Chin-Sun Lee’s debut novel Upcountry (Unnamed Press, 2023) opens with a shocking and intimate loss. It’s a scene handled with both deftness and brutal directness, and I immediately knew that I was in the hands of a daring, commanding author.
Selected as one of Publisher Weekly’sBig Indie Books for Fall 2023, Upcountry is set in the New York town of Caliban and revolves around three women whose lives become entangled post-Recession: Claire, the downwardly mobile Manhattan refugee; April, the impoverished single mother forced to sell Claire her possibly haunted house; and Anna, a young, pregnant member of a reclusive religious sect. The novel filters modern questions about marriage, motherhood, and money—and old questions about death, ghosts, and god—through a Northern gothic lens.
Lee and I caught up over email about class, real estate and labor, crafting characters, and the career that has led to her new life as a debut author.
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The Rumpus: You’ve called Upcountry a “Northern gothic.” What does that description mean to you, and what draws you to the gothic lens?
Chin-Sun Lee: Gothic stories have an atmosphere of mystery, madness, and the uncanny or threat of the supernatural. Southern gothic conjures tragedy, destitution, elements of the occult and grotesque, often in sultry rural settings. Northern gothic tends to amplify the chillier aspects of the Northeast region as reflected through its setting—like creepy old houses, gloomy wintry landscapes—and its people, those with suspicious mindsets and religious moralism.
I’ve always been drawn to gothic stories, starting with the Grimms’ Fairy Tales I devoured as a little girl. Those tales conditioned me early on to the thrill of certain tropes: good versus evil, betrayal, sacrifice, mysticism. Later, as a teen and young adult, I loved noir in books and movies. Gothic and noir both have elements of heightened drama and even melodrama, but unlike horror which I can be squeamish about, they focus less on physical violence and more on psychological repression or trauma, where the present is haunted by events from the past. As a writer, anything pertaining to the psyche is a rich, vast junkyard I can poke around in to create narratives that align with my own obsessions.
Rumpus: Upcountry adapts one of those classic tropes: the haunted house. The novel starts with one character, the financially distressed mom April, losing her family home to Claire, the also—but differently!—financially distressed Manhattan escapee. Houses continue to figure into the story and become sites of death, entrapment, and torturous memories. It’s a timeless symbol, but also particular to the recession era. Did you always envision this as a kind of haunted house story? Or—in exploring modern life, why can’t we get away from real estate?
Lee: Well, real estate is an indication of the economy, which reflects our stability as a society. Shelter, after all, is an elemental necessity, something we take for granted until it’s threatened or gone. Which leads me back to your first question: no, I didn’t initially envision this as a haunted house story, but I started writing with the image of a house I saw on a walk one summer in the Catskills. As in the novel, it had a dilapidated, drained pool enclosed by a chain-link fence, which suggested financial decline. It made me wonder what might have happened to its occupants. In early drafts, April’s house—later Claire’s—was creepy, but my beta readers suggested I really amplify that aspect, so the gothic tone became more pronounced not only in that house but throughout the entire town. Haunting to me isn’t necessarily about spooks and ghosts. It’s about how any setting can energetically absorb and then disgorge whatever misdeeds might have occurred upon it. In my novel, the presence of ghosts could either be taken at face value or as a projection of my characters’ impressionable psyches. That ambiguity is deliberate.
Rumpus: There’s something so physical, too, about these characters’ struggles inside and outside of the house. April makes a living cleaning houses when we meet Anna. She’s heavily pregnant and performs penance by doing chores and suffering confinement. Of course, there’s a visceral and life-changing incident in April/Claire’s house early in the story. I was also struck by the way Claire punishes herself with exercise and extreme diet. It made me think about how women’s bodies are exploited by others but also how we hurt ourselves.
Lee: Oh, that’s an interesting observation. I hadn’t really considered how much physical toil I put my characters through, except for Claire, but you’re right, they do deal with a lot! Domestic labor and the labor of giving birth definitely take a toll, and yes, women often end up punishing themselves to meet a certain ideal. Claire’s compulsion is somewhat extreme, but women’s bodies and actions are more frequently and critically judged than men’s. It’s not surprising some feel their self-worth is overly bound to their physical appearance and fitness.
Rumpus: Before you turned to writing, you spent many years in the fashion industry. Do you think that influenced this book—if not the women’s appearances, then the class or regional perspectives?
Lee: My fashion background didn’t influence the novel directly, but the 2008 recession did because many of my friends in that industry lost their jobs. Some were in their forties or older and had held big-salary positions, like Claire. Suddenly they found themselves unmarketable, too young to retire and too old to start over. I was lucky to still have work, but fashion is a youth-obsessed industry, so I knew I, too, had a shelf life. As an immigrant whose family experienced financial ups and downs, I’ve always been intrigued by the social construct of class. The year 2008 was the first time I really registered how little it matters having certain protections like education, stability, or a good employment history. The years since have shown even more how we’re all susceptible to unexpected disasters, whether on a personal or broader scope, and that very little separates us from those far less fortunate.
Rumpus: April and Claire seem like natural antagonists: former childhood friends who grew up to have very different lives and now are tied together by this house. Anna—the young member of an insular religious sect, the Eternals—follows a way of life quite alien to April and Claire. How did you decide to bring Anna into the story, and how did you develop the Eternals?
Lee: Actually, I knew the Eternals would be in the novel before I conceived of Anna as a character. The Eternals are based on a religious group I encountered when I spent several months in the Catskills, and while that group did practice an archaic form of Christianity and embraced certain old-world customs, they were and are much more benign than my fictional version. They were also very much assimilated with their secular Christian and Jewish neighbors. I found that remarkable, but of course with fiction, harmony isn’t as interesting as conflict, so I began imagining what might cause a community to turn against a group it had once accepted.
April and Claire are both older white women who’ve been weathered by their life experiences. Anna, by contrast, is the much younger naive foil, so her compliance with the cult’s strict rules is plausible due to her unworldliness and unusual upbringing. That she’s also Asian in a mostly white community emphasizes her sense of being an outsider. All three women are outsiders, for different reasons, and that, along with the house that connects them, completes the triangle.
Rumpus: Was it your experience in the Catskills that inspired the novel? What was your first idea?
Lee: I think seeing that drained pool with its economic implications might have been the first seed, followed by the character of Claire, who was based on someone in the Catskills I actually found quite controlling and irritating! I try to avoid annoying people in real life but in fiction, they’re a lot of fun to write about. Once I had Claire, a natural antagonist had to be someone completely different and looser, so that’s how April came to be. And once I encountered the religious group that inspired the Eternals, I knew they had to be in the story as well.
Anna’s character came later, and initially she was much more tertiary—and also white. In fact, she was white in the version I sent out to agents when I was querying. I got a lot of full manuscript requests but no offer of representation and after a few months, I made the cynical calculation: I’ll bet they see my name and expect the Asian character that never materializes, so I should just make one of my characters Asian. Ironically, right after that decision, my agent reached out to say she was very interested. When I told her I was thinking of changing Anna’s ethnicity, to her credit, she didn’t push me in that direction. She only said, “Hmm, that could be interesting.” But when other agents began to weigh in seriously, too, a lot of them leapt at the idea, so I knew from a marketing perspective it could work. So that was my concession to tokenism which, sorry to say, I’ve observed is still very present.
Rumpus: I recently had a conversation with another writer friend about realizing our protagonists had become ciphers, while the surrounding characters became centers of drama and psychological depth. Did you ever struggle to find a balance with Anna, April, and Claire? How did you make sure they remained equally vibrant and essential to the story?
Lee: I didn’t really struggle balancing April and Claire, at least in my initial draft, though I was cognizant of giving each enough space within the novel. But once I decided to make Anna’s character more of an equal third, that involved some complicated reconfiguring, not only because I changed her ethnicity but because in very early drafts, some of her sections were originally written in her husband Luke’s point of view. And then even after I signed with Unnamed, my editor, Chris Heiser, wanted Anna’s voice much earlier in the novel than in the version he’d read. Originally, the first chapter’s perspectives alternated between Claire and her husband Sebastian. But once I added in sections from Anna’s perspective, I also had to allow April to weigh in, so I changed the Markey’s bar section, which had been in Claire’s point of view, to be written in April’s instead. Hence, the first chapter overall became more polyvocal.
Rumpus: Often, I think, in our early stories or early drafts, writers have an urge to protect their characters. But Upcountry is, to borrow a familiar blurb-ism, unflinching in how it allows tragedy to unfold. Did you ever struggle with an instinct to shy away from painful events?
Lee: No—if anything, I probably have a propensity to go toward darkness, both in my reading and writing tastes. To that end, I greatly admire Paul Bowles, who conveys misfortune and violence with an elegant, almost casual viciousness, the way an animal is casual about killing its prey. There’s no malice. Rather, the violence is simply instinctual—as it can be for certain people and in a broader sense, nature and the world at large.
It’s interesting because in my real life, I avoid and fear dark situations, and as a person, I generally feel optimistic and content. But I see all the terrible possibilities that can and do occur in this world, and I think that exploring those possibilities in fiction is a way for me to imagine how I would process those events should they happen to me. That said, writing painful or tragic scenes can be difficult on a craft level. I want them to feel as vivid and visceral as any upsetting event in real life would but also true versus overwrought or melodramatic.
It’s challenging to imagine and convey in words the sensory details of a shocking or painful event. Especially because in real life, when those things happen, we often disassociate. So it’s about balancing the sharp details in the moment with the blurry, out-of-body sensation that simultaneously occurs.
Rumpus: Real life, of course, is brutal. Do you think fiction has a responsibility to show that brutality, or, in contrast, does it ever require some balance of hope and positivity?
Lee: I think the only responsibility a work of fiction has is to satisfy the writer’s vision and to engage the reader. Whether that’s through realism, fantasy, humor, or horror is of no concern to me. Writers have a variety of obsessions and styles of expressing those themes, and my scope of interests is wide. All that matters to me is that the writing works on the sentence level and that the story feels new and compelling.
Rumpus: You began studying writing at the age of forty, after a long career as a fashion designer. What made you decide to enroll in that first workshop, and when did you realize this was the start of a big change?
Lee: Actually, I first enrolled in a writing workshop in my late twenties at NYU but dropped out after two sessions because the instructor was so disdainful of her students and clearly unhappy about having to teach. It really squelched my confidence, which in hindsight was so stupid, but I didn’t have the wisdom then to take it in stride.
Flash forward to my late thirties, when a dear friend was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and then died two years later. It really shook me. I realized so clearly that all we have is this one life, so why not at least attempt to realize this ambition I’d secretly harbored for so many years?
Thankfully, the first continuing education workshop I took at the New School was a completely different experience from the one I had years before. Our instructor, John Aiello, was so generous and encouraging, which is essential for new writers. From there, I took more workshops and eventually applied to and got accepted by the New School’s graduate writing program. Still, it took another four years after getting my MFA before I broke away completely from my design career. That decision was a combination of job burnout and an awareness that time was working against me. I recognized that if I was going to grow and make real progress as a writer, I needed to devote my time completely to it. I’m not saying that’s necessary for everyone—nor is it even possible. I’m amazed by how much some writers can juggle, and I was also very lucky to have made enough money in fashion to have a cushion for the lean times. Which I have certainly experienced and still do. But I have no regrets and in fact, so much gratitude for how things have played out for me, especially in the last year.
Rumpus: Poets & Writers recently named you as one of its Five over Fifty. What gifts have your experience and maturity given you as a writer?
Lee: Patience, focus, and resilience. Writing is a long game and there’s no guarantee ever of success or even publication, as I’m sure you’re aware. And because my stories are so character-driven, I think my lifetime of experience has exposed me not only to a variety of different personalities but to the modulation required to perceive the underlying causes and complexities.
Rumpus: I’ve always liked the idea that with each story you write, you teach yourself again how to write a story. What craft lessons did you learn from writing Upcountry?
Lee: I definitely learned through trial and error how easy it can be to spin out of control when you’re writing a novel. There’s so much room to play around with but you need to rein in your main protagonists and themes. And at some point, usually around the thirty-thousand-word mark for me, having even a loose outline is helpful.
My method is to write out potential scenes on index cards and then move them around to form a breadcrumb trail toward a narrative. I also think having an ending in mind, even if it’s just a nascent idea, makes getting there so much less onerous.
The ending can change, but once you’ve got about sixty thousand words down, you’ve got to start thinking of potential conclusions and work in that direction, even if you detour because of some unexpected idea that just pops up from your brain. That’s actually the thing you want to happen and the most exciting, rewarding part of any writing project. It happened for me with Upcountry.I knew I wanted April’s connection to the house to resolve in the way it did, but I didn’t know how to get there. And then, one day while I was deeply immersed in the draft, it just came to me, like a gift from the universe. I’ve only had that happen once before with an ending, when I wrote a story, “The Ravine,” published back in 2015. But smaller revelations of that type have occurred throughout the writing of my second novel, which I’m still revising, and those tiny detonations feel like magic.
Rumpus: The Catskills setting is so different from your current home, New Orleans. Has the change in scenery affected your writing?
Lee: Well, I have yet to use New Orleans as a setting in my fiction, so in that sense, it hasn’t affected my writing. But like the Catskills, it’s more quiet and slower paced here than in New York City, where I lived for twenty years, so I find it much more conducive to my writing practice. It allows better focus.
I wrote the early chapters of Upcountry while I was in the Catskills over two summers, and it was great to live in the environment I was depicting. But even after I left, the topography, community, and customs remained vivid in my mind. It’s really helpful to be in the setting you’re writing about, especially early on, but for me, what’s more important is discipline and freedom from external distractions. You need to leave the real world behind—wherever that happens to be—in order to inhabit the world of your story.
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Author photograph by Craig Mulcahy
