Postscripts

Ploughshares is pleased to present Paul Yoon with the nineteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his short story collection Once the Shore: Stories (Sarabande Books, 2009). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction.

This year’s judge was DeWitt Henry, one of the founding editors of Ploughshares. In choosing the collection, Henry said: “Loss, grief, yearning, and sensory relish permeate these eight stories. At his best, Yoon is magical, even visionary. His prose rises to the fourth dimension that Hemingway spoke about. His stories are set on the mythical Solla Island (a composite of actual islands in South Korea), which becomes a country of the mind, where characters of different genders, ages, classes and cultures move dreamlike through rites of loneliness, endurance, and communion, relating passion to immensities of time and space.”

Yoon says of himself, “I will always consider myself a reader first and foremost. Writing, for me, is my way of participating in the reading culture.” After the “usual years of rejection letters,” his first story was finally published by One Story and later chosen for Best American Short Stories. “That whole experience,” Yoon says, “with my first publication was something out of a dream, a little miracle.” He went on to win an O. Henry for the story “And We Will Be Here,” which he published in Ploughshares and the pen/New England Discover Award for emerging writers. After the collection was published, it met with critical acclaim.

Yoon was born in New York City, though the family moved around following his physician father and finally ending up in Dutchess County n Poughkeepsie. He later attended Phillips Exeter Academy and after high school attended Wesleyan University. He admits that although he was a decent student, overall he “wasn’t very good in the classroom.” He isn’t sure why. “Shyness, maybe,” he confesses. “I always preferred being inside my own head, and I think perhaps I felt too exposed in a classroom setting. “I had a handful of really close friends . . . and I was the type of person who stuck with them. . . I was also the guy who sat on a bench or a hill with a book and smoked cigarettes.” After college he took a number of jobs: waiting tables, working in bookstores and in book and magazine publishing, and serving as a faculty assistant to professors at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Of his work, Yoon says, “I never know what it is I’m writing exactly until much later. I tend to start with images and write about them, and in that way I find the story. There are certain themes and situations that interest me, of course, and I know I want to write about them, but forming that into a narrative is all very murky in the beginning.” He goes on to describe how his collection came about: “The first seed of the book started in upstate New York, at a writer’s colony called Ledig House. I wrote an early draft of the title story for Once the Shore... I’m not sure exactly why I was so obsessed with this island. I think it enabled me to visualize a piece of land in its entirety, from above, like a map, and I could slip in and out of its landscape, all its streets and trails and hills and cities and rooms and hidden corners. I think I was interested in having that fixed boundary—that enclosed setting, and juxtaposing that with the infinity of the horizon and what seems like endless water everywhere.”