An Interview with Joan Kwon Glass 

Intern Evelyn Chi sat down with poet Joan Kwon Glass to discuss her new book Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Prize and released on September 24, 2024. The collection explores themes of diaspora, identity, hunger, and resilience from Joan’s mixed-race Korean American perspective growing up in both Korea and the U.S.

You can watch the full 35-minute interview on our YouTube channel. An edited 9-minute version is included below, along with a transcript. In this interview excerpt, Joan and Evelyn talk about the opening poem “Bloodline,” the role of absence, and what the title Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms means to Joan. 

Transcript

Evelyn Chi: Welcome to this interview with Joan Kwon Glass, author of the new book Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms and winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Prize. I’m Evelyn Chi, an intern at Perugia Press, and rising senior at Amherst College, who will be interviewing Joan today.

So, the first actual question in the interview is about your first poem, “Bloodline.” It’s the opening poem, and in it, you describe the creation myth of Korea, in which an ex-god and a bear-turned-woman give birth to the first ruler of Korea. You write, “The first Koreans were part god, part beast. / Every morning I look in the mirror and ask: Which will I be today?” Why did you choose “Bloodline” to be your opening poem, and how does the poem’s discussion of themes like mythology, lineage, and identity set the tone for the rest of the book?

Joan Kwon Glass: So, the poem “Bloodline” I wrote after doing some research into Korean mythology, and it stood out to me very significantly, and spoke to me, because I feel like it’s a struggle that I’ve experienced throughout my life in various ways. In one way, asking myself, “What kind of a person do I want to be in the world?” does have to do with identity and diaspora. Because I am half white and half Korean, and I’ve often been white passing, not by any desire of my own, but that has given me a lot of strange experiences in my life, because when people can’t figure out “what you are” or “where you come from,” you sometimes get to hear things and be privy to things that you might not. So, that’s one aspect of it. 

Another is the fact that I’m in recovery from substances and making the decision on a daily basis not to use drugs, not to drink alcohol, when it’s such a big part of society, especially drinking. And really waking up every day and making that choice. And in other areas of my life, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. Sometimes I wake up and I don’t know – I don’t know if I can be the person that I want to be on that particular day when it comes to being the best version of myself that I can present to the world. So, I think in some ways, to answer that question, I chose this poem because it speaks directly to mythology and Korean history, but it also spoke directly to me, personally, in terms of my own individual and personal struggles with other aspects of my identity.

Evelyn Chi: The next question is about absence. Throughout your collection, you deal with many forms of absence: your sister’s suicide, your father’s leaving, disordered eating, sobriety, and many more. What makes you drawn to the idea of absence, and how has absence shaped you and your writing?

Joan Kwon Glass: I think absence has shaped me, my identity, my life, my choices for as long as I can remember. The very first memory that I have is the night that my sister was born. My mother was obviously not home; she was at the hospital giving birth to my sister, and it was the first night that my father put me to bed, and he didn’t pray with me. This is when I was three years old, my first memory, and as he was walking away, and the first night of my life that my mother did not put me to bed and pray with me before bed, I remember telling myself, “You are a big girl, you can do this on your own.” 

So the absence of my mother that night, the very cursory kind of putting-to-bed by my father, and then watching his shadow kind of disappear down the hallway and being left with just me, and telling myself I could do it, really set the stage for my life. It set the stage for my relationships, my romantic relationships. It set the stage, really, for how addiction began in my life, and disordered eating as well, because any time in my life when I haven’t met my own expectations, or I haven’t been able to do something on my own, I’ll reach for something that will make it feel as though I can, or make it look as though I can. 

And then, when my father left, when I was ten, there was that huge absence. And age ten is a really difficult year to have a parent just disappear from your life, I think especially to have a father – well, it’s probably just different – but to have a father disappear at that time right before puberty hits – it was just a brutal time in my life. We then moved to Korea right after my father left, so it was then the absence of my American life – it was the absence of one identity for another, but then living in Korea, I was not regarded as Korean because I looked different: I looked like a mixed-race person. So there was a lot of staring, a lot of staring on the street, a lot of questions, people reaching out to touch my hair. When I would speak Korean, everyone looked completely confused because I spoke Korean with a Korean accent. Things like that really played out in my childhood [and] have continued to kind of haunt me in different ways in my adult life. 

And then, in 2017, I lost my nephew to suicide, and then two months later, my younger sister also took her life, and that was his mother. So following that, those sudden and traumatic absences, after that I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and had really terrible symptoms for the first up to two years, really acute symptoms of PTSD. So all of those absences have shaped my perception of the world, my relationship with myself, with others, and also with my ethnic identities and national identities.

Evelyn Chi: Referring back to the title of the book, what does the phrase “daughter of three gone kingdoms” mean to you?

Joan Kwon Glass: “Daughter” is a huge part of my identity. It is a book about matrilineage. I think a lot about what is gone, and what is absent, and what remains. I am a survivor in a lot of ways. I am also a result of history and the choices that my ancestors made, and yet so much of that history is just – gone. It’s disregarded; it was colonized; it was burned; it was migrated away from; it was survived, and not survived. Ending the book with “Armistice” made sense for the reasons I explained, and the title Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms is really about still being here. When histories have been – I don’t know if “lost” is the right word – but they’ve morphed. They no longer exist in the same form, and yet, here we are: trying to navigate our lives and the world.