A Brief Sketch

Often, I wonder if my youthful pleas to become a savant of letters had been a Faustian bargain in disguise. There is no room for a fall-back plan and so my frenzied passions have been aimed towards becoming a novelist and a poet my whole life. In this desperation, I’ve been jousting my way into scholarly academia with the discipline of a Buddhist monk. My childhood was filled with Korean, Japanese, and English, learning to engrave and accept paradoxes between cultures and language in my soft mind. I would hear music and rhapsody in my nightly dreams, filling my days with soulful poetry of diverse language and meaning. I had my family fluff me up with mystifications of swan heroines and poke me with lessons of bloody endings and mass seppuku suicides. In this, I became elated with stories and the intricacy of imagination woven into truth. I left for Japan to the Shinanomachi Inter-cultural School to learn the art of the Meiji I-novel and fell in love with Soseki’s Kokoro and Dazai’s No Longer Human. I would read about self-aggrandizing isolation through stories and absorb the Japanese appreciation for the simplicity of Tanka, Katauta and Haiku poetry. I decided when I was sixteen that fiction-writing and poetry is a never ending process of learning rather than knowing. Since then, I have been unable to control this insatiable thirst to grow alongside accomplished writers in the field of both fiction and poetry. As the Faustian bargain has been sealed, my thirst has been unquenchable. I am qualified because I am a misfit in a state of perpetual madness. I am obsessed with fiction and poetry like Vladimir Nobokov’s Humbert Humbert is with his Lolita. I am qualified because I do not sleep, I do not believe in “Plan B,” and everyday I write until my nails crackle and splinter into my fingertips.