"To Dissect, Examine, and Catalog My Alienations": A Conversation Between Yoojin Na and Rachel Lyon
by Yoojin Na
When I met Rachel Lyon last winter, I had just returned from a brutal year in New Zealand. I had no job and was sharing a Bushwick apartment with a young couple who were unexpectedly expecting. It was a painfully transitory period in my life, and I was embarrassed to reconnect with friends, yet I was also aching to be once more amongst other writers. So, I went to Hinterland Bar one night where Rachel was hosting her Ditmas Lit reading series.
Rachel struck me as the kind of person I had hoped I’d become when I first moved to the city. She was serious about her writing and accomplished yet still warm and generous. She exuded the kind of poise one obtains from achieving a true sense of belonging. Yet the Rachel that I got to know through her writing was not at all who I had expected; the female protagonists in her works are often on the edge of society, vulnerable, and alone.
Yoojin Na: Your short story “150 BPM,” published in Catapult, is a poignant exploration into the wide range of emotions that come with pregnancy. How did you come up with the idea for this story?
Rachel Lyon: Well, I’m pregnant right now, and without getting too deep into my personal experience, during my first trimester I had a lot of worry and fear about the health of the fetus. Pregnancy is like writing in that there are infinite ways a given manuscript could turn out—which can feel very daunting when you’re in the early stages of a project—though of course pregnancy is higher-stakes than writing, because it’s literally life and death. At any rate, in my first trimester, waiting for various early-stage tests to come back, I felt a panic similar to the panic I often feel when I’m in the early stages of a writing project, but tinged with a far deeper dread. If the fetus was unhealthy I knew I would terminate it (thank God and Gloria Steinem that a woman still has the right to choose in this country). Even though I was comfortable with that decision I also knew that abortion would be incredibly difficult for me on a personal level. I had this sad little plan: if I ended up terminating the pregnancy I’d take some kind of beach vacation afterward, alone, to give myself space and time to mourn and begin to cheer myself up.
In some ways writing “150 BPM” was an exorcism of all that dread and panic, and of that strange fantasy. I often find that if I’m perseverating about something, fiction can be a good way of channeling my obsession. I’m very grateful that this little piece found a home at Catapult with the wonderful editor Stella Cabot Wilson.
You are a physician and writer. Tell me a bit about how these practices inform each other.
YN: I can relate to what you said about channeling one’s obsession through fiction. Usually, in the ER, so many things happen all at once. When a patient dies, I don’t necessarily have time to step back and grieve; I have to move onto the next patient and the one after that. Then, I come home, and all these repressed feelings stir restlessly. So, writing gives me an opportunity to sit with feelings that I couldn’t process at the moment.
I think being a writer also helps me be a better doctor. I often get these tangled narratives from patients with their own biases and ideas about what went wrong. Being a writer, I’ve learned to distill the facts of the disease from personal history.
Nonetheless, I haven’t written much about my experience as an ER doctor. A part of me wants to keep my doctor-self separate from my writer-self. Yet more and more with this pandemic raging on, I find it impossible to keep my two lives separate. I feel compelled to write about what’s happening at work because it’s bleeding into my personal life.
How has the pandemic changed you as a writer and an expectant mother? What has your experience been like?
RL: I’m so sorry—it sounds incredibly difficult what you’re being called upon to do right now in your professional life, holding so much grief and processing so much death. I’m glad, though, for your sake and mine (and the sake of our readers), that you’re able to write about your experience. It’s intriguing to me that you talk about it as a kind of integration. Is that the way it feels? As if your separate constituencies, inside, are cohering?
As an expectant mother, I don’t have much to compare this to; all I can say is sometimes I’m sad and lonely, and wish I could share my pregnancy, and all that comes with it—fears, hopes, my own changing body—socially with family and friends. Particularly now that I’m in my third trimester, and I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been, easily winded, made stupid by “pregnancy brain,” and hounded by weird aches and pains, I am strangely grateful for this time I have to nap and “nest” and be in close proximity with my husband.
As a writer, though, I’ve found the pandemic really stifling. Thinking about what’s going on in the world to any extent feels incredibly overwhelming, and that sense of being overwhelmed, that anxiety, has been pretty destructive to my writing practice. I suspect it has something to do with having been socialized as a girl that, despite my own best efforts, and years of developing a personal philosophy to counteract this, deep down I still regard my own art-making as self-indulgent; it feels almost rude, not to mention frivolous and irrelevant, to work on a novel or on short stories in the midst of this collective trauma. The only thing that helps, I’ve found, is consciously writing “for” other people. So I’ve revived my little newsletter, which is meant to help others be creative in a crisis, and I’ve been spending about an hour per weekday (mostly fruitlessly) trying to write, in tandem with a friend who needs an accountability partner right now.
I would love to know more about how, as you say, being a writer helps you be a better doctor. Is the reverse true, as well? How does your work as a doctor affect your writing?
YN: Medicine offers up so much narrative material that it seems only natural to take advantage of it, yet I’ve been hesitant to draw upon my own clinical experience. I wish I could say such reluctance stems from a strict ethical code, but it’s actually more my desire to protect my identity as a writer.
For me, writing remains a place to dissect, examine, and catalog my alienations. It’s also where I lay out all my misshapen parts and trace their origins. Such an introspective process requires a certain amount of freedom and selfishness. Medicine, on the other hand, leaves no room for error or excess. So, I write to forget that I am a doctor. Without such a relief valve, I’d have less reserve to deal with the pressures of the ER.
However, lately, I find myself interested in writing about my experiences as a doctor. As I mentioned before, these days, what happens at the hospital doesn’t just stay at the hospital. It follows me home and affects every aspect of my life. So, last month for my Epiphanic column, I reflected on what it’s like to maintain a fledgling relationship while working on the front lines. I also wrote an op-ed for the NYT about the lack of conversation around end-of-life care. People are dying at rates we’ve never seen before, yet they’re not prepared for what that entails. So, the pandemic has compelled me to write urgently about subjects I’ve been uncomfortable with.
Rachel, you mentioned how the pandemic has made you feel self-indulgent about writing fiction. Personally, I believe it’s okay to be self-indulgent when it comes to one’s art. Do you disagree? Do you think art needs to serve a function? If so, what might that be? Can you elaborate on consciously writing “for” other people?
RL: I don’t disagree, no, and I don’t believe art serves any one function. I think art can and should be as diverse and broadly defined as the infinite people who make it. What makes art exciting—or, at least, one quality that can make art exciting—is when it seems to do something new, to serve a function or purpose we haven’t seen it serve before.
Maybe what is happening right now, for me, personally, in this strange period of pregnancy-in-a-pandemic, is that the functions my writing practice was serving before have shifted. The various reasons I had for getting up and working on my novel, before—which were all very personal, but which, broadly speaking, have to do, first, with the content of the book and its relevance, as I see it, to the culture and society at large; and, second, with my own identity, as both a writer and woman—no longer feel like reason enough. The book’s relevance has been dwarfed by the pandemic and meanwhile, my identity has shifted. Writing “for” or with a friend, and/or “for” the subscribers to my newsletters, has been useful, temporarily, as a meaningful reason to write. But I’m afraid my long-term, essentially existential questions about the relevance of the project, and who I am becoming, will continue to go unanswered, for at least the (semi-) foreseeable future.
You say you write in part to forget you’re a doctor, which is, of course, a part of your identity. And yet your piece in the Times is not only incredibly moving, but urgently relevant to your work as a doctor. Perhaps, just as saltwater and freshwater spring from different ecological sources, we have within ourselves different sources for different kinds of work. Perhaps one thing I can learn from you, here, is how to find a new source within myself, for a different kind of work that feels more urgently relevant to these times and to who I am becoming.
YN: I think you’re giving me more credit than I deserve but thank you. It’s funny because I feel like Lu, your protagonist in Self-Portrait with Boy. Similar to her, I’ve been using myself as a subject, and I just happened to be near something interesting at the time the shutters were going off. Though instead of a boy falling out a window, it’s New York amid a pandemic.
That said, I agree wholeheartedly with you. Yes, everything seems relatively insignificant compared to the mounting death tolls. Yes, it’s difficult and sometimes nearly impossible to take our place at our desks, our kitchen tables, or wherever else we write. Yet, we must show up. Only then will our art have the chance to surprise us.
—
Yoojin Na is a writer and an ER doctor. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Quartz, The Rumpus, and others. She is working on a memoir that explores her identity as a 1.5-generation Korean American and a formerly undocumented immigrant. She currently lives in New York City.
Rachel Lyon is Epiphany’s Editor-in-Chief.
