▶️ Press Play: An interview with Jules Chung

"I had to trust that my life was actually part of my art"

▶️Welcome to Press Play ▶️ an interview series about creatives who have weathered a Long Pause. Today, Jules Chung shares her experience of finding a sense of purpose and faith in her work while Paused. Enjoy! 💖

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Explain yourself. Who are you; how do you identify as an artist / creative?

My name is Jules Chung and I write fiction. I’m the daughter of immigrants from Korea and grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs in the 80s. I’m married and the mother of adult children. 

I always loved literature and writing. As an undergraduate, I majored in English. I then got a law degree and worked briefly as a lawyer. In my fiction, I grapple with the drama arising from the interplay between domesticity, gender and sexuality, American middle-class life, and Christian faith. I’m working on a novel about an eldest daughter and her love for a cellist, David Bowie, and her dead best friend.

Current Author Photo: Jules Chung

You’re here because you’ve gone through a fallow period where you didn’t produce much work. How did your Long Pause come about? How long did it last?

I quit law to write and to save my health. It was a fit of YOLO that I never regretted. While my children were young, I finished a novel, landed an agent, and was subsequently rejected by the big publishers who wrote me very kind “close but no cigar” type letters. The letters were mostly about how they didn’t know how to market my book. 

That experience devastated me at first but then it clarified my sense of purpose. I knew I had to keep working and make something even better, something irrefutable. So being rejected in such a painful way sharpened my desire to make great work. It also made me confront whether writing was important enough to me to continue, even if I never got any external validation. Getting existential about the work was good for me. I decided not to give up.  

But the stage of life where I could have the extended periods of focus and mental space I needed to write my stories seemed very far away. I saw how quickly my children were growing and how many things happened every day, and I didn’t want to miss it. I wanted to look back and remember as much of this fleeting time as possible. I kept writing—in journals, in food blogs, on my phone in the Notes app, in long emails to my best friends, on the backs of receipts—but serious fiction writing had to wait.

I discovered that when I tried to put my novel-writing first, family and children felt like a distraction, and I didn’t want to feel that way. 

Approaching the end of the high school years for child number one. Me at parents’ night 2018.

I redefined my ambitions to make them about embracing the life I had at the moment, which was family life. I spent over a decade collecting material in the form of notes and ideas. Expressing something felt much better than expressing nothing, even if I was only expressing something to myself. I had to trust that my life was actually part of my art, and that the observations and notes I was able to jot down would all flow into something bigger later. Even if the actual words from those early parenting years don’t make it into things I write now, there is definitely a spirit I was able to capture in written form that persists in my imagination. 

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This is not to say that I was content all the time, of course. No way! I’m not a saint. The mental and physical strain, tediousness, and invisibility of life as a stay-at-home mom often felt like a long trek in the desert to my writer self. But the desert is where you’re supposed to meet the divine or the indomitable part of yourself. The spiritual or creative discipline for me was about finding ways to see beauty and drama in everyday life, to stay centered and be honest about my joys and my frustration in ways that were good for my work and not bad for my family and other relationships. I’d say I had mixed results, but I think that’s life.   

What about your creative practice feels like magic? What feels like science? Was one aspect more affected by your Long Pause? 

What comes to mind as I write feels like magic because I so often don’t plan it. When the details of a scene arrive vividly or the words in a dialogue feel real and crisp, I experience something probably akin to “magic” in that something profound is happening beyond my will or intention. The “science” part seems to be about “preparing the ground” or creating the conditions I need to write. I’ve learned not to take my health for granted, so I’m very careful to stick to routines that support getting enough sleep, eating well, exercise, and connecting with loved ones. I’m terrible at creating when I feel rushed or stressed, so making sure I have enough time in my schedule to be in my head and not have to talk to anyone is essential. 

How did your Long Pause change your creative practice? Has anything shifted in terms of process or medium? What does your work look like on the other side? How has it changed?

I’ve been thinking a lot about time. I’ve come to see time as an essential element of art and that there seems to be no substitute for spending time with or going through time with the work. Some well-meaning people in my life will ask me “Are you finished yet?” or “Is the book done?” and I’ve learned to smile and say “It’s finished when it’s finished.” In the same way that I promised myself not to look back on my brief time raising children with regret by staying present, I try to approach my writing the same way. If I can enjoy each day that I’m able to sit down and work, then I feel I won’t regret how I spent my time. Writing is the joy in itself.

I think I’m less precious now about my words than when I was a younger writer. I get to the point faster when I sit down to write. For me, that means connecting with the part of my imagination that is full of “juice” or an energy that feels authentic rather than writing from a pose or a persona that is trying to impress.  

Were there positives that came out of your Long Pause? What did you learn or come to terms with while you were blocked?

I’ve learned to see solitude as a powerful source of creativity rather than a cause for loneliness. 

Was your pause deliberate or accidental? Were you confident you would return to your work at some point?

My pause was definitely accidental. I was sure I could do it all or have it all at the same time. That’s just the climate I was brought up in: nothing was impossible, nothing was out of reach if you were smart enough, organized enough, hard-working enough and so on. In my mind, I could be a cheerful and present mother, keep house, host dinners, and be a good friend, sister, and daughter and write novels. I couldn’t. Finding my limits and accepting them made me a more honest writer. It’s a continuing process, of course. Everything is evanescent. 

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Jules Chung (she/her) is a former lawyer who is obsessed with the border between intimacy and friction. She is currently an assistant prose editor at The Seventh Wave. Gender, mothering, and faith have been her central themes. Her work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the One Story Writers’ Conference, T Kira Madden at Hedgebrook, VONA, and The Cabins Retreat. Her stories have been published in places including The Seventh Wave, Catapult, Chestnut Review, Jellyfish Review, Lumiere Review, and Armstrong Review. Jules is at work on a novel inspired by Sunday school, Korean folklore, and David Bowie. You can find her stories at juleschungwriting.com. Connect with her on Instagram at @glorifyandenjoy and on Facebook @juleschungwriting