Nami Mun

What sparked Miles from Nowhere?
Miles from Nowhere started as a short story about a teenager on her first day on the job as a dance hostess. (For those who might not be familiar with that line of work, dance hostessing has little to do with dancing and more to do with sympathizing.)

 When I began 'Club Orchid', now chapter three in the book, I knew I had landed on something good, something worth exploring, mostly because I felt such discomfort while writing. Even though 'Club Orchid is not autobiographical, crafting it brought to the surface old emotions from my runaway years—emotions that weren’t all that fun to revisit, frankly.

Please set the scene of the novel for us.
Miles from Nowhere is narrated by Joon, a Korean-American girl who navigates homelessness, physical abuse and drug addiction during her years as a runaway in 1980s New York. We follow her for five years (from age thirteen to eighteen) as she tries to eke out a life for herself.

Do you have a particular attachment to any of the characters or places in the novel? If so, which one(s) and why?
My love and loyalty is with Joon, a natural side effect I suppose from having written in her voice for nearly eight years. Simply put, I just like the girl. She's at once smart and naive, strong and vulnerable, painfully empathic as well as painfully numb. I also like how she tries to remain calm and rational while weaving through a city of characters who are mercurial at best.

Knowledge and Wink also come to mind. Knowledge for her code of ethics, and Wink for his capacity to feel and contain large amounts of sadness.

What are you reading at the moment?
I'm revisiting the following books for various reasons: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat, The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann, and the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina. I just finished up Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, a book I’d been wanting to read for a while, and started As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport by Peter Case and City of Night by John Rechy.

What are you working on now?
I'm diving back to my criminal defense investigation days and working on a story collection about one crime.