I’m thrilled to see how much publicity A City of Han: stories by expat writers in South Korea, which features my story, “The Mosquito Hunters of Korea,” has received!
When I wrote “The Mosquito Hunters of Korea,” I’d hoped it would find a publisher willing to include it in a magazine or an anthology, and I’d hope readers would enjoy it. But I didn’t know. So often, that’s the sorrow of writing – you put so much of yourself into a project, then send it off. Sometimes stories go from publisher to publisher for years and never find a home. You wonder if you just see through its flaws with the unconditional love of a parent. Or perhaps, like Stephen King wrote, the story is just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This story came out of my Art of Fiction course at UWM, taught by George Clark. That was a tough semester – I started four different stories, trying to find characters and a plot that stood out to me. One of those has been shelved for good, or so I think, and two others (one set in Bronze Age Greece and another in the North Woods of Wisconsin) have been going through revisions upon revisions. The fourth, “The Mosquito Hunters of Korea,” was turned in for a grade.
Many of these links are from closer to when the book came out. I’ve been meaning to share them, but COVID seemed to warp time, and now it’s months later.
(The Asian Review includes a quote from my story, “You young folks come here for your year-long assignment, and after a few months, you think that you know everything about Korea,” and remarks that this “resonates throughout the collection, establishing a division of the transient foreigners who pass through the neon-lit facades and those who stick around long enough to get to know the real Korea by traversing through the less visible terrains of the country.”)