hello and thank you for joining us i'm christian lash and my pronouns are they and them i am with the children's services department and i'm on cpl's rainbow pride committee this virtual program is part of our lgbtq plus pride month series of events for this program it is my absolute joy to welcome distinguished author yoon ha lee a korean american science fiction and fantasy writer who received a ba in math from cornell university and an m.a in math education from stanford university yoon finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for story ideas yoon's novel nine fox gambit won the locus award for best first novel and was a finalist for the hugo nebula and clark awards its sequels raven stratagem and revenant gun were also hugo finalists his middle grade space opera dragon pearl won the locus award for best y a novel and it was a new york times best seller yoon's short fiction has appeared in publications such as fnsf tor.com and clark's world magazine as well as several years best anthologies yoon's middle grade space opera dragon pearl was also named one of cpl's best of the best books yoon joins us to discuss many topics including identity space operas both children and adults and new and upcoming books including dragon pearl's upcoming sequel tiger honor with that i'm thrilled to begin our discussion with yoon holly i guess um we can dive right in if that's okay with you sure absolutely so um as you as you know um we i'm part of the um rainbow pride committee here at chicago public library and um so we are doing this for um part of our pride month programming and so a natural place to start is you know kind of to talk about um some of your um writing and some of your characters you know a lot of your books and a lot of your stories do include queer characters and so that you know kind of makes me wonder are there you know other ways in which your um your own queer identities influence your writing you know it's mostly in deciding to include queer characters and queer societies uh a book that was really influential to me growing up or i guess a series of books was mercedes lackey's valdemar books because they had you know they had daniel who was gay and they had a number of queer characters and also um maybe not uh the best example from a modern standpoint but ann mccaffrey's purring books because they had the uh they had various queer characters and i thought i would like to continue that in writing books where characters like myself could be seen and reflected yeah i know as a non-binary person myself i've really appreciated reading um just all kinds of books with non-binary characters and yours in particular and the reason i say yours in particular is because i think you do a really good job of having non-binary characters that are just people living their lives like everybody else um i think a lot of queer fiction is so focused on these you know identities as service to the plot or identities to explore some of the um i guess trauma narratives and the the difficulties that we face in society and those stories are absolutely important and crucial to tell um but i i really appreciate having stories like yours where non-binary and trans and queer characters are just people living their lives i think one of the things that enables me to do that is that most of the time i'm telling stories set in a secondary world so for example if you're writing about a queer character in the 1990s it's it's a little hard to escape some of that narrative because that acceptance wasn't a part of general society the other thing that really made me think about this was actually not in regards to queer fiction but a friend of mine rachel brown is a jewish author and she said something that really struck me that all the books about jewish characters when she was growing up were holocaust or jewish trauma narratives and sometimes she just wanted to read about a jewish character having adventures and just being jewish without that you know their identity being you know a jewish i guess jewish coming out is maybe not not the same thing but you know their identity as trauma being a focus of the narrative so i thought of that in regards to queer and trans and non-binary characters doesn't say maybe the characters can just be themselves having their own lives yeah um so i i know that um you know in prior um conversations like we've talked about um you know how there are more non-binary writers that are writing um non-binary characters um and i'm wondering if you have um any favorite examples of not just non-binary but any um queer trans um authors who are writing stories about their own communities uh one of them is river solomon who wrote an unkindness of ghosts i will say that it is somewhat heavy reading because it's a it's a colony ship that has managed to reproduce in sort of a um really horrible way at the antebellum south so it you know there's a slave plantation and there's racism against you know there's racism basically but it's such a well-written book and it really pulled me in and um the k one of the characters is gender variant and not neurotypical which i really appreciated and um the other author i actually don't know how to pronounce your name so i'm gonna drop it into chat i think it's esteoli liu and um the book it in the watchful city which is actually the first book i read that not only that had multiple neo pronouns being used for different non-binary characters and i mean i'm not widely read i'm a very slow reader but it was the first time i had seen that and it worked so gracefully to differentiate the different characters under different ways of being and i really um appreciated that yeah thank you for adding to my to be read list i have read an unkindness of ghosts and that was absolutely i agree with you it was heavy but just such a powerful book i know whoever's has written at least one other book i sort of lose track because as i said i'm a slow reader but they warned me that like their next book would have lots of fungus and i'm like oh i don't know i have a fungus phobia so i'm gonna maybe give that one a miss yeah um so you know this kind of leads to the question of um how do you think um stories or the um kind of you know powerfulness or meaningfulness um of stories changes um when they are by authors for writing about their own communities i think you do get a certain kind of authenticity with the caveat that sometimes i get the feeling that especially in minority communities people are expecting a particular kind of narrative and of course not all non-binary people have the same experience not all trans guys have the same experience not all jewish people or asian americans or whatever you know we all have our own individual life stories so um i think it's important to recognize that someone can approach the same identity from from many different angles the other thing i want to be cautious about is that sometimes people ask uh authors for credentials in ways that can be kind of damaging and i'm thinking of the isabelle fall helicopter story situation where um she wrote a story about about gender about gender dysphoria and it was some people did not receive it well and that it finally came out she was sort of forced to disclose that she's a trans woman and i think nobody should be forced to come out as sort of a hey i am an authentic moment especially when there are safety considerations involved so i do think we have to be a little bit cautious i mean absolutely there are narratives out there that are not well done or that are harmfully done but at the same time i think demanding that people disclose to us oh hey i was a rape survivor or hey i'm a trans guy or hey i am queer sometimes people have very good reasons for not disclosing that information to the public yeah i think as always you know when we talk about uh marginalized identities things can get um very messy and very complicated in so many ways um but i you know i i do um i i know i always appreciate reading um books that are you know from people that are writing about their own communities which kind of leads um into my next topic which is um you know you weave so much just beautiful folklore into um pretty much all of your stories um and i know i've learned a lot about um some of that more traditional um folklore through reading your books and then being curious and looking up you know some of the some of the different things and so um i was wondering if you could uh tell us a little bit more about um you know some of the folklore and traditions that show up in your writing and if there's any um uh stories that you know particularly inspire you as as you're weaving those threads into your books you know when i was a kid i started out reading tons of classical mythology that was really where it started like my my dad was really into the iliad and the odyssey and greek myths and he would tell me those stories and then i started branching out my mom found me a book of polynesian folk tales um i started reading norse folk tales i even got some books of korean folk tales and my parents are like yeah haha that's a thing so i i do like to read widely i especially loved uh reading fairy tales and my dad was really into the ballet and there are a lot of stories like swan lake that got adapted for the ballet so i just try to cast a wide net and um i i do think that as i grow older i try to work in more korean folklore into my stories and most of that i got from reading i got from reading a book called korean folk tales uh logically enough by an author who uses a romanization system that i have never seen anywhere else like he just sort of made it up but he would have stories about nine-tailed foxes who it you know everyone thinks because of pokemon and naruto that not nine-tailed foxes are sort of cuddly and in korean folklore they are not cuddly they're out to sleep with you and then like tear out your liver so yeah um you know go ahead oh there are also stories about um folk heroes and you know just sort of the general the general feeling of fairy tales i've start i've been writing my own sort of fantasy fairy tale on my patreon uh for for some of my followers and i think there's something about a story that draws so heavily on archetypes and you know those big fantasy fairy tale archetypes that's really appealing yeah i know um uh fractured fairy tales are gaining a lot of of traction as of late um and there's been some really well done ones um i think the latest one i read was um deep and darkest red um anna marie mclemore who did a really fabulous job with the the red shoes um i think the last one that really made an impression on me was katherine valente's uh deathless which takes uh i can't pronounce russian costa the deathless or heartless or whatever however it goes and mixes it with uh the history of the siege uh in world war ii where the germans come and the russians are in there starving in their city so it's again it's very heavy reading but it's so brilliantly done and i just love it when people take old material and make it new yeah um i know when when i've done outreach visits lately to um you know schools um and um child care groups um a lot of the older kids are now like asking if we have you know books on greek mythology or norse mythology or all these different you know folk tales and mythologies um and i know a lot of that was spurred by the um popularity of rick riordan which you you know um your middle grades books um dragon pearl you know were published under the rick riordan presents um imprint um how um i'm curious um if you have read any other um books that are in that imprint i read a couple of them i've read uh which one the first arusha book which was really funny and the first one by jennifer cervantes and then i had to stop the sal and gabi break the universe by carlos hernandez i had to stop reading that one not because it was bad but because it was so good and there it got to this point that was like really emotionally traumatic i won't spoil it if you haven't read the book and i was like i can't continue this because this is hitting me too too close to home so yeah um kwame and balia's uh strong books yes tristan strong is actually next on my on my file yeah yeah so really great stuff i just uh you know the there's one coming out every month and it takes me a month to read a book so i just cannot keep up with how fast they're coming out but that's a good thing right yes good problem to have yes um so you know i mentioned dragging dragon pearl and um so for some books we will put um genre labels on them like whether they're fantasy or whether they're mysteries or you know sci-fi and we had so much trouble with dragon pearl and i think we eventually just didn't put a genre label on it because it's kind of this like sci-fi space opera fantasy mystery ghost story folktale like and it it just sounds like you know so odd and complicated to have all of these different threads but it's it's all woven together just so beautifully into this story about family and about honoring oneself um i just i i loved it so much and i have to give a shout out to my mom who works at a at a book bindery and she was actually the one who introduced me to dragon pearl into your writing um so you know i'm wondering um with all of these complicated threads and genres that you weave in is there a certain um you know process that you use as your writing to kind of keep track of all of this i wish i could say there was but i i you know i just sort of throw ideas together into the blender and something comes out uh you're mentioning the label the genre label stickers actually makes me smile because i have this problem in my um in my documents folder where i categorize different writing projects and for the longest time i would have a science fiction folder and a fantasy folder and anyone who's been following my writing for any length of time knows that i write a lot of science fantasy and so instead of creating a science fantasy folder which would be the smart thing to do i would just at random pick either science fiction or fantasy and then like not be able to find my file when i want to look for it now i have a middle grade folder which i guess is just the dragon pearl series but yeah um organization is not one of my strong points i i feel your pain um organization um actually is one of my strong points and i was a cataloger before i um came to the public library but um there are some books and and yours is kind of the top of the list that that defy those um categories um which i think you know makes it all the more interesting and powerful and also allows um you know when people come in and they're looking for something new to read and you ask okay well what kinds of um genres do you like and you kind of try to do that interview where you can find rita likes and um with so many you know genres and pieces too dragon pearl it's often one that that we can recommend um to almost anybody um so i am just so excited for the sequel to dragon pearl which i saw um you know has has is out on on uh goodreads now so we have a title and we have a cover so tiger honor and that cover oh my goodness it's gorgeous i got so lucky with the um with the cover artist for those books uh vivienne toe t.o uh she was the art director for the lego batman movie and yeah but she does fantastic art i've been incredibly lucky yeah so um anybody who has not seen that cover yet um go to yoon's site or to goodreads and and just look at that cover it's amazing um i will say i was very interested to to read the blurb um because while it is a um sequel to dragon pearl the blurb at least um seemed like it focused on a different um main character and so i was kind of curious about that and i don't know if you're able to to really um talk about that a little more without um giving spoilers i don't think it's really a spoiler uh the main character the pov character for tiger honor is sepping who is a non-binary tiger spirit and they are the i'm blanking here because i don't know of a non-binary english word that is like english that is like nephew niece yeah i was gonna say there there are some different ones thrown around but the one that um is gaining the most traction is um nibbling or niblet okay um they're the nibbling of captain juan from dragon pearl so they've grown up with captain juan as their hero and then they learned that captain juan has gotten into extremely terrible trouble and then captain juan uh gets involved with their training crews and um that's when seven meets min and fixes on men as the enemy so min does make an appearance she's a major character lots of stuff happens with her but she's not the point of view okay and i wanted to do this because i wanted to write a non-binary character uh pov in this series i know that there are i've written non-binary characters before as side characters and i wanted to do one as the main character and um yeah i thought it would be a good way to move the series forward without without it feeling too much the same i have this terrible problem that if i write a book and it feels like i'm retreading old ground i get bored so i have to change things up yeah um and and that kind of leads into you know if uh seven fixes on men as the enemy um you know you saw this a little bit in dragon pearl but particularly in your adult writing as well i i've noticed um that a lot of your characters are not like purely the good guys or the bad guys like there's a lot of you know moral moral greatness and a lot of um complexity um woven into um your stories and into your um character development i think it makes it feel um to me at least it makes it feel more real more authentic because none of us are you know purely good or purely bad right there's not that defining um you know bold line yeah i actually really enjoy morally gray characters or even all very dark grey characters which is why i write them it's funny because my husband prefers for there to be a clear unambiguous hero so he has a hard time with my books because that's not really something i do very often yeah i know um i you know i thought that that's you know really what i wanted is i wanted people you know to to have the those clearly defined um roles and then i read um oh my gosh it's escaping me now um holly blacks oh yeah yeah um her elf fame um series and um the way you just couldn't figure out who was the good guy and who is the bad guy and by the end you're like there really isn't um and i it was through through that that i really developed a love of those morally gray characters and it was not long after reading that series that i um dived into your adult novels and um noticed that also you know in in your adult novels and so i really um you know had a new appreciation for that moral greatness i was once on a presentation with some of the other rick riordan presents authors and jen cervantes says that she loves me when she decides on a main character she loves making a hero someone who who is doing the right thing and i said that i like to write someone who who sort of starts out with a really big flaw because the thing that i find rewarding to write is those transformation arcs and the uncertainty of are they going to become a better person or are they going to slip and fall like that's what energizes me but you know there's a there are different stories for different kinds of readers which is which is the great thing about the world of books yes that arc um of of transformation as soon as you said that um i just i literally just this morning finished reading um the second book in the um children of blood and bone um and that's you know kind of through this entire um entire series like you know you're you're trying to figure out um whether inan who you know the ruler of this um kingdom like is he going to you know like you said is he going to have that you know good transformation or is he going to fall and we still don't know and um i really you know i think it adds a lot um to to the writing um so we're kind of um starting to get into a little more of your adult writing and speaking of gorgeous covers i recently finished um your your newest novel phoenix extravagant um which features the um dragon on on the cover and that dragon just like completely stole the show in this novel it was probably my favorite character and i know we talked about um i know we talked about pronouns earlier and i found it interesting that that um you know a lot of times when when uh machines in you know in sci-fi are are personified they often get assigned gendered pronouns but the dragon um was referred to as uh with the pronoun it through throughout the novel and i thought that was an interesting choice and i wonder if you um have any more to you know to say about uh why that decision was made uh i did it to avoid pronoun collision because champi the main character is non-binary and they're the protagonist and the book is written in third person so if i had two characters that were going by they pronouns that would have the potential to get confusing and the dragon like what does it even mean for a robot dragon to have a gender anyway and it is mechanical so i decided that it would be okay to use the pronoun it i'm reminded uh and i mean this is not just non-binary or inanimate inanimate um robot creature pronouns i had a writer friend nancy sarah who once had to do a writing assignment where she was writing three female warriors um fighting a battle in the dark and she had to differentiate who was doing what at any given time without getting the reader confused with all the she's and hers running around so it was really just for technical reasons that i decided to assign the dragon okay um yeah so i like i said that dragon was just my favorite part of the book i mean it just completely stole the show and um you know added some some real moments of levity um in the way it interacted um with the with the humans around it um like you know sentient machines and sentient ships are a relatively um you know common sci-fi trope but um everyone you write um you just have such a talent for making them you know fresh and unique and often the the uh sentient machines and ships that you write are really funny and really sarcastic i have i have a liking for snarky characters it's sort of a weakness and the you know i've seen books where they make try to make the robots robotic and that's never really worked for me narratively i mean i have no opinion you know i'm not an ai researcher i don't have an opinion on whether that's realistic but i always find um non-human characters more interesting when they have a distinct personality or a distinct point of view and so i and especially if there's a sense of humor in there as well yeah um i really um i really appreciated the theme behind phoenix extravagant and i'm going to to plug cpl's um summer learning theme a little bit here because our summer learning theme is focused on art and phoenix extravagant fits really well um with that theme you know the exploration of art for art's sake um you know the the themes of cultural appropriation when it comes to art and this really unique um system of magic in which art uh is a magical tool and pigments are are a magical tool um and it felt like you know it felt to me like it was quite a shift from your first um you know adult adult novels the the machineries of empire um series you know was very math heavy um and yet somehow even with these um very different themes it all you know felt like your you know your style and your writing um so i was wondering um what the inspiration was if any for this shift from a from a math heavy um world to a magical kind of art driven world sure with phoenix extravagant i was inspired by the fact that i had taken up watercolor painting i started drawing because i have a fantasia i can't visualize things to any meaningful degree and i wanted to be able to see what my characters looked like so i started drawing my characters and i know that there are many talented artists out there but at the time you know this was before my books had come out i was broke so it was like if i want anyone to draw my characters it's gonna have to be me i'm gonna have to do it myself and it just sort of went naturally from there into watercolor i thought at one point that i was going to get by with just like six colors and that has not happened i have a whole collection of watercolors now uh and i learned about this paint called uh quinacridone gold po49 and the thing about quinacridone gold which i'm probably mispronouncing is that it actually um the world supply ran out it was manufactured as a pigment for cars like it's this golden color and it went out of fashion like nobody apparently wanted gold colored cars anymore so uh a paint manufacturer called daniel smith bought up the world supply and used it in their paints and this was all very fine and dandy except like they they ran out like they they literally physically ran out of the chemical stockpile and when i was a little kid playing around with my crayola colors it never occurred to me that you could run out of a color like that this would be a thing and if you do digital art for example it doesn't matter if you want to use a particular gold color or pink or gray or whatever you can use it infinitely and it doesn't matter but if you think about what a paint is it's a chemical and there's no such thing as an infinite supply of any chemical it is possible to run out so um there was sort of this watercolor like panic buying of this particular color as people realized that they were out of the color and some people you know it's a it's a beautiful color it's it goes from this pale yellow to this deep gold and mass tone and water colorists were paying like upwards of a hundred dollars for a half pan uh cut that kind of craziness and it occurred to me like uh you know what if you kind of made a magic system out of this where you had a scarcity of um pigment paint pigment created from artworks and um you you would have to use them up in order to create your magical effect the other thing that uh happened as i was writing this was that i did some research into the japanese occupation of korea and i discovered that a lot of the kinds of things that i wrote about in phoenix extravagant actually happened um the japanese making off with uh korean artworks and so on so even though um phoenix extravagant is about a very different kind of character jeby is you know an ordinary person who just wants to sit at home and paint um the themes of imperialism and colonization are similar to some of the themes that i explore in machineries of vampire sorry that was long yeah no that was that was really interesting um i had no clue about the that that gold so that was a really interesting story kind of like you know the toilet paper during the pandemic yep yep um it also kind of reminded me of um anish kapoor um and um stuart simple i don't know if you are familiar with those artists you know kind of trolling each other yeah yeah so um it might be a little hard to dive into this without spoilers but that ending oh my goodness yeah i mean i as i was coming up to this ending and i was seeing how few pages were left i was like oh my gosh like there's no way this this book can wrap everything up in this last few pages so there must be a sequel and then the ending happened and i gotta be honest man that was a gut punch that was just like like like hitting a brick wall and you know the more the more i sat with that ending the more it made sense and um now i you know i think i kind of understand you know why you ended it in in the way you did and and really in order to be true to the story there probably wasn't another way to end it um but you know as i you know read reviews um about that book it seems like you know it was very controversial with some you know really understanding it and loving it and others were just like you know they hated it and it ruined the book you know i i'm wondering if you can you can kind of expand on on your decision on ending it um in that way without giving spoilers sure so cheby and um friends let's say friends champion friends i wanted to give them sort of a happy ending because i got tired of this thing where the non-binary character or the queer character or whatever you know gets gets broken up or unhappy ending or somebody dies or whatever like i did not want that to happen at the same time um if you look at the historical background the book is sort of based on the japanese occupation of korea korea was not freed because of plucky rebels korea was not freed because a mechanical dragon came around and you know beat up all the japanese and drove them out was freed from the japanese occupation because the americans came in japan in world war ii and ended in 1945 and then of course things get very complicated and five years later we have the korean bar but you know i was like i i'm really not up for writing writing things that go that far into the history but if you look at the historical background and the fact that um outside intervention was what drove the japanese out of the korean peninsula i was like this is the only this is the only way i can go so i guess you know we we're kind of to this this point where you know phoenix extravagant came out a few months ago you've got tiger on her um coming out in you know a few months from now and so i'm wondering if you know you have anything else going what's next for you and for your readers uh i have a collection of fairy tales coming out in i think october of this month it's called the fox's tower and other tales and it's coming out from andrews mcneil publishing and it's a sort of a re-release plus some news stories of those patreon flash fairy tales which i really enjoy writing those because i write a lot of downer books as you may have noticed and with the fairy tales i really endeavor to write something short and sweet and uplifting it's not something i really do a lot in my novel length work so that's coming out um i am working on a novel presently but because i am waiting for the official announcement i cannot say anything else other than i am writing on a novel and things are happening okay fair enough um i'm really looking forward to the fairy tales though um and and i also i also have to say like i've i follow you on twitter as i'm sure many of your your uh readers also do and i am just like endlessly entertained by um your cat pictures and how much your cat is involved in um it almost seems like your cat is very involved in your writing um i also have um what i lovingly refer to as a velcro cat um um yeah tell it tell us about tell us about your kitty uh we adopted her seven years ago because i decided i wanted a cat and we had decided that it was time we were going to do the cat thing she's my very first cat and um she's really friendly and not very bright like the first day we brought her home and we plunked her down in front of her food bowl and she flopped over showed her belly and started to purr and everyone had warned me that the belly is a trap do not pet the belly but she just kept purring so i tried petting her belly and she really liked this was on her first date like we were strangers she had no idea who we were or if we were gonna you know murder her for i don't know cat me so she's just a really easygoing trusting cat and we think she's really a dog and the reason my twitter feed is like 90 cat pics by volume is that you know some people use their twitter to get into political discussions or i don't know any sort of heavy discourse and i i don't think there's anything wrong with that but my observation from watching a lot of twitter arguments is that i have never ever ever once seen anyone change their mind about something because of a twitter argument so i'm opting out i am just going to sit here and provide cat pics to bring more joy to the world that's it that's what i do i appreciate that i i'm not i have a twitter account but i'm not really on there um you know a lot um but my facebook is pretty much um half queer posts and half cat pictures so my facebook my facebook is um sort of wall to wall funny facebook animal geek memes and i every every two days i call my husband and daughter and say hey you have to come look at this they're like oh it's facebook again isn't it and i show them all the jokes that i've accumulated like i'm the vector for bad facebook memes yeah my um my spouse and i will often even if we're in like the same room we'll often like text each other like memes that we've found just scrolling through um facebook or or reddit that's that's definitely part of you know relationshiping is look at this funny thing i think that pretty much covers things um you know i i just um i really appreciate you um taking the time to to speak with us um and you know i'm i'm really looking forward to um to reading you know the things that you uh have in the works yeah it's been my pleasure thank you so much for reaching out of course thank you so you can check out yoon's books for free here at the chicago public library this program will continue to be available on on the chicago public library youtube page so please encourage your friends to watch it on demand and please visit the chicago public library website for many more upcoming virtual events at shypublive.org [Music] you