10 Questions for Cindy Juyoung Ok
- By Edward Clifford
Photograph by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
I stay outstretched in a November
coat, not abundant and not wanting
to be. A machine I own mistook shootings
for students in a transcript, ushering
me to tilt canals toward titles and curate
hedges into pages.
—from "Table of Contexts," Volume 64, Issue 1 (Spring 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In kindergarten I wrote a neat cursive reflection during recess expressing elaborate distress over a change in dynamic between me and two other five-year-old friends, and drew Mary Poppins, who I guess represents reconciliation. I have another piece from that age that starts: “Once I had the best dream that I’ve ever had.”
What other professions have you worked in?
I teach undergraduate creative writing now and was a science teacher in a large school district for much longer. I had a few additional gigs as a lesson reviewer for a nonprofit, summer program teacher, and debate coach then. In a full-time grad program, alongside teaching and fellowships, I did several new jobs, some of which I still do: rape crisis call center advocate (usually accompanying people to and through the hospital system), standardized test item reviewer (generally for math or science questions), dissertation editing (for education and English doctorates), study subject (when at research universities), commissioned translator for documents and events (and less commonly, poetry), creative writing instructor at various nonprofits . . . I think I’m missing one or two. On a more casual basis, a bit of bartending, babysitting, and essay reviewing.
What did you want to be when you were young?
A doctor and ballerina. And later, a teacher and writer. In between, lots of other concerted combinations.
What inspired you to write this piece?
I wrote this poem at the end of March 2021, when I was a student and a teacher, both attending and facilitating creative writing workshops online. I don’t think I had physically stepped outside since the shootings in Atlanta, and a shooting at a Boulder grocery store the week after made clear that “opening up” cities meant increasing executions. I must have referred to one of these events in a recorded video for an asynchronous class. I subtitled these using a machine that transcribed the spoken word “shootings” as the written text “students” (I don’t have with me my physical notes that would confirm all these details, so invariably this is a bit of a spiel and spielness may betray the poem a bit).
That mistranslation moved me. My whole life I have been a student and/or I have taught students, and in the U.S. there is no abstraction I can make of students without shootings or shootings without students. I hid during active shooter drills starting in elementary school and locked down my classroom in drills and non-drills as a high school teacher, wondering how many teens I could lock into the storage room next door in case a shooter had a key for the classrooms but not the closets. Working for a news organization, I covered a theater shooting the morning after, collecting information about those shot as it came out, some of them students, one survivor a student at my then-college, a university 40 minutes from a school shooting of children only months later; years after and on the other side of the country, my grad school thesis presentation scheduled for a weekday afternoon was delayed because that morning there was a campus shooting (“only,” some said, a murder-suicide).
The same momentary collapse happened with “tending” and “teaching” around then (as I wrote about in another poem, this was my misread and not a machine’s). But the automation of the shootings/students error seemed to reflect the automation and outsourcing of mass death by the state and its supremacists, as much by refusal to curtail, provide, or acknowledge as by action, in a pandemic. As a child I was disturbed by the obviously admirable actions of Dave Sanders, the teacher in Columbine who was shot in a hallway trying to get more students to safety and died in a classroom (like many other teachers who have died with and for their students in the countless shootings since).
Once I had students, I began to understand how he organized for others, that even while attacked and afraid, generous, tender facilitation was possible—an energizing care for student life. It was a year when I felt like the static racialized and gendered object of the projections of strangers and people I knew, and only I felt real to myself. But I did not completely indulge my solipsism because I was trying to write and trying to teach. The poem comes, in this way, from gratitude.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I welcome whatever noise makes music with a few exceptions including the loud second hand of an analog clock and the neighbors’ sex. Any other complaints I have about sound are usually misdirected reasons to explain why I’m not writing; if I’m writing, neither daytime construction noise nor my loud friends in chortles can divert me.
Last year when I tried to lengthen the attention capacity of my sight and hearing, Pauline Oliveros’s “deep listening” music and her work on radical consciousness guided me through the latter process. I wasn’t listening while writing but trying to listen to it and do nothing else, which I guessed would probably be fruitful to writing eventually.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I have no lasting routines around literary writing and I hope never to. I approach it in an unsystematic fashion, without theory about what makes it happen or norms around how writers work. I find it charming that so many writers have some specificity of outfit or odd time of day that structures their practice, but for me, it’s different every time, and not in an interesting way. I don’t aim for a specific pattern and any that emerges lasts only days or weeks.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
In every case and for each version, my partner.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
A frustration I have with writing is the struggle to depict a particular eeriness or immensity around how my dreams feel visually or aurally. I’ve always wanted to learn to draw and exactly recreate the architecture of those made spaces, which seems reasonable, but my boundless and unreasonable answer might be film. Kurosawa’s Dreams is a series of short films that make up a whole, each a particular and strange dreamscape, many scenes feeling to me exactly how dreams feel, even when not mine. He was already an important director, though, so I think interest and budget were built in, and the fact that his were all recurring dreams maybe allowed for a more intense recreation of detail. All my dreams have been once only, so far, so my films might be hazier, and probably would have fewer women conspiring toward and causing central male protagonists problems and death, though I guess I would likely reveal some other pattern.
What are you working on currently?
I’ve been working on an email all week to send my students before our classes meet. Their college recently put out a statement that made explicitly clear many trans and nonbinary students are not welcome in its “women’s college” community. A stylistic and grammatical analysis of the statement is revealing, with phrases like “identify and live consistently as a woman,” which invites policing and essentialism, or “as urgent as ever” about women’s rights, during a period where trans people are attacked in every way, as well as associating “reproductive health” with the word “woman.” As writers attached to an institution it feels important to be specific about the role that language plays in violence, but I realized a linguistic proof against the statement is basically beside the point and doesn’t center student experiences and feelings. I deleted that draft and I’m writing and rewriting it still.
What are you reading right now?
The theme is architecture, though I continue to feel outside of its language and history. I’m slowly reading the impressively thorough Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements by Jane Mah Hutton, a landscape architect, and I’m in a chapter about conquest, reading, and monument in Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, introduced to me by an architect named Zahra Safaverdi. Next I’ll read Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present at the recommendation of Donté K. Hayes who, as a sculptor, is kind of an architect of clay (my return suggestion was Katherine McKittrick), and the last poetry book I read was by Renee Gladman, who has an architectural practice of both drawing and poetics.
CINDY JUYOUNG OK is the author of the forthcoming debut Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024), recently chosen by Rae Armantrout for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
