But I really feel that the work is a living organism and needs to be engaged with every day. I literally write every day (my TikTok handle is daily_writing_makes_book), and a lot of it is about checking in.

A big part of my writing practice-and my Buddhist practice-is showing up every single day, which is connected to the importance of ancestors and ghosts. For me, that means having a new way to observe things that I think that I know. But there is a certain idea that when you do something every day, in some ways it is the same, but when you do it enough, you see that it’s not the same. There are all sorts of jokes about cleaning out the bathroom and how that will lead you to enlightenment. One thing that’s very important in Korean Buddhism is ritual, and a lot of it is the idea of tedium leading to some kind of enlightenment. Read excerpts from their conversation below, and listen to the full episode here.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen sat down with Lee to discuss her new novel, her experience raising a child with severe intellectual disabilities, and her own journey through diverse spiritual traditions. Through a combination of luck and perseverance, she and her mother were able to enter North Korea in 2008.įor Lee, writing-and all the research it entails-is one way of honoring her ancestors, and her practice of showing up at her writing desk every day is fundamentally connected to her Buddhist practice. But her research didn’t stop there-at some point she realized that she had to travel to North Korea. “I feel like I can’t write unless I can be embodied in what’s happening.” In order to accurately depict the daily life of an obstetrician, Lee ended up shadowing a cohort of medical students on their OB/GYN rotation, sneaking into medical conferences, and eventually helping a midwife deliver a baby.

“I’m the kind of writer where once I get an idea, I have to be all in,” she shared with Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks. The novel follows the story of a middle-aged Korean American, Yungman Kwak, grappling with memories of war in a rapidly changing world, and Lee has been working on it for 18 years. When novelist Marie Myung-Ok Lee began writing her latest book, The Evening Hero, she didn’t expect the research process to take her to North Korea.

The Evening Hero by Marie Myung-Ok Lee