As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges muting over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic.

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

Not to any really influential effect, but certainly there have been comments that have surprised me. It's surprising sometimes to get particular perspectives on your work, and it's enlightening sometimes to know that non-writers and readers out there have certain assumptions about everything that I both want to keep in mind and want to forget about why I write, and about the connection between me as a private person and the stuff that I think about on the page.

What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted? And then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit? But you keep coming back for more?

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.