Interview with 2021 contest judge Jenny Heijun Wills

Jenny Heijun Wills is the author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related: A Memoir, which won the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust prize for non-fiction. Jenny was born in Seoul, South Korea and was adopted and raised in a white family in Southern-Ontario, Canada. In 2008 she reunited with her family in Asia. She’s lived, studied, and worked in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, and Seoul and holds a PhD in English Literary Studies. She currently teaches writing at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, and she is working on her next book, a novel.

Finding time to write amid the demands of daily life can be challenging. How do you find time in your day to write?

Things can be complicated when I am teaching, but I am fortunate enough these days to have a very light teaching schedule (just one course this Winter 2021). I find that I write most in the morning, have the clearest mind for revising in afternoon, and catch up on reading and events in the evening. And I don’t work on the weekend. :)

Do you thrive in the solitude of a writer’s life, or do you flourish when you are around other writers, like as part of a writers’ group for example?

I am a social person when it comes to collaborating on projects, doing writing groups, workshopping, and events. I am exchanging chapters with a few writers back and forth these days, and we offer guidance either through email or weekly Zoom meetings. And I look forward to this time. It keeps me writing because I want to be fair in this exchange. Not just greedily reading the brilliant things my friends share but also trying to be vulnerable with them as well.

When it comes to writing, I need absolute silence. No music, no background noise, nothing.

So I guess I’m a little from column a and a little from column b.

Are you comfortable sharing a detail or two about your current writing project(s)?

I’m writing a novel. I just finished the first draft :) It is longer than I’d like, so now I’m whittling. It’s in part loosely inspired by the lives of the Korean young people adopted by Jim Jones. But it’s mostly about the challenges of navigating kinship and race in Korea, the U.S. and Canada.

What are some of the elements that really make you say “WOW” when you are reading through a story?

I am drawn in by language: innovative, playful, beautiful, evocative, distilled, fragmented, whatever. Any thoughtfulness about language, style, structure—I love that. But it has to be used meaningfully and not just to show off.

I also am a sucker for creative symbolism and imagery. Narrative is of course tied to all of this, but my attention is most piqued through style.

Do you have any advice for contest entrants?

Think carefully about your character(s), including your narrator, and be aware that the things they say and do, and the way they say and do those things, is a reflection of who they are. The pace at which things are told, the details that are included or not, the length of sentence, amount of dialogue, structure of telling--all that tells me something about these figures. In other words, get to really know your characters. Reveal them in ways maybe they’re not even aware of themselves.