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Heinz Insu Fenkl was born in 1960 in Bupyeong and grew up in Korea, and later in Germany and the United States. His autobiographical novel Memories of My Ghost Brother was named a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and a Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection. His fiction and translations have been published in The New Yorker. A member of the editorial board for Harvard University's AZALEA: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture from its inception until 2017, he is also the translator of the classic 17th-century Korean Buddhist novel The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-jung.
Fenkl received his A.B. in English from Vassar College and his M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis. He was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea, where he studied literary translation and began a project collecting narrative folktales, which led to his book Korean Folktales. He was co-director of the Fulbright Summer Seminar in Korean History and Culture and he studied in the PhD Program in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, specializing in shamanism, narrative folklore, and ethnographic theory.
He has taught a wide array of creative writing, folklore, literature, and Asian and Asian American studies courses at Vassar College, Eastern Michigan University, and Sarah Lawrence College. He was also a core faculty member for the Milton Avery MFA program at Bard College and has taught at Yonsei University in Korea. He currently teaches creative writing and Asian studies courses at the State University of New York, New Paltz. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and daughter.
Heinz Insu Fenkl's website
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Skull water is the fluid that's said to accumulate in the human skull and, according to a Taoist folk belief, it can cure any human ailment. In my novel, the main character, Insu (who's based on my younger self), sets out with his friends to dig up a grave to get skull water for his uncle, Big Uncle. Big Uncle has suffered for decades from a mysterious foot injury that never seems to heal, and he's dying as the infection spreads, so there's urgency to the quest, which goes spectacularly wrong with lots of unexpected consequences.
Skull Water is largely autobiographical and has two parallel stories—Big Uncle's survival during the horrible early days of the Korean War and Insu's survival in-between cultures in 1970s Korea. (My wife calls it the great "After M*A*S*H" novel.) The threads of Insu's and Big Uncle's lives overlap in unpredictable and illuminating ways.
My real-life Big Uncle was a geomancer who could read the spiritual energy—the "dragons"—of a landscape to find auspicious grave sites; he also performed exorcisms. He had an unusual method of consulting the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle, to look into the future. As I wrote Skull Water, I used the pictographic method I learned by watching ...
Eve J. Chung is a Taiwanese American human rights lawyer focusing on gender equality and women's rights. She lives in New York with her husband, two children, and two dogs. (more)
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Skull Water
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Yu Hua was born in 1960 in Zhejiang, China. He finished high school during the Cultural Revolution and worked as a dentist for five years before beginning to write in 1983. He has published four novels, six collections of ... (more)
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