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SELFIE INTERVIEW | Chin-Sun Lee

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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ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | Women In Clothes by By Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton

women in clothes

 

Women in Clothes

By Leanne Shapton, Heidi Julavits, Sheila Heti

Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives.

It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations.

Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed.

 

Blurbs

“Poems, interviews, pieces that read like diary or journal entries—all these responses help the editors fulfill their aims: to liberate readers from the idea that women have to fit a certain image or ideal, to show the connection between dress and ‘habits of mind,’ and to offer readers ‘a new way of interpreting their outsides.’ ‘What are my values?’ one woman asks. ‘What do I want to express?’ Those questions inform the multitude of eclectic responses gathered in this delightfully idiosyncratic book.”—Kirkus  

“Thoughtfully crafted and visually entertaining, this collection, edited by Heti, Julavits, and Shapton, uses personal reflections from 642 contributors to examine women’s relationship with clothes in a deceptively lighthearted and irreverent tone….it also inspires meaningful questions…the prose is spliced with striking visuals…[a] provocative time capsule of contemporary womanhood.”—Publishers Weekl

“[A] delirious assortment of conversations, essays, journal entries, and photographs…This big, busy book feels like a thrift store brimming with jumbles of clothes and accessories and alive with women’s voices. Their comments and stories are canny, funny, incisive, twee, surprising, and caring, as thoughts and anecdotes about clothes touch on everything from gender to beauty, sex, mother-daughter relationships, aspirations, money, human rights, health, work, creativity, and violence. A uniquely kaleidoscopic and spirited approach to an irresistible subject of universal resonance.”—Booklist

“This is the wisdom of the crowd, and while it’s not authoritative or prescriptive, it’s reassuring and fun.”—Associated Press

 

Publisher Information

Paperback: 528 pages

Publisher: Blue Rider Press (September 4, 2014)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0399166564

ISBN-13: 978-0399166563

Purchase HERE

 

SHEILA HETI is the author of five books, including the critically acclaimed How Should a Person Be? She writes regularly for the London Review of Books and is an editor and interviewer at The Believer magazine.

Heidi Julavits has published short fiction in Esquire, Story, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Short Stories 1999. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

LEANNE SHAPTON is a Canadian illustrator, author, and publisher based in New York City. She is the author of Important Artifacts and Swimming Studies, winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

 

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