With the closure of bookstores and in-person readings impossible, sales opportunities for small presses have largely been stymied to the point of near fatality, and the fallout is widespread.

A book or books that you once loved isn’t quite the same thing as a painful memory, but for me, rereading His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman felt similarly unapproachable because it had direct ties to a past iteration of myself.

Yoojin talks with Epiphany EIC about writing during a pandemic, the similarities between working on a draft and being pregnant, and how our professional lives intertwine with our personal lives.

When he reaches his thick arm
towards you, you might not realize

where he is aiming. You might not understand
until he seizes you, until you’ve already caught

his dirty fat hand, and spun the both of you so that now
you face each other.

“I try to work out who would appreciate reading who and make recommendations. And I tell them to think of the reader, to be kind to the reader – by which of course I mean be kind to me.”

These verbal capsules contain universes—seemingly ordinary worlds that transform, as a matter of course, in unexpected and mysterious ways. A woman gets a stomachache and lays an egg. A man gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a seahorse and floats out to sea. I’m finding them to be perfect reading for a pandemic.