confusion generated by the language barrier and the differences in how the two cultures view themselves and what gives meaning to their lives is as old as that between Israel and the Persians in the Biblical stories of Daniel and Esther.

By language barrier I mean also the non-verbal for bodies and faces are speaking a foreign language across the cultural divide.

I like the way Zerndt used inter-personal relationships among his primary and secondary characters to both show how these misunderstanding are created and how it will be at the inter-personal level not the international level that the relationships between nations and culture will be repaired.  And to this point it really is a shame that Americans for the most part make little effort to prepare their young for this role by exposing them to foreign languages early as most all of the other cultures do.

By having his story revolve around a Korean school dedicated to teaching their children English and the Americans they bring over to teach, Zerndt was able to demonstrate all of this. But not in the dry way I just explained it.  Rather with a story in which characters, so well drawn you come away feeling like you know them, live it in front of your eyes.

I've made it no secret here that I believe in the power of story to transform, to heal, to enlighten.  I've witnessed it and lived it.  I believe that my intense interest in this type of story when introduced to it by Professor Inada was because I was already sensing the shift deep in myself that would, just five years later, culminate with me breaking away from the fundamentalist sect I was raised in and continuing to seek them out and read them helped me reach a new equilibrium after that devastating experience.  This is why I believe that storytellers like James Zerndt who help us learn how to communicate across cultural boundaries and even time are one of our most valuable resources.



From the Publishers:

Set against the backdrop of the 2002 World Cup and rising anti-American sentiment due to a deadly accident involving two young Korean girls and a U.S. tank, The Korean Word For Butterfly is told from three alternating points-of-view:

Billie, the young wanna-be poet looking for adventure with her boyfriend who soon finds herself questioning her decision to travel so far from the comforts of American life;

Moon, the ex K-pop band manager who now works at the English school struggling to maintain his sobriety in hopes of getting his family back;

And Yun-ji , a secretary at the school whose new feelings of resentment toward Americans may lead her to do something she never would have imagined possible.

The Korean Word For Butterfly is a story about the choices we make and why we make them.

What they are saying:

“5 stars. Full of fresh, original writing.” -THE KINDLE BOOK REVIEW

“This is one of the best young novels of the year.” -Grady Harp, Amazon TOP 50/HALL OF FAME REVIEWER

“Zerndt is a wonderful writer, and BUTTERFLY is an absolutely beautiful story. I was drawn into his characters from the first page, and I found myself devouring the novel in huge, satisfying gulps.” - kacunnin, Amazon TOP 500 REVIEWER

“The author had his finger on the pulse of how naïve Americans react to Korean culture and a spot on depiction of how Korean culture plays into this sort of scenario.” -Wayne, Amazon TOP 500 REVIEWER/VINE VOICE

“Zerndt has managed to write something completely different from The Cloud Seeders yet equally captivating. These deliciously flawed characters will capture your heart from page one and have you sweating when you realize you’re reaching the end of the story entirely too soon. Zerndt is a master storyteller who seems to be able to write from absolutely anyone’s point of view with ease. Can’t wait to see more from this author.”-Sheri Meshal, Author of Swallowtail

From the Back Cover:

“Zerndt is the real deal.” -Jonathan Harris, author of The Wave That Did Not Break

James Zerndt lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and son. His poetry has appeared in The Oregonian Newspaper, and his fiction has most recently appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal. He taught English in South Korea in 2002 and still loves kimchi.

Jamie’s short story, “The Tree Poachers”, recently won WCCHA’s fiction award. Some of his short stories have also won Honorable Mention in both Playboy’s and The Atlantic Monthly’s Fiction Contests.

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Follow the blog tour for more reviews, giveaways, author interviews and guest posts: 

So Many Precious Books Feb 3 Spotlight & Giveaway
Joy Story Feb 4 Review
Joy Story Feb 11 Interview
Every Free Chance Feb 5 Spotlight & Giveaway
She Treads Softly Feb 7 Review
The Book Diva Reads Feb 10 Guest Post & Giveaway
Let’s Talk About Books Feb 12 Review & Giveaway
Indies Reviews Behind the Scenes Feb 14 Blog Talk Radio Excerpt/discussion 8 pm cst
Tracy Riva Feb 14 Review
Tracy Riva Feb 17 Guest Post & Giveaway
The Princess Gummy Bear Feb 17 You Tube Review
Serendipity Feb 19 Review
Reader’s Muse Feb 18 Review
Reader’s Muse Feb 14 Interview
From Isi Feb 20 Review
Deal Sharing Aunt Feb 21 Review
Deal Sharing AuntFeb 24 Interview
Book Dilettante Feb 25 Review
So Many Precious Books Feb 26
Carole Rae’s Ramblings  Feb 27 Review
Margay Leah Justice Feb 28 Review
Margay Leah Justice Feb 28 Guest Post & Giveaway
Romance & Inspiration Mar 3 Review

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Music to Write By

Yep, I'm still going on about the music with Brainwave Entrainment tones from Mind Power MP3.com I discovered last weekend.  Only now I have more than the three free samples and the YouTube channel for Ed has gotten me this digital 20 album library plus bonuses for Christmas.  Some of the bonuses are more BWE music, some are ebooks and one is a digital course with some of each.  Altogether 30 to 40 items averaging over 10 minutes per audio file download.

I've no desire to spend hours at the tedious task of downloading them one by one (the only option given) before I stop to listen.  So I've started out by targeting several that I'm anxious to have available ASAP.  Yesterday I shared why Moonlight Sonata was so important to me.  Today the spotlighted album is Energy Activation: Holst - The Planets.

I discovered Holst's symphony, The Planets, at the same time as Beethoven's 9th via the same classical music radio station while living in Longview in the early 90s.  I had been listening to the station in the first place because my creative writing professor at Southern Oregon State College (now SOU), Lawson Inada (since designated as Poet Laureate for Oregon State), had turned me on to the usefulness of music to help set the mood or feeling tone of a poem, story or individual scenes.

Thus in the late 80s I had started keeping a file noting the emotion a musical piece called up in me and as I began using them to tune my mood for a writing session I kept records of which musical piece was playing while I was writing the scene or poem and would play it again when returning to work on it. It wasn't long before I realized that not only did the music tied to the written piece recreate the mood it triggered the memories of my unrecorded thoughts and intentions regarding the piece during previous sessions.

Energizing Classical Music - Holst, The Planets
(I think the track is Neptune)

The really cool thing about Holst's The Planets is that it is a mini mood library all by itself with each of the 7 movements titled with the name of a planet having a completely different emotional content.  Nearly all of the major moods were represented so it became a standby goto album if I didn't already have another piece of music in mind.  A good number of my poems were composed with one or another track from this album playing on a loop.

I've since lost the records I'd kept on which music conjured which mood and which had taken ownership of which story and haven't got around to recreating it.  The memories of this valuable tool were triggered by listening to some of the classical pieces on the Super Mind Music YouTube channel.

I had gravitated to classical, jazz and piano to accompany my writing as I'd learned that, at least for me, it was important that the music I listened to was instrumental or foreign language (as in Operas or the Chorale in the 4rth movement of Beethoven's 9th) as any use of words that I recognized yanked me out of the dream state and out of the story and even out of my own thoughts as tho my own thoughts were being overwritten by someone else's.  Apparently tho when it is a language I can't understand the voices are just another musical instrument.

 Several more of my one time Write By library of music are represented in this collection. Among them are:  Vivaldi's Four Seasons, several more Beethoven pieces (but sadly not my most favorite music ever, his 9th symphony), several Mozart, and some Bach, Chopin, Handel, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky.

But that's not even half of what's in this library. There are many other music genres represented from acoustic, trance, ambient, electronic, contemporary, and jazz.  Several pieces were composed for this project.

All of the positive or neutral moods are represented: contentment, peace, acceptance, trust, ecstasy, bliss, joy, euphoria, calm, energized, alert, open, love, compassion...  If I need to conjure any of the negative moods for a poem or scene, I'll have to look elsewhere.  But then again, I probably don't need the help with fear, anxiety, anger, bitterness, resentment, irritation, doubt, revulsion, regret, sadness, grief etc. as I'm well practiced in all of them.

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Monday Poetry Train #64

I've talked about Lawson Fusao Inada here a number of times. He has been Oregon's Poet Laureate and an America Book Award winner but that isn't my main motive for continuing to bring him up. He was my creative writing professor in the late eighties when I attended Southern Oregon College in Ashland Oregon. (Southern Oregon University today.) I am bringing it up again today because I've got a DVD of him reading his poems and talking about his childhood in the American internment camps checked out of the library. Not the one above but What It Means To Be Free.

Lawson Inada was the one who woke me up to the power and potential of my own unique viewpoint and pointed toward the way to develop my own voice. We studied and practiced both poetry and fiction in his class. Before doing the poetry section with him I had never considered poetry to be part of my path as a writer. I wrote for his class the first poem that I continued to like as time passed. I see Soul Mirror as one of the first true things I made out of my own heart and knowledge. It still speaks to me in startling ways to this day.

I took his contemporary literature class as well which introduced me to the power voices and stories of women and non-WASP writers. These stories opened the world up to me and probably helped prepare me in ways I can only guess at when the moment of my break with my childhood religion came in the early 90s. I cannot overstate the influence this amazing man has had on my development as an artist and a thinker in my own right. I first learned from him two of the techniques for tapping into inspiration (aka the right side of the brain or non-linear thought) which I continue to use: listening to music and gazing at art. Once we had learned how that felt, he taught us how to gaze at the world around us and see it fresh.

He gave me personally the assignment to describe something I saw on my daily forty-five minute bus ride to school every day. I described a woman I saw on the bus who appeared to be talking to herself or possibly performing on a stage only she was aware of--a woman with red hair down to her waist and a face that looked like a shelled walnut. That woman walked onto the stage of my first Faye story as Estelle Star in 'Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities.' Which story I also began as an exercise for his class. The story that grew to become my Fruits of the Spirit story world with a cast of dozens.

Because I'm busy with the kickoff of NaNoWriMo and at least partially because we lost power last night for five hours between 10:15 PM and 3:30AM, pretty much the entirety of my usual work session, I didn't get a new poem written for today so I'll just leave the link to my Poem Portal in which I try to keep links to all my poems posted in Joystory. It needs to be updated some. More recent poems missing from the portal can be found through the Poems by Joy Renee Lable below this post.

Oh, and I can point to the poem at the top of my sidebar under Obama's picture. That's one of my Haiku. And with that, I will take the opportunity to encourage all my American reader's to VOTE tomorrow. Whoever you favor, VOTE. It is the most solemn duty of every American. VOTE.

Since Rhian has been too busy to keep Monday Poetry Train running lately, Gautami Tripathy has taken on that task until Rhian can return. Find more passengers here.

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Matrimony by Joshua Henkin--Book Giveaway

Enter to win a paperback copy of Joshua Henkin's Matrimony, inscribed personally by him to the winner.

Note: the cover image to the left is linked to Joshua Henkin's site were there are a lot of related materials such as reader's guides, praise for this New York Times Notable Book, an exerpt and Joshua Henkin's blog, among them.

Also, I've been informed that the opportunity to have Mr. Henkin join your book group's discussion of Matrimony via phone chat which I blogged about Thursday, has been extended due to strong response. The deadline to sign up has been extended to midnight, September 30.

Below the rules for entering I will discuss my own experience with reading Matrimony.

This will be a drawing via random number generator from the pool of valid entries in comments on this post between now and NOON Pacific Coast time, next Monday, September 29, 2008.

This drawing is open to anyone in the world and even PO Box addresses are acceptable. You don't have to have a blog of your own to enter. And you are welcome to enter even if you have previously won a contest on Joystory.

A valid entry is a comment on this post AND a contact email provided either in your comment or, if you prefer, via an email to joystoryATgmailDOTcom. (That format is used on web pages to prevent web crawlers from harvesting emails for spammers.) If you choose to email your @ to me, be sure you clearly identify which comment on this post is your entry. If there is no @ clearly connected to an entry it will be disqualified.

If, in the case of a win, you would like your name in the winner's post to be linked to your URL then be sure either your comment or your email includes it.

Now in order to encourage you to help me spread the word here are two ways you can get extra credit:

1. Blog about this contest and send the post's URL to joystoryATgmailDOTcom with subject Matrimony Giveaway and I will add a second incarnation of your name to the drawing.

2. Your name will be entered again each time another entrant mentions you in their entry comment on this post as the one who sent them. Whether they learned via your blog or another way is irrelevant. Just be sure they know to refer to you by the same name or screen name with which you entered.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Now, since I just finished Matrimony myself not three hours ago, I'm feeling too intensely wrapped up in the story to provide anything like a formal review, so I'm going to just ramble for awhile about my experience of reading the story. Actually, you know, I'm not sure how much getting distance has to do with it as I don't think I'm cut out for writing formal reviews. I don't much care to read them myself and writing them feels about as appealing as dissecting a frog. But I love reading stories and I love to talk about stories and I love to talk about reading stories.

Matrimony appealed to me on several levels. The story is set in a number of college towns between 1986 and 2005 thus spanning most of the same decades as my own marriage (though mine began more than a decade before the two couples followed in Matrimony) causing the current events that impinged on the characters to trigger memories of how many of those same events had entered my own consciousness. I must of have graduated from high school a full decade before Julian, Mia, Carter and Pilar but I entered my own freshman year of college only nine months before they did, though having been married for six years already I did not experience campus living as those four nineteen year olds did.

Those two and a half years I attended college were the best of my entire life. I noted at the time that it was as exhilarating as falling in love. It was the exposure to ideas and the encouragement to explore them and talk about them that I was in love with. So ever since then I have been drawn to stories set on college campuses.

Because of my own experience of entering college nearly a decade after graduating high school, I was able to identify with Julian when he entered graduate school nearly a decade after graduating from college. The same feeling of displacement because of the age difference between him and the majority of his fellow grad students had discomfited me also. Then when he walked away after only a semester and a half when a family emergency had rearranged his priorities, explaining to a fellow student only, "Life calls." I could deeply understand because a series of events out of my control had forced me to leave school before graduating. Though he more than half wanted to leave while pulling me out of college and out of the college town and all the way out of the state had been about as easy as extracting an impacted wisdom tooth.

As I mused in Friday's post, reading stories for me has been affected by my own training in writing stories. I credit one of my Professors, Lawson Inada, for showing me how to learn from a story how it was made. A few years later his pointers were reinforced when I read Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction. So I can't resist talking about stories that way whenever I can get away with it. Taking care not to give spoilers, I will share a few of my observations on how the story Matrimony was made.

The novel is comprised of sections most of which are set in different college towns, starting with the freshman year of Julian and his best friend Carter and their respective girl friends Mia and Pilar and coming full circle back to that fictional Massachusetts college for their fifteenth reunion. Each of those sections seemed to me to be nearly self-contained stories in their own right with distinct beginnings, middles and endings. It is hard to judge for sure, having read them in order, whether any of the later ones could be encountered on its own terms without prior knowledge of the others. But I can say that I tended to read each section in a single sitting much as I would a short story, feeling a sense of closure and finding it felt natural to set the book aside for a time (whether fifteen minutes or fifteen hours) as each section ended. Each section had its own crisis point and resolution connected with its own integral plot. And yet the whole was definitely greater than the sum of these parts. They are deftly woven into a singular tapestry with a unifying theme and structure.

It is not just the marriages of Julian and Mia and Carter and Pilar that are encountered in Matrimony. The marriages of Julian, Mia and Carter's parents are also reflected upon. The overall effect is to create a examination of the institution of matrimony as a function of society.

Nearly from the moment he graduates from college Julian is engaged in writing a novel himself. He struggles with writer's block and self-doubt. No need for me to elaborate on how easy it was to identify with that. But I do want to share one very startling insight Julian had about the writing process that has given me cause to re-re-evaluate my own work habits and writing process. Quoting from pages 189-190:

Julian had gotten paint on his overalls, and on his shirt, too. Henry was speckled and spattered himself, and the house appeared no better. It looked as if a gigantic ice cream cone had dripped down the side of it.

"You better hope your landlady doesn't show up now."

Henry dipped his paint roller into the can and tossed some paint against the wall. "It's a lot like writing," he said. "You get it all down on the page and then attend to the mess."

Julian had once heard an analogy made between writing and architecture. You had to lay down the foundation before you focused on the molding. But he went about things differently. He revised as he went along. Every sentence had to be right before he moved on to the next one because each sentence grew organically from the one that preceded it. For him, the foundation was the molding.

Emphasis added by me to highlight the point I need to contemplate. As this precisely describes the way I used to work and at some point I came to see it as a problem that needed fixing having encountered countless similar analogies to the 'make a mess' and 'lay a foundation' ones presented here. I need to think deep on this. Especially with NaNoWriMo fast approaching. I may have something more to say about this in an upcoming Friday Foray In Fiction post.

For now I leave you with two videos. The first of Joshua Henkin being interviewed about Matrimony and writing. The second a video book trailer of Matrimony.

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Falling

This is the theme music and opening credits to the 1990 TV show Twin Peaks. Here is the version titled, Falling, with lyrics sung by Julee Cruise.

Falling into a storyworld for a writer can be a lot like falling in love. That has been my experience in the past and it is happening again. I want to spend every waking and sleeping moment thinking about the object of my affections. Which makes it all the more frustrating when it seems to be trying to shut me out. At least this time it took me only a day or two to remember the secret of almost infallible access to that mystical-magical place where the story lives.

Music.

I have mentioned it before here on several occasions and not too long ago gave credit to the college prof who introduced me to this technique for wooing the muse. That was Lawson Inada back in the late eighties when I was attending Southern Oregon State College in Ashland, Oregon. Inada is currently Oregon's Poet Laureate. I was going to include the links to the posts here but I'm too anxious to get back to work to go hunting for it. If you are interested in learning more about Inada you can find those posts where I link to info about him and talk about his significant influence on me by following the Poetry Train label and scanning for his name. Or do a Google search of Joystory for Lawson Inada. I guess if I'm going to keep mentioning him, I should gather the relevant links in a quickly accessible place and create a label for him here.

And I wouldn't be surprised if I find more occasions to mention him as the 70 Days of Sweat procedes. Because the storyworld I am working on was born in a story I wrote for his creative writing class. That is, Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities, the story which I posted the first of four parts in Friday Snippets last Friday.

It was in his poetry class, that he introduced us to the effect of using music to create a mood and to bypass the critic which is often the cause of writer's block. I can't remember when I translated the concept from poetry writing to story writing but it turned out to be one of the most powerful tools. It is like casting a magic spell.

Now I need to introduce another major influence on my FOS storyworld and explain the inclusion of the video at the top of this post. The short story I was writing for Inada's class in 1986 was not completed. It was probably still under 3000 words when it got set aside when the next semester's work load took over. It wasn't until 1990-92 that I returned to working on it. In the months preceding that, I had been one of the many who went completely gaga over David Lynch's Twin Peaks. I was disgusted and angry when they canceled the show. I had been nearly as enthralled by the music of composer, Angelo Badalamenti, featured on the show as by the story and its world of eccentric characters with sometimes dark agendas hidden beneath placid masks.

A few months after Twin Peaks was cancelled I started working on my 'Dead Cat' story again, and began to see beneath the surface of my three schoolmarmish characters into a veritable cauldron of conflicting emotions and motivations. It was also around this time that we bought our first CD player and one of the CDs my husband bought for me was the soundtrack to Twin Peaks. As I often do when I am obsessed by something, I listened to that soundtrack on endless repeat for hours and hours. I did not set out to fix the association between that music and this storyworld but that is what happened.

I did not realize this had happened until many months after I had finished Of Cats, after I had wandered away from the storyworld for some time and then was struggling to find my way back to it. I happened to be listening to the Twin Peaks soundtrack while I was thinking about my characters and the plot for the story which would become Making Rad Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes, and suddenly it all came alive for me again. The mood, the setting, the themes, the characters that already existed in scenes and those I had contemplated including, their relationships and motivations and the plot elements, including those that never made it into my notes. After that I seldom worked on what had by then become my Fruits of the Spirit storyworld without the accompaniment of that sound track.

I don't know why it took me a whole week to remember that. But now that I have and have implemented the musical spell, I'm expecting things to break loose any moment. Already, after less than a day of immersion in the music, memories of story elements that existed only in the hundreds of pages of notes and rough drafts that were lost when we abandoned our storage unit in the Silicon Valley in 2001, have begun to swarm.

I'm not going to concern myself with word count for now. Because of the way I work, roaming about from file to file it is hard to keep track of it. I can only give a guesstimate and at the moment it isn't very impressive, still under 5000 after a week. But my progress in the past week cannot be measured by word count or any other countable thing. The hardest thing for me has always been to get engaged and stay engaged in the story. So my two major accomplishments this week have been to immerse myself in the storyworld and to remember and start to apply the techniques that I've learned work to keep me there or return me to it after a hiatus.

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Monday Poetry Train #7

CRUCIFYTHE CRITIC To write and not worry if all is spelled right, To write and not think of the good and the bad of it, To write and not judge, neither budge A finger to backspace or erase, Thinking only of white space, Fingers flying like birds, to fill it with words- With thoughts sublime or absurd, With plots simple or complex, With dreams shallow or deep, With observations, inspirations, aspirations, To make someone-if only me-laugh or weep, To make their brows perplex, To slake their verbal thirst For soothing nouns and zesty verbs. Wandering solitary in thicketed woods, Wooing amid airy leaf-lace that enchanting face, That muse, unnamed, neglected, un-embraced, until That harassing harpy who begrudges-even sabotages- The art of it, is banished from the heart of it. So crucify the critic writer, and write!

This was the first poem, and still one of the few, that I composed directly on a word processor. This was back in the late eighties when I was going to college. Before Windows and the GUI that gives us the plethora of options we take for granted today. I remember thinking it was funny that I was writing about filling up white space when the screen was really black as tar with font that glowed either gold or green, depending on whose computer I was borrowing time on.

So you can see, I've been musing about the creative process for eons.

This was one of my earliest efforts at poetry that wasn't a class assignment. I'm sure the inexperience shows. I was in a playful mood at the time some of the lines came to me but that playfulness was overlaid with defiance. I was a mite ticked off at my nemesis, those harpies of perfectionism. I tricked them by pretending that I was just goofing around. It was just an exercise at learning to compose on the keyboard. I never took this one seriously. But I always get a kick out of it when I stumble upon it in my portfolio or files. So maybe its worth sharing.

In learning to compose via keyboard, I was attempting to follow the advice of one of my profs, Lawson Inada, who had suggested that the word processor might be the tool that could free me from those harpies and thus should be considered a necessity rather than a luxury. His comment was made after I had returned to class from a holiday break in which I had visited my family where I had used my Dad's Apple and tripled the word count of a short story I had been struggling with. I had turned the several hundred words that had taken me several weeks effort into two or three thousand words in just a few hours.

That short story became the seed for what I now call my Fruits of the Spirit Storyworld, that multi-generational epic, which I mention here occasionally. So I have a lot to thank Lawson Inada for. I wrote about him in my second Poetry Train when I shared Soul Mirror, a poem composed for his class. I'm going to just quote the relevant paragraphs from that post:

The first draft of Soul Mirror was written in 1986 for a college poetry class taught
by Lawson Inada who is currently serving Oregon as Poet Laureate. I took a
creative writing class and a contemporary literature class with Inada while I was
attending then Southern Oregon State College now known as Southern Oregon
University. If you have any time at all, please follow the links above to
get a sense of who Inada is as a writer, an American and a human being.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that what I learned about writing,
thinking, being, and me under Inada changed the course of my life. I cannot
imagine what going through the psychological and spiritual upheaval of 1992-1996
would have been like had I not learned how to let the reading and writing of
story help me think and write my way into a new story. One that neither left the
old story behind nor allowed it to chain my soul but rather carry it like a
precious gift.

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