On March 26th in Veritas A 101, Krys Lee, the award-winning author and a professor at our very own Yonsei University stood before students to tell us a story of her life. That story began with the history of language. Why did humans according to the bible build the tower of Babel so as to reach God? What does Darwin's discovery of how humans created language through imitations of their own noises suggest? The need to be heard. This need, according to Krys Lee is behind the creative impulse we are born with whether it develops as art making or photography. We may age but this impulse so freely explored as a child does not diminish. It becomes submerged under the obligations and pressures of society; it hides as our secret self.

             For her, this impulse breathes in writing. Her love affair with language began with the seductive covers of Victorian novels in a language that was not her own. When she grew up in America as a young girl before her Korean was lost (only to be regained recently), she spoke Korean but read and wrote in English. The stories of dead writers that animated the girl under the covers soon inspired her to partake in that history.

             What does it mean to be a writer? A writer is that someone who observes, that someone who loves the cadences of a word, that someone who likes sentences. However, this is just the beginning. Unlike the glamorized media depictions of writers as having an innate talent, a writer is made. Ernest Hemingway, popularly attributed to his drinking, accomplished his best writing when he devoted at least six hours a day to it. Tobias Wolff neglects the luxury of the Stanford campus for a windowless basement to avoid all distractions. And Krys Lee, a product of the internet era, uses internet blockers and sometimes even writes in the brown line of the subway. Anyone from anywhere can become a writer but all must undergo the 10,000 hours of apprenticeship.
             You will be hungry. Get married. Grow up. All 10,000 hours and the billion more that follows, carry the uncertainty bred by a society that demands us to give ourselves up to fit into the square it has carved. Writing, like other promises for the secret self, is a continuous fight that requires faith and effort.
             Still, reassuringly, writers are all around. Not all yield success but a community that supports and protects this tradition exists. Writers may be disguised as lawyers or Samsung employees as well as fathers and mothers for the most part of their days, but they dedicate a time and space to feed their secret selves – to dream.
             “You don't have to be sixteen years old to dream. You can still dream when you are in your forties and fifties. But sometimes life is so hard, and there is no luxury of dreaming...” (Krys Lee, 7, UIC Scribe Vol. 9 Ed. 1. 2013) 

             The story of Krys Lee's life which was told through the stories of others that came before her and the stories of those that exist among us now, is a metaphor of a life that risks uncertainty for dreams, a life lived for oneself. Whatever ideal we as college students secretly desire to chase and no matter how fragile those seem, they are possible, Krys Lee tells us. She awakens our courage to make the necessary sacrifices so that we do not compromise who we are and what cultivates our spirit. She encourages us to face the challenges that will be thrashed at us but to never give up. We may be pressured to fit in a square, but we are, she reminds us, octagons.

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