Winter in Sokcho

Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that's been going on for so long people have stopped believing it's real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it's all fake, we're on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We're living in limbo. In the winter that never ends.

People always think they have time.’ ‘I’m only twenty-four.’ ‘Exactly.

I didn’t want to be his eyes in my world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted him to see me with his own eyes.

He’d never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.

How do you know when a story is done?" "My character reaches a point when I know he has a life of his own. I can let him go.

That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring

For five hundred won, you could gaze at North Korea. I slid a coin in the slot. It was so cold our eyelids stuck to the metal frames. To the right, the ocean. To the left, a wall of mountains. Ahead of us, fog. Not much a of a view, but what could you expect with this weather?

The rain hammered down, the sea rising beneath it in spikes like the spines of a sea urchin.

What I mean is you may have had your wars, I’m sure there are scars on your beaches, but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.

Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real.

How do you know when a story is done?’ ‘My character reaches a point when I know he has a life of his own. I can let him go.

I needed peace and quiet.

He arrived bundled up in a woolen coat. And the man on the waves, feeling his way through the winter, Slipping passively beneath the waves, an afterimage in his wake, a woman’s shoulder, belly, breast, the small of her back, the lines tapering to become a mere stroke of the pen, a thread of ink on the thigh, and on the thigh a long, fine scar carved with a brush on the scales of a fish.