Paul Yoon
Photo by Laura van den Berg
Bio
Paul Yoon is the author of Once the Shore and Snow Hunters. His most recent book is The Mountain. He lives in Cambridge, MA, with his wife and dog.
The NEA Creative Writing Fellowship meant everything to me. It provided me time and space away from the day job to focus on a project and it also allowed me to travel to Europe twice for research. Eventually, I was able to finish a draft of a book because of it. That’s a big deal for me. Words seem not enough, but: I couldn’t be more grateful for this opportunity and to everyone who is involved in this program for supporting me and for encouraging me to keep going, and to finish.
Excerpt from a work in progress
Last summer, a ghost ship appeared in Newfoundland waters. It was a small deep sea fishing vessel that had caught fire and there was no on board—that is, there was no one on board who was alive. The fishermen who had boarded the boat, the structure of which had remained intact, found no evidence of a crew but in the hold they discovered five bodies ranging in height and in various poses, their features ruined by the fire.
The working theory was that the victims had been refugees seeking asylum—perhaps a family, three male and two female, their ages ranging from around eleven to sixty, most likely Asian judging by their hair and facial bone structures—and that they had paid for passage into Canada and that somewhere in the Atlantic something had gone wrong.
The boat was registered as American, though it wasn’t difficult to find out that it been sold years ago and had not been in the United States since then. Still, it was an American boat, which led to Cullen being assigned to it. And on the day it was brought to shore near St John’s, Cullen called me, wanting me to examine the fire damage and to verify what had caused it.
“There’ll be a Canadian team to do that,” I said to him on the phone.
“Then verify what the Canadian team does,” Cullen said.
I said, “That sounds redundant and not a good use of my time.”
“Your flight leaves in an hour,” Cullen said, and then repeated it, in case I didn’t hear the first time.