an chang joon: On Imagined Liminal Spaces, the Art of the Short Story Ending, Capitalism as the Locus of Horror, and His Debut Short Story Collection ‘God-Disease’

The description I read of God-Disease (Sarabande, March 2025) said it was “equal parts Southern Korean Gothic and slipstream”—and that was enough for me to bump the short story collection to the top of my TBR. I’ve become, in the last few years, very interested in contemporary Korean fiction, much of which seems to sit at the dead center of the social commentary/SpecLit Venn diagram. As a fan of writers like Han Kang, Djuna, and Bora Chung, I had a feeling that God-Disease would fit neatly in with books that I’d already loved. I was right, but also wrong. 

In God-Disease, writer an chang joon’s debut, I found a collection unlike anything I’d read before, where strange people encounter even stranger circumstances. A setting unto itself, the book is alien to everyone but the people on its pages, and yet invites readers to give themselves fully to its visceral dream-logic. While it’s on the shorter side for a collection, made up of the eponymous novella and four stories, its intensity makes it anything but a quick read. It’s a collection that requires much of its readers: curiosity, a willingness to suspend reality, and—often—a strong stomach. The stories in the collection, once part of chang joon’s MFA thesis, have taken on a life of their own. They speak to the most destructive parts of modern life and, like their author, straddle multiple cultures, each one their own battle against the destructive forces of capitalism and patriarchy. 

While I was a fan of the book, I loved learning first-hand from chang joon the forces that shaped the collection even more. Drawing from a life spent moving, mostly, between Korea and America, as well as his religious upbringing, the most striking thing about the stories, as well as the inspiration behind them, is the adept way an chang joon can sift through trauma, ugliness, and strife to offer acceptance and acknowledgement to the commonalities of the human experience.

Corinne Cordasco-Pak: Congratulations on publishing God-Disease! How does it feel to have published a book? 

an chang joon: It still hasn’t fully sunk in, even though it’s been out for about a month now. It’s been exciting to be able to say, “I wrote this thing.” I’d placed pieces before, but completing a body of work is new.  

CCP: What does your writing life look like these days? How do you balance writing with other responsibilities?

acj: I write better when I’m writing towards a goal, so I am currently working towards a second book. I’ll allot a day for [writing], where I’ll just take my laptop, take my phone, go to a café, put everything on Do Not Disturb, and crank out as much as possible. 

I’m working at a small Korean press, and it’s a fun job that mostly consists of recommending books that they might be interested in translating—so what I’m balancing is writing-related. It isn’t too much of a mental leap, except that I sometimes try not to read too much when I’m in the weeds with a particular piece, so a job that necessitates reading is sometimes a bit of a struggle. 

CCP: Can you tell me about your literary community?

acj: I have a few close writing friends that I try to Zoom at least once a week. Writing is very communal in nature and it’s important and useful to have people around to write with. One really good friend of mine, Katherine Hur, is a great writer. We went to the same undergrad and got our MFAs at Louisiana State University. I also still maintain contact with my thesis advisor, Jennifer S. Davis, and I’m grateful for that as well. 

Something I’ve found harder as my writing career gets going is putting myself out there. The distance puts me a little farther away from my friends in the States, so I do miss them. My goal currently is to be more involved in the literary community within Korea. I’m currently applying to this literary translation program for Korean-to-English translation. If that goes through, I’m excited to meet other writers within that space in Korea. 

CCP: What is it like working between Korea and the US? How do you think writing across two cultures has shaped your writing practice?

acj: I was born in Korea and, when I was nine, I went to Uzbekistan for about four years. Then, I went to the States for another four years. Since then, I’ve bounced between the States and Korea. I did my undergraduate at Emory, and went back to Korea for my mandatory military service. Then, I went to the States for my MFA, and I’m in Korea now. Somehow it works out that every four or five years I go through a big—usually intercontinental—move. 

The literary scene in Korea is smaller, but most big name writers still do end up being translated. Sometimes writers just slip through the cracks. Korea just had Louise Glück translated two years ago. One book that I’m pitching to my publisher right now is Stag’s Leap, because not a single Sharon Olds poem has been translated into Korean. 

Interestingly, though the market is a lot smaller in Korea, it’s actually easier to make a living as a translator. In Korea, people are always interested in English books. Translating from Korean to English is a niche market within the States. Obviously I hope that a lot of [American readers] are interested in Korean writers, but in the States, there’s just so many things to read. 

The way you become an author in Korea is slightly different. There are newcomer writing contests, called 등단 (deungdan), that are very established. If you win one of those, you’ve officially made the cut. It’s difficult to explain that to my friends in Korea, who assume that I’ve done this thing, and I’m like, “In the States, it’s a free-for-all. If you have a book and somebody wanted it and the book is out, you’re an author.” 

CCP: What is your translation practice like? How does it shape your writing?

acj: I’ve translated one book from English to Korean, but what I’m actually interested in now is Korean to English. Reading a lot more Korean books in the last few years has increased my interest in Korean writers, and been really influential to my own writing practice. There are a lot of interesting Korean writers that I think American English readers would be interested in and, I think that interest will continue to mount after all the big things that have been happening.

Another goal of mine is to translate poetry. I already have an almost-finished manuscript of a Korean poetry book. I also want to complete a translation of this writer, Kwon Yeo-Sun; she has a collection, 안녕 주정뱅이 (Hello Drunkard), that I have loved for a long time. It helps when I’m translating from Korean to English to read more Korean. I don’t personally write in Korean—I am fluent, but creative writing is a different beast entirely. That’s a long-term goal.

I’m particularly interested in contemporary Korean women writers. Back in the eighties or nineties, women writers were often pigeonholed into domestic subjects. Han Kang is a really good example, and Kim Hyesoon’s poetry. Also, the work of Kim Yi-deum. They are radically pushing back against that expectation, so they incorporate a lot of the grotesque and even a bit of body horror.

CCP:  I read The Vegetarian for the first time a few years ago, and you’re so right—the intensity feels very radical!

acj: I say this with love: it is relentlessly upsetting. But books like that are born because Korea still is very patriarchal. If you have an understanding of what Korean society can be like for women, the grotesqueness of the book makes sense, and it’s really exciting.

CCP: Do you find yourself reading more in Korean or English these days?

acj: When I’m in Korea, I end up reading a lot more Korean writers. But every time I go to AWP, I buy like twenty books [in English]; right now I have that self-assigned homework. Overall, though, it’s actually 50/50 because I’ve been reading a lot of English books to recommend to the Korean publishing company.

CCP: It sounds like much of your life revolves around literature. What non-literary things feel essential to your writing?

acj: I love cooking, and I love to eat. Food often makes an appearance in my writing. It’s usually not very appetizing, but the act of eating is so visceral and specific that I like writing about it. A lot of nonverbal communication can come through depicting how someone eats. I love trying new places. Whenever I’m in a new city, I’ll just pick a restaurant and show up; sometimes they’re not places that you necessarily go alone, so everybody is with dates or in a large group, and I’m by myself, having a great time.

Aside from that, I’ve been trying my hand at the guitar. I watch a lot of film, but sometimes it’s a little too writing-adjacent. I’ll get struck by this deep terror, like, Look at all this beautiful art that people are making, and I’m just sitting here wasting time. I should be writing. I don’t get that way with music.

CCP: I’m excited to talk more about God-Disease. Were the stories in the collection all from your MFA thesis? When did you begin thinking of them as a collection?

acj: This collection is five stories, and my thesis was seven. I cut two because I didn’t think they had the coherence for a collection, and I have another two that didn’t make it into the thesis. There's actually a lot of thematic coherence in those four stories, so I’m going to eventually flesh them out into a second collection.

As I went through the stories in this collection, I realized I had not written them with a place in mind. They have characters with semi-Korean names, by which I mean they follow the format of Korean names, which are usually three syllables, but none of them are really names in Korean. So if you walked up to someone in Korea and said, “my name is…” and you took a name from my book, they would say, “That is an exceedingly strange name.” But the characters speak English and I had a very hard time deciding if the stories were Korean or [American]. 

Reading Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, I realized I wasn’t limited to physically real places and that cracked open the whole collection. I was like, if none of these are Korean or American, then I’m just gonna make weird in-between spaces. I’m not really Korean or American or even Korean American, so why should my settings have to be? They all have at least one aspect that is very intrinsically Korean. In one story, it’s goshiwons (고시원), which are small living spaces for students. In Autophagy, the pig disease actually happened in Korea. It’s what ties the collection together for me: a kernel of something Korean, but planted in an imagined liminal space that’s not Korea or America.

CCP: That detail about the names is so interesting! I’ve read collections that fictionalize real places, like Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore, but you’re creating a third place entirely. How did that shape the collection overall?

acj: The characters I write about are not pleasant; they’re weird and cagey and maybe even come across as unlovable. They have a hard time fitting in. That’s the way I viewed myself growing up—too Korean to be American and too American to be Korean. It felt good to give them a home in the collection, even though it’s a weird home.

CCP: As a big reader of speculative fiction, I’m always curious what reads as surreal across different cultures. Can you talk about how the supernatural in this collection was informed by your cross-cultural perspective? 

acj: I was raised Presbyterian in a family that’s produced three pastors, four deacons, and two missionaries in two generations. My father is a pastor and an ex-missionary, which is why we lived in Uzbekistan. A significant portion of Korea is Christian—about 31%. So, even though my relationship with belief is not as clear cut as my family’s, a lot of the imagery that I draw from is from the Bible. My parents enrolled me in a Bible memorization contest when I was in sixth grade, and I remember thinking, this is some really wild imagery. There’s one I distinctly remember where Peter becomes hungry and God sends down a tablecloth filled with reptiles and birds and says “Kill and eat all these things.” And Peter’s like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” 

On the other hand, I wrote the novella, God-Disease when I was really interested in Korean shamanism. In traditional Korean belief, a shaman becomes a gateway into the supernatural, but to them, it’s just everyday reality: you allow a god to dwell inside your body, and that gives you the spiritual knowledge to intercede on behalf of somebody or chase away malignant spirits. Though I was exposed to these two very different beliefs growing up, one thing that’s true for both is this idea that uncanny occurrences are attempts at communication by whatever being you believe in. 

Also, I’m interested in the idea of work hyper-exploitation—what does life look like in late-stage capitalist societies? I actually think that the locus of the horror within this collection isn’t strange dreams or talking animals, but a city that crams students into fifty square feet of living space, or the conditions that we put livestock in, or the guilt that a person feels about reducing their mother’s condition to insanity or when maybe nobody heard her out because she was a woman. 

CCP: In a moment where we’re collectively witnessing religion, specifically Christianity, prop up capitalism in both the United States and Korea, how does your work engage Christianity in particular?

acj: “The Kulshov Effect” started as a thought exercise based off the story of Job. God and the devil make a bet: “What if all these terrible things happen to Job? Will he keep his faith?” I took that idea and thought, “But what if all these terrible things happen to a Korean woman?” I reference [the Bible] a lot. Despite my complicated feelings towards it, it’s been good for my writing. I’m always interested in subverting it and thinking about it in new ways.

CCP: In publishing a book for an English-speaking audience who might not be familiar with Korean culture, what do you hope that they’ll take away?

acj: I thought about this a lot. I’m interested in providing a point of accessibility and a little bit of inaccessibility. For instance, I mentioned the Korean names. For a Korean reader, these names are not names they’re used to. For English speakers, those names are unfamiliar to begin with. To that end, I try to let Korean words be Korean words. I used to explain everything like, “She ate the spicy, pickled cabbage soup.” Now, I’ll just call it kimchi jjigae and if that’s the point of inaccessibility, so be it.

CCP: What is your relationship with accessibility and inaccessibility in your reading practice?

acj: I like reading work in translation, especially poetry. I love when the original text is side by side. Even if I can’t understand a single word, being able to look at it is a point of accessibility to me. I enjoy those translations a lot more than the ones that just give the translated text. What good writing doesn’t challenge at least a little?

CCP: I heard Don Mee Choi speak about DMZ Colony and how she started translating poetry, but because Korean and English don’t share a linguistic root, she was basically writing new poetry. It sounds like your work finds a shared cultural context in terms of religion and capitalism, even though the language isn’t the same.

acj: I love thinking about the weird [overlap] between the two. For instance, late-stage capitalism is everywhere, but very prominent in Korea. The Korean word for something that’s complimentary is an English loan word: 서비스 (seobiseu).  I think about the way words semantically shift between languages. That’s why I think that translation is so fascinating and fun to read. 

CCP: Your stories often end with gestures towards the surreal, where things are not necessarily tied up happily. Can you talk about your approach to endings?

acj: I have this inefficient approach to short stories that probably would make my writing professors upset: I start with the ending. You’re probably right when you say “gesture”. There is usually some kind of visceral imagery I want to write about, and I have an idea of the character, and then I have this ending. Sometimes I have to push past what I thought was the ending. For instance, for God-Disease, the original ending I envisioned was the dream with the beetles, and I was like, Well, this is not good if I finish here, and I wrote on. I will write one-fourth of the story, and then start again and retype it. Then I’ll write it halfway there. I keep doing it until I hit the ending. Within the process of retyping, I end up making edits. It’s not some sort of secret cool hack. I think it’s just because I have a short attention span and sometimes it’s easier to just rewrite the thing and fix it than to push on. 

I hate that I’m quoting Aristotle, but one of the things I do like that he said was that endings should feel surprising, but inevitable. That’s generally the feeling I aim for. I don’t want my stories to end on a total note of doom. I want the reader to wonder what is going to happen to [the characters], but I hope to have told enough with the story itself that it doesn’t feel incomplete.

CCP: If God-Disease were on a shelf with its extended family, what books would be on that shelf?

acj: Han Kang’s writing, specifically The Vegetarian. Some Kafka, probably The Trial. Kafka’s writing, especially The Trial, is hilarious in a bleak, absurdist kind of way. I’m also interested in writing about weird bureaucratic things—one of my stories, “Structural Failure,” is about a woman working at a Kafka-esque city hall. I actually got that from my experience with the Korean military; I didn’t make the physical cut, so they put me in this architectural section of the city hall. The whole way the city hall was structured was very bizarre, bureaucratic and inefficient, but it chugged along.

Also, Tenth of December by George Saunders. Saunders is immaculate in his short stories. Specifically, “Escape from Spiderhead.” It’s not like a lot of the stories in the collection, but I was interested in the way he uses the trappings of genre fiction, because I don’t believe in the division between literary and genre fiction, and I often play with horror. 

I also want to shoutout Pyun Hye-young. The only translated novel of hers is The Hole. It’s surreal and slipstream with horrifying imagery. Again, the unpleasantness in her writing is a direct mirror of Korean society. She has a story where a dog mauls a child nearly to death, and the parents are trying to get the kid to a hospital and nobody helps them. The child has been mauled, but the indifference is actually more chilling.

Also some Faulkner, specifically, Barn Burning. I’m interested in the religious overtones of that writing and the way a parent’s worldview informs and warps that of the child.

CCP: To finish up, how has publishing your first book changed your writing goals?

acj: In an ideal world, I’d be able to live off of writing. If not, something else I'm excited about is teaching. It opens a lot more doors to actually have a book.

In terms of how things have changed: all of this happened very quickly for me. [Publishing] has helped with my creative output, because I’m excited about the second book and the third. I might be getting ahead of myself, but the second book that I’m writing is a non-fiction collection. It seems more attainable now that the book is out. I think that’s actually the biggest thing that’s changed for me: how I view my timeline in terms of projects and what I want to publish.

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an chang joon was born in Seoul, Korea, but raised somewhere between Uzbekistan, Korea, and the eastern coast of the United States. His writing explores borders, not as a flat line, but as a liminal space of their own. His prose can be found in Barnstorm and Blue Earth Review, and he was the runner-up for the Gulf Coast Review’s 2022 and 2023 Fiction Contest. He is the Korean translator for Nellie Hermann’s novel, The Season of Migration.