Chin-Sun Lee is the author of “The Ravine,” originally published in Eckleburg. Her stories and essays have appeared in Your Impossible Voice, The Believer Logger, SLICE, and Shadowbox Magazine, among other publications. She is a contributor to the anthology Women In Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014), edited by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton. She was interviewed for a feature story on the Playa Artists Residency along with other residents in Oregon Public Broadcasting’s (NPR) podcast State of Wonder; hosted by April Baer, which aired on April 18, 2015. The segment also includes her reading an excerpt from “The Ravine”; written during her 2014 residency and set in Summer Lake. She also collaborated and performed in the video “Spinning World” by the art/literary/rock band The Size Queens (also featured in Medium Cool at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review in November 2012), which premiered on PANK’s blog website on October 3, 2014 http://pankmagazine.com/tag/the-size-queens/.
Eckleburg: What captures your interest most in your work, now, as a reader?
Chin-Sun Lee: Any passage that evokes a sense of unease or dreamlike blurring between what is imagined and real. I’m a big sucker for disorientation.
Eckleburg: What are you working on now?
Chin-Sun Lee: I’m writing the penultimate chapter of my novel, The Eternals, which will be finished this summer! The title refers to a religious group living in a small rural town in the Catskills that becomes the center of a tragedy which polarizes the surrounding community. The novel is set during the 2008 recession and addresses themes of economic disparity, class warfare, territoriality, cultural resentment, and xenophobia. The first (and title) chapter was published as an excerpt in Your Impossible Voice, in September 2015 http://www.yourimpossiblevoice.com/the-eternals/
Eckleburg: Who and what are your artistic influences?
Chin-Sun Lee: Storytellers in print and film, and in no particular order: Henry James, Paul Bowles, Mary Gaitskill, Chris Kraus, Alfred Hitchcock, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, Denis Johnson, W. Somerset Maugham, David Lynch, Jonathan Glazer, Javier Marias, Asghar Farhadi, Haruki Murakami, Peter Weir, Jane Campion, Cormac McCarthy, Patti Smith, Michael Ondaatje, Todd Haynes, Todd Solondz…to list a handful.
Eckleburg thanks Chin-Sun Lee for spending some time with us.
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