FALL/WINTER 2009
Far, and Indie Next. Named Best New Novelist of 2009 by Chicago magazine, she is a recipient of a Whiting Award and a Pushcart Prize. Mun, who currently lives and teaches in Chicago, was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up there and in Bronx, New York. She has worked as an Avon Lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator. After earning a GED, she went on to get a BA in English from UC Berkeley, and an MFA from University of Michigan, where she received the first place Hopwood Award for short fiction. She has garnered scholarships from the Corporation of Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference, and Tin House Writer’s Conference, and her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Granta, Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Iowa Review, Evergreen Review, Witness, Bat City Review, Tin House, and elsewhere.
ON WRITING AND PROCESS CHRISTINE ZILKA: You have gone through your share of occupations-Avon lady, a journalist, a waitress, and a criminal defense investigator, to share some. Which job did you hate the most—and which job did you enjoy most? And why? NAMI MUN: I had a job once that involved me sitting alone for eight hours a day in a gray room with no windows. The room was small—a vertical coffin of sorts—and very bare, except for one fold-out table, one fold-out chair, and one analog gem scale. The job was this: use tweezers to pick up tiny bits of Cubic Zirconium (the size of rice kernels) and weigh them on the scale, one by one. Let me reiterate: I did that for eight hours a day, five days a week. I was maybe fourteen then, with the energy of a pogo stick. By the seventh hour, I would actually feel vomitous. The best job, hands down, was criminal defense investigations. Unlike the “CZ” job, investigations allowed me to get out of the office and visit different places every single day (for example, I would visit freeway underpass encampments to look for witnesses for a drug case; heavily-secured buildings to serve a subpoena; county jails to speak with defendants; people’s homes to interview character witnesses, etc.). The job gave me access to a variety of voices and setting, which I feel only helped me as a writer. ZILKA: And what led you to writing? (It feels like you might have settled on your “final job” as a writer—do you feel the same way)? MUN: An English Composition instructor at Santa Monica College gave a writing assignment on the first day of class. She said to write 81