Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
March 15 LITM: Silvia Park
Silvia Park grew up in Seoul and split their time between Korea and America. They received a BA from Columbia and MFA from NYU, in addition to completing the Clarion Workshop in 2018. Their short fiction has been published in Black Warrior Review, Joyland, Reactor, and reprinted in the 2019 Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Luminous is their first novel.
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The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Silvia Park: As a child, I read Calvin & Hobbes under the desk in school and got in plenty of trouble. It was worth it. Recent favorites: Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams, Skinship by Yoon Choi, and A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Park: I’m not sure if I ever wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write a book, and then they were all terrible. The process of writing is often so miserable, the career of it fiscally shaky and unfulfilling, but then I’d experience, on occasion, this ecstatic joy. It rarely lasts. But like a gambler, I’ve kept chasing it. Maybe that’s the line we’ve crossed when we become a writer. Our brain chemistry is now permanently changed, and we have to accept a life without writing is a faded life.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Park: My novel Luminous will be out on March 11. Set in a near-future reunified Korea, eleven-year-old Ruijie discovers a lifelike robot boy in a junkyard, unknowingly reigniting a family’s buried past. Siblings Jun, a police detective, and Morgan, a roboticist, have been estranged since the disappearance of their brother Yoyo, a prototype humanoid robot their father had created. They’re reunited, however, by Ruijie’s find, forcing them to confront their past and a future shaped by Yoyo’s return.
While this book may be a reflection on our uncertain future with robots, I wrote this for our readers now. For so many of us—anyone who’s ever felt off-kilter, marginalized and negated for who we are—our future is speculative.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Park: C. Adán Cabrera’s “The Familiar Phantom” and K.C. Mead-Brewer’s “Rapunzel House.” Dear friends, haunting pieces.
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Author photograph by Han Jeongseon
