A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park is a complex kaleidoscope of a book that explores Korean history and diasporic identity, the nature of reality and dreams, and the drive (and dry spells) that are inherent in creative and political work.
The book offers an imagined history that overlaps with our own, unfolding over the course of multiple intricately interwoven narratives that each bring a different tone and style to the novel as a whole. Park is also a founding editor of The Believer, a former literary editor of The Village Voice, and the current Rea Visiting Writer for the UVA creative writing program. His debut story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, is forthcoming in July. C-VILLE spoke with him about Same Bed Different Dreams.
C-VILLE Weekly: In Same Bed Different Dreams, the character Soon and his doppelganger Echo are both writers of a novel titled, The Sins. There’s also Parker Jotter, a Korean War veteran and pulp novelist, whose sci-fi series plays an integral role in your book. As you crafted these characters’ writer-selves, how much did your own experiences in publishing inform them?
Ed Park: I’ve always enjoyed books that have other books inside them, and likely would have included such an “invisible library” in Same Bed even if I’d never worked in publishing. But my experiences as an editor (books, magazines, newspapers) and writer definitely added to the texture of these characters’ lives; I found this metafictional aspect relatively easy (even fun) to devise.
I’ve been writing fiction for a long time—well before Personal Days came out (in 2008)—so I’ve lived their emotions; there’s part of me in Soon, in Echo, in Parker. My work as an editor perhaps gave me a more objective view of the lives and ambitions of writers. And it certainly helped, at certain points in the novel’s construction, to put on my “editor’s cap” and straighten out the writerly mess I’d put on the page. I could become a stern taskmaster to myself!
The themes throughout the book suggest a certain self-reflexiveness, creating an internal mythology that mirrors and layers on top of some aspects of actual history. How would you describe your process to create this intertextual reality?
This book took a long time to write. I didn’t set out to write a book involving a lot of research, but the characters and situations that were developing tapped into certain obsessions of mine, some of which were historical. When I finally realized that I wanted to not just explore but highlight these historical events and figures, I realized that these could all be part of a book-within-a-book—Echo’s Same Bed, Different Dreams (with its comma included!).
I would say that my research was determined by my pre-existing obsessions: the poet Yi Sang, the rise and fall of Syngman Rhee, various pop culture artifacts (“M*A*S*H,” Friday the 13th, etc.), ice hockey, etc. That is, at a certain point, I knew I wanted to include these obsessions, and would then research more deeply into these topics. Some people have told me they searched up various topics as soon as they finished the book. I certainly understand the urge. But I also think, as a novel, it can be enjoyed on its own terms, without further confirmation. (And besides, in this age of A.I.-powered search—are you sure that what the computer returns is “true”?)
How long did you work on the book?
Nine years is my standard answer. But I recently found some notes in which I sketched out some characters for future use, dated nearly a year before I started writing. And then, even more recently, I found a notebook from 1991 in which I contemplated a character named Echo.
Anagrams, codes, and other puzzles pop up throughout the book, suggesting the unknowable nature of history and reality while also underscoring selfhood and identity as mutable concepts. Was wordplay an interest of yours already or something that was inspired through the writing process?
I’ve always been attracted to anagrams and other linguistic games, both as diversions and occasionally a glimpse into some mystical undergirding order—the “word golf” in Nabokov’s Pale Fire seemed to me a key to understanding this novel’s aesthetics and metaphysics.
The Korean Provisional Government is a core structural element of the novel, combining real and imagined aspects of the Korean independence movement. What can we learn from the KPG in our current political moment?
I hesitate to draw any direct connection to the current moment, but I suppose what’s attractive about the notion of a provisional government is that it’s partly fiction—a state of mind, a metaphor for hope.
Same Bed Different Dreams was a Pulitzer finalist in fiction. How has that changed your approach to your work, or not?
In one sense, nothing’s changed. I’m still working on the novel that I started about five months before Same Bed was published; being honored was wonderful, but it doesn’t magically make the act of writing any easier! I’m still agonizing, drafting, walking around, taking up and scrapping and refining ideas. But I hope that at the very least the Pulitzer nod attracts more readers to my work—to Same Bed, and to everything before and after.
Ed Park will give a fiction reading at the UVA Bookstore on March 4. Photo by Sylvia Plachy.
