This past Thursday, Western New England University’s Department of English and Cultural Studies, along with the Creative Writing Program, hosted Jung Yun, author of O Beautiful, for their New Writers Reading Series. The reading was held in CSP and was followed by a Q&A.
Jung Yun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and was raised in Fargo, North Dakota. She has studied at multiple colleges and has earned her M.F.A in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Massachusetts Review, the New York Times, and more. She is currently an associate professor of English at the George Washington University. (Interested in learning more about Yun? Visit her website, jungyun.com, to learn more. All information in this paragraph was cited from her website.)
The reading began with an introduction by the Creative Writing Director, Dan Bevacqua, who introduced Jung Yun and thanked everyone involved in the revival of the New Writers Reading Series. After the introduction, Yun was brought to the front and prefaced her reading by explaining how she was going to be jumping around in her novel and cutting in every so often with commentary about the situations that the main character of the novel was going through, along with background about the setting.
O Beautiful, the novel Yun read, follows Elinor Hanson, a struggling journalist who travels back home to North Dakota to write about the Bakken oil boom. As she returns home, the landscape has become unfamiliar and unrecognizable to her. The area is overrun by men seeking out fortune and success because of the boom. The story follows Elinor’s struggles with misogyny, grief, and alienation.
Yun jumped around to a few scenes that had a strong impact on the audience and painted a vivid picture of the overall themes of the novel. One of the most notable scenes from the reading saw Elinor berated by sexist comments from a crowd of men as she attempted to interview an elderly woman for her article. The scene was haunting and a stark reminder that these kinds of interactions don’t just appear in fiction; they are very much real.
Missed out on this amazing event? Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for more information regarding the next author in the New Writers Reading Series.
