Janie Kim

Janie Kim is the author of We Carry the Sea In Our Hands. Applauded as “beautifully composed [and] original” by New York Times-bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, the debut novel employs poetic prose and an imaginative voice to explore family, trauma, and belonging through one woman’s journey to reconnect with her roots.

Kim grew up in San Diego, California, and studied molecular biology at Princeton University. She is currently a biology PhD student at Stanford University and is studying RNA in the symbiosis between V. fischeri, a bioluminescent bacterium, and the bobtail squid, a very charismatic little creature. She likes ocean critters that are fun-sized, or, better yet, microscopic (funner-sized). As an undergraduate, she worked with bacteria that live inside algae and make toxins to deter hungry sea slugs. During her Fulbright research grant to Denmark, she spent time with some tag-team marine bacteria and microalgae.

Kim writes about these and other topics in microbiology for Small Things Considered.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The sea—how it both gives and takes life—is a recurring image throughout the story. In a literal sense, my novel ends with the main character at a beach with seawater cupped in her hands, and the last sentence is "Briefly, I carry the sea in my hands." In a less literal sense, much of the story is about the multitudes of one person's identity, how these are often amorphous, and how other people in Abby's life in both the present and the past are a part of her own sense of self. So it felt right to keep the last sentence of the story except changed to plural first person.

The title was the last part of the book I came up with. I was trying to come up with something that gave a sense of things being nested or layered or within other things, and of these being weights (whether good or bad or neither) that we bear as we move through the world, plus a subtle homage to the hypotheses that life arose from bodies of water.

What's in a name?

For most of the stories I wrote prior to We Carry the Sea in Our Hands, I tended to either choose more unusual names for my characters or simply not name them at all. I decided against this when I started writing this book, because I wanted to avoid the usual pressure I feel to write characters that live up to the "specialness" of their names. I also wanted to write a story with a main character whose uniqueness comes not from something nominal but rather from everything else that happens in the story and builds up into who she is. So I chose the name "Abby." I also chose this name and all of the other characters' names because at the time of writing in 2020-2021, I didn't know anyone with those names well enough to have a "template" or to feel weird about "stealing" their name.

A few other names in particular: "Iseul" I chose because it means "dew." The bad PI character is named Stanley just because it doesn't sound similar to the names of any of the wonderful PIs I've been lucky to call mentors over the years. As for San Oligo, my fictional Southern Californian city based off San Diego: "oligo" (short for "oligonucleotides") is a term for bits of DNA or RNA, which are often combined in the lab to create longer stretches of DNA or RNA. I liked that notion. I do realize that in the context of a Californian city name starting with the Spanish "San," the Greek root is odd, but I grew too fond of the little mash-up to change it later on.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I think my teenage self would be a bit surprised that the characters in my novel are neither birds nor dragons, which were my two childhood obsessions and the subjects of most stories I wrote in elementary school (although both birds and dragons are certainly both mentioned in my novel!). She would probably not be surprised that there are scientist characters and that there is a made-up microbe important to the plot. I'd first become smitten with science and microbes after an 8th grade science class that had us students do a science fair project on the side.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I think I tend to change beginnings more. This is especially true if events from a character's past are particularly important to the story (like this novel)—when editing, I get caught up in indecision over what point along the character's timeline the story should start.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

All of my characters have some piece of me in them, whether a personality trait or an interest or a piece of their history or something else. When coming up with characters, having that familiar seed to start with makes it easier for me to then get into exploring aspects of personhood and identity that I'm not familiar with. For example, Abby and I share the fact that we are Korean American and are in science, but I'm not adopted and am also very lucky that my close friends are alive and well. I'm a second-generation Korean American, and I think part of the inspiration for my book drew from my perception of America as a complicated adoptive parent and of South Korea as a distant and unfamiliar and equally complicated biological parent.

I do definitely have the same sense of humor as Abby, though (for better or for worse).

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My scientific research, for one. It's fun when I can take tangential "what if?" questions I had in the lab and explore them further through fiction. (It's also fun and cathartic when I can take my experiments that failed miserably in real life and make them work in my fiction.) Also, most any advice from my science mentors and writing mentors applies to both science and to writing. I admire my science mentors' willingness to explore unfamiliar areas and to learn on the fly and to do curiosity-driven work, and I try to emulate that mindset when I write. I also try to treat my characters while writing with the same generosity, forgiveness, and openness that my science mentors have given me every time I screw up.

Running, too. I think I often write better when I'm not focused so much on writing well. If I'm actively trying to put out "good writing," the pressure and magnitude of that task is too paralyzing. So, when I'm stuck on something or need to come up with key ideas, going for a longer run outside helps, and I usually get back home with potential solutions on my phone's notes app. There's a pleasant emptying of the mind, some kind of half-conscious limbo, as you slip through the miles that lends itself to idea-generation and problem-solving, without any of the burdensome hyper-awareness of time passing and deadlines and other practical realities. I owe it to this book and the frustrations while writing it that I've run marathons. Various running communities I've been a part of, too, have a particular mindset that translates well into the process of writing.

And songs! For each writing project, I tend to end up listening to a few songs on endless repeat that get me into the mindset. For preparing my qualifying exam proposal last December, that was the Lawrence of Arabia overture, "Run Free" from DreamWorks's Spirit, and the Wii Mii Channel theme song. For this book, it was Studio Ghibli songs ("The Changing Seasons," mostly), "It's Not Enough" by Starship, and "Celebrity" by IU.

Visit Janie Kim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue