The Smoke from Hidden Fires
David Newkirk
Churn: An Illustrated Novel-in-Stories, by Chloe Chun Seim, Texas Review Press, 2024.
What is it like to be a fire-breathing dragon?
Classical mythology does not provide any answers. Sure, we get a lot about the dragon slayers. But don’t bother looking for dragon-centric stories. We never see the world through the eyes that live behind the fiery plumes. We can speculate about the dragon’s point of view. We can wonder about the cost of surviving, just surviving however you can, in a world where “home” is an alien place and dragons are not welcome. We can make guesses about the struggle needed to see the next sunrise. However, their interiority is behind an opaqueness, trapped in a Schrodinger’s box whose insides humans can never observe. Unless, of course, something transformative happens.
In Chloe Chun Seim’s Churn: An Illustrated Novel-in-Stories, two adolescents flee the latest and most violent episode of mutual domestic violence between their soon-to-be separated parents. Chun, the brother, seeks refuge in a lake. Something pulls him down, down into a deepness that is deeper than life, a place where the weight of the lake splits the complexity of the world into simple colors:
Green are the weeds that wrap his ankles. Purple, the color of fear. Orange is the hand that grabs him, but not before he hears
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something. A voice. It offers a message, but his brain fails him. He searches his memory for a word, a command, but all he recalls is the feeling. Of being cleaved. And the sound, from which no human or animal origin can be named.
That place—perhaps the spirit realm, perhaps a room behind the door to the collective unconscious, perhaps nothing that can be known, only lived—makes a subtle change to Chun and his sister Jordan. When Jordan challenges the depths to pull Chun’s nearly lifeless body to the shore, they emerge transmuted. Like Orpheus and Eurydice, the return to the land of the living comes at a price. Chun now has seizures when faced with adversity, twitching on land like one of the carp that followed him in his downward odyssey. And Jordan? Here there be dragons. When faced with strong emotion, literal smoke, quite real, quite thick, quite hot, pours uncontrollably from her mouth.
But Churn is not a supernatural story. It is far better. Although, it would be understandable if the reader were to conclude that Jordan and Chun might be superheroes. Superheroes whose power is surviving while coming of age in the alien world of Salina, Kansas. Surviving as Korean Americans in a desert of diversity, as children of deeply damaged and largely absent parents, materially impoverished but spiritually rich. The fact that Jordan is attracted to her best friend Amy—a relationship that will take a decade to bloom—is just another obstacle our ordinary yet extraordinary heroes must overcome. A series of carefully woven vignettes, Churn is a novel made of connected short stories, a scrapbook of literary snapshots from a family photo album rendered in prose.
Churn is, however, also more than well-crafted storytelling with deep interiority into compelling characters. Its invocation of place will resonate with anyone who has spent any time at all in Western Kansas. It calls forth the world of small towns marked
only by interstate exits and Taco Bells. It invites the reader to country roads driven by cars that send “gravel dust high into the black and windless October air.” It conjures an adolescence that the reader may only vaguely remember—a time of spiked drinks, of handsy boys, of summer camp and spin the bottle.
Churn was awarded the 2022 George Garret Fiction Prize. Reading the haunting, gentle prose and the paragraphs that take jazz-like riffs into the world of our characters, it is easy to understand why. Jordan and Chun are people that might be found in an old black-and-white scrapbook at a thrift store—lives that were, places gone by, time lost beneath a lake of yesterdays. Unlike forgotten anonymous portraits, by the end of Churn, the reader feels they have known Jordan and Chun forever. They feel that they have been right there, beside them on their almost mythic journey.
Which brings us back to dragons. Dragons, you see, are not always portrayed as monsters, fodder for the blades of crusading knights. Some cultures see dragons as symbols of wisdom, courage, and protection. They guard secrets, protect the weak, and are wise beyond any measure. They aren’t even always recognized as dragons.
Especially if they grow up in Salina.