A Conversation With Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Author Sena Moon

“It’s hard to keep the imposter syndrome at bay.”

Best Debut Short Stories 2020: The PEN America Dau Prize is the fourth edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll feature Q&As with the contributors, whose stories were selected for PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and for the anthology by judges Tracy O’Neill, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Deb Olin Unferth. Submissions for the 2021 awards are open now.

*

Sena Moon is a graduate of the MFA program in prose at University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she was a recipient of the Tyson Award in Fiction and the Hopwood Undergraduate Short Fiction Award. She is the third-place winner of Glimmer Train’s Short-Story Award for New Writers (May/June 2018). She hails from Seoul, Korea.

“Dog Dreams” was originally published in Quarterly West.

*

“Hello, hello,” goes the voice, immediate and rushed. It gives me an unexpected long pause to decide whether to hang up on this intrusion. Just when my thumb decides yes, I hear the voice calling out, “Jimin-ah, is that you?” before drowning into nothingness. My thumb perspires against the heat of the end button. It’s Yeju.

Seoul is sweltering that summer. Sometime around May, the sun became a nuisance and not a sporadic beacon of warmth and beauty. By June, hellfire. People share near-death experiences over the phone and I secretly rejoice. The heat wave is as good a reason as any to remain in status quo, holed up and hunched in my room, festering.

“Please don’t call again,” I write back. “Even with a different number.”

But my phone pleads. “An hour,” it says, “just an hour. Okay, thirty minutes. Even less. Please.”

*

Where did you find the idea for this story?

I once saw a documentary about someone who blinded her own family for insurance money. The needle in a syringe is how she did it. The imagery stayed with me for over a decade and fell into a story.

How long did it take you to write this story?

A week, and two months of revising.

“Dog Dreams” is filled with some riveting twists that consistently take the reader by surprise. When you’re writing a story that hinges on these kinds of reveals, how do you plan out the style and timing of each narrative revelation? Do you know going into the story how you’ll deliver each twist, or do you go in without necessarily planning how each twist will reveal itself?

I start with a scene and fit the pieces later. A scene is a glimpse and the glimpse leads to questions. The questions and the reasonings behind them guide me. I didn’t plan much until the middle of the story.

The story ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, as we are cut off mid-conversation—We anxiously await Jimin’s response, but never get it. Can you talk a bit about the intention behind that ending, and what must be going through Jimin’s head in that final moment of the story?

The story had to be about the two women, not the fate of the husband. I wanted the focus to be on Jimin’s choice not to alert the husband. As of now, I’m unsure if Yeju truly meant to go forward with her plan to blind K; her main motive was to placate Jimin and save the friendship. In choosing to stay silent, Jimin was playing Schrödinger’s cat. Until Yeju decides, K’s fate is undecided, and Jimin is okay with that.

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

It helped me keep writing. It’s hard to keep the imposter syndrome at bay.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently working on a novel that is set in Seoul, about twins.

Finally, where do you discover new writing?

I love browsing Amazon Kindle in my own time. Recommendations from writer friends are also always a go-to.