This interview was conducted by Sarah Jane Cody over Zoom. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

It feels meaningful that Gina and I are Zooming on a day when the air quality in NYC, where she is located, has reached “hazardous” ratings and the sky has turned orange due to ongoing wildfires in Canada. It emphasizes how relevant her novel’s near-future setting and concerns are to the current moment.

Tell us about your debut novel, Sea Change:

Sea Change is about love, loss, and cephalopods. It’s a coming-of-age story about a thirty-year-old Korean American aquarium worker named Ro Bae. She takes care of a giant Pacific octopus, which also happens to be her last remaining connection to her marine biologist father, who went missing fifteen years ago at sea.

When the novel opens we see Ro dealing with a lot of big changes and losses in her life. Her boyfriend has broken up with her—and he’s not just leaving her; he’s leaving the planet on a privately funded mission to colonize Mars as part of a last-ditch effort on the part of humanity to respond to the climate crisis, which, since my novel is set in the near future, is even more urgent than it is today. She’s also dealing with a strained relationship with her mother with whom she has never really been able to process the loss of her father. On top of that, her best friend Yoonhee, who also works at the aquarium, is pulling away as her wedding approaches. The inciting incident of the novel is that Ro learns that Dolores, the giant Pacific octopus whom she cares for, is about to be sold to a private investor. From there, Ro starts to spin out of control and is forced to grapple with the role that she’s played in her failing relationships.

I love the juxtaposition between Ro’s Apa, whom she has lost to the ocean, with her ex, whom she has lost to space/Mars. Did you have that setup in mind when you started the book, or did that evolve?

I think it kind of just evolved naturally, but looking back, that setup does touch on two of my biggest fears—outer space and the ocean. I love the ocean, I think it’s incredible, and I have a deep respect for it. I’m also terrified of it because who even knows what’s in there? There’s so little we know about the depths of it. It’s funny because as human beings we’re surrounded by the water on all sides, and the only other thing we’re surrounded by that’s more than that is space, which I also find deeply terrifying. When I started the book, I did have this idea that she’s been broken up with because her boyfriend is leaving her to go on this privately funded mission to Mars. That was an element that popped up organically as I was writing, and I thought, Oh this is interesting; I want to stick with this and see what other things I can get out of it. It was only later when I had also put into place that her father is missing, he’s lost at sea, that there was this juxtaposition between these two regions of the unknown.

In the opening of the novel, Ro says, “The vast darkness of outer space—which is totally unlike the darkness of the ocean, where even the most unfathomable, seemingly inhospitable depths still glimmer with signs of life, the kind of life you can see and touch—has never interested me much.” At least with the ocean there’s life even at its darkest, deepest, coldest depths; with space, we know even less about it, because it’s that much more unbounded. I think that fear of what’s out there and what’s unknown resonates across her fears of the losses she’s experiencing with her relationships. The other unknown terrain that I’m always interested in is the human heart and the landscape of complexity when it comes to navigating interpersonal relationships.

It struck me how richly drawn your characters are. I felt as if I got to spend real time with Ro, like getting to know a friend. That’s a really special feeling, and I don’t know if I’ve read another book recently that made me feel that. Can you talk about your craft approach to developing characters?

Thank you. That means a lot to me. With characters I tend to have a bit of a method approach—not that I was going through and experiencing the same things as her, but I am always interested in how a character is feeling in their body. That’s something that I think is really critical for me both as a reader and a writer. If I’m reading a story, I might really admire the writing or I might appreciate where the plot is going, but if I don’t feel viscerally connected to the characters, I have a harder time being engaged with the overall story. Because the novel started out as first person and stayed that way throughout my time writing it, it got to be almost second nature to step into Ro’s skin.

I’m a very music-driven person, and so I made this elaborate playlist with songs that Ro references throughout the book. It also includes some songs that I thought were a nice soundscape for various emotional beats of the novel. Sometimes I would have it in the background when I was writing; sometimes I would even just go for walks and not really think much about the writing, but I would be listening to the playlist and that would help me stay immersed in the world of the characters. 

For any character that I had a bit more of a hard time connecting with, like, for example, Tae, Ro’s ex-boyfriend—he doesn’t get much time in the present day of the novel, but I also wanted his presence and his role in the relationship to feel really vivid and visceral—I decided to try out this writing exercise that I heard about through a friend who took a class with Maaza Mengiste: Try, as the author, writing a letter to yourself from the point of view of that character, and just see what comes out, get their side of the story. It doesn’t have to make its way into the pages of the work, but it’ll inform the world of that particular character that much more. Recently, I was in conversation with Claire Fuller—her book, The Memory of Animals, just came out, and it also involves octopuses—about character development. She mentioned that when she’s having trouble getting into the head of a character, she creates a whole new Word document and calls it “We need to talk about XYZ.” And she’ll address the character, and be like, “Hey, what are your thoughts on this?” And I love that, the idea of interviewing your character.

Speaking of characters, the animals are so great, especially Dolores, the giant octopus, who I’m sure is the favorite of a lot of readers. You’ve also written a number of animals in your short fiction. You have a knack for characterizing them. What draws you to them?

I’m drawn to animals because they’re just so honest. It’s funny because I’m a fiction writer, so I’m essentially telling lies for fun, but at the same time in fiction a reader can tell, and you as a writer can tell, if something is emotionally true or not. Writing about and thinking about animals helps me stay grounded as a person. And writing about them as a writer really helps me remember what we as human beings need—and what a character might need. There’s a great essay by CJ Hauser—“The Crane Wife”—in which they write about going on an expedition to join scientists who are tracking the whooping crane in the Gulf Coast area, and they write about being someone who is, at that point in their life, very afraid to admit that they have needs. But then when you’re in the field looking at these animals that are endangered, all you are doing is tracking their needs and how they are being met or not. Reading that essay was a very resonant experience for me. And it’s something that I think about too in my own fiction, when I’m thinking about what my characters need and want or what they feel like they can’t say about those needs or wants. Animals have a way of bringing out the truth and reminding us that we are also animals, and we are just as equally part of this world and part of the natural world in particular.

Yeah, I love that. And I feel that thematically in your writing. With Dolores, for example, there’s this part where you point out, through Ro and her father talking, that Dolores is this magnificent octopus, but if she ever mates and lays eggs, then that’s it, she loses her motivation to live. And why? That’s just evolution; it doesn’t always make sense. I thought that particular idea tapped so smartly into your novel’s concerns with identity and being limited and shaped by one’s identity. For Ro, that includes the traumas that her immigrant parents have unintentionally passed on to her and also the expectations of womanhood. I wonder if you could talk a bit more about that baggage she’s carrying.

I think that’s absolutely right in terms of how many of us are often hesitant to take on certain responsibilities or certain commitments because of the baggage that is associated with them. So when I learned that female octopuses essentially waste away once they lay eggs, I thought, What an interesting metaphor for motherhood and how we have certain ideas of how mothers are expected to be. I think it’s also true what you point out about the ways in which trauma and expectations can keep a person really locked into one position that might not be the best for them. 

At the same time, I wanted Ro as a character to realize over time that, yes, there are these trappings of wifedom and motherhood that she is afraid of, having witnessed it first hand with her own mother, but that she has choices beyond that, and that learning how to show up in her  relationships with other people is actually only going to benefit her in the end. I wanted to point out that she needed to find connection in order to really grow and evolve as a character, whereas for a long time she’s been sort of content to be very solitary and not voice her needs and wants in relation to other characters. She’s dealing with a lot. She’s been grieving, and I think she’s also grieving the loss of people who aren’t necessarily physically absent from her life, like her mother and her best friend. She keeps telling herself, “People always leave me.” When you keep telling yourself that, it sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where maybe you start to drive away the people you need most. You also start to leave yourself, in both small and big ways.

You utilize a lot of stunning descriptors that tend to offer surprising insights. On a linguistic level, could you talk a bit about what guides you?

I’ll be honest, I think that a lot of my approach to language is, in the moment, kind of unconscious. I’ll just think about how to describe something in an interesting way, and I’ll think, Oh here’s this random comparison that just comes to mind for me. A lot of that actually gets edited out or edited down later though because, while I love a metaphor, you don’t want it to become a distraction to the reader. So there’s a lot of unconscious dumping in the drafting process for me, and later I might decide, “Actually I still love this, but we need to cut it.” Which is always hard, but rewarding, because I think cutting stuff is also a way to strengthen what you want to be able to bring out on the page. 

As a reader I read for voice first and language second. Voice is intrinsic to every writer. People talk about finding and developing your voice as a writer, and it’s different for every person. There are just some writers where you come across their work and think, I know who that is, without even having to read who it’s by. When I talk about writing and reading for language, I don’t necessarily mean that the language has to be super ornate or even overly descriptive. There are some writers who write in a very clean and spare style, but have a way of describing things that gets right to the heart of the matter. I feel like I’m always trying to make my way toward that. If I can write something that makes a person feel surprised in a good way or look at something in a new way then, to me, that feels like a success. 

I’m curious from a writer’s perspective—if you could look back, what advice might you offer to past Gina as she embarked on the writing of this book, especially as your debut?

I think I would tell myself to not be so freaked out all the time. Like a lot of writers, I’m an anxious person. [Gina laughs.] I think when you’re working on something, it feels so internal and private for so long, until you are ready to start sharing it with people. And it can be very tempting to want to rush things, when you get to that stage. You can feel like, Oh my gosh, every chance I get might be the last one. There are a lot of reasons why many of us fall into that mode of thinking. Because, you know, the world that we live in encourages us to think that way. There’s this urgency that everyone feels, due to the myths of scarcity that capitalism perpetuates. 

I would also say to that past version of myself that there is no rush; the story is going to take the time that it needs to, and the work will always be there. The reason I say this is because I wrote the very first rough draft of the novel for my thesis for my MFA program. And I just remember feeling so scared the entire time. I don’t know, maybe it was also the time I was writing in. It was Fall/Winter 2020, and I just felt like I needed to finish this as quickly as possible. I just put so much pressure on myself to get to that daily word count or page count or whatever it was. And I think if I could go back, I would tell that person that I was to slow down and not be so hard on myself. It’s an ongoing thing, learning how to be more gentle with myself, but it bears repeating for any writer or creative out there.

You have a short story collection coming out next. What can we expect after Sea Change?

The short story collection is called Green Frog, and it’ll be coming out in March 2024. It explores a lot of similar themes to Sea Change including Korean American womanhood and girlhood, animals, bodies, transformation, trauma, family. It’s fifteen different stories, a whole new cast of characters, and with short stories I feel I have license to be more experimental, so there’s stuff that might be a little bit more speculative or more overtly magical realist than the novel is. It also gave me the chance to try out a lot of different voices, so I’m writing in modes and writing about characters that I wouldn’t necessarily inhabit for an entirety of a novel. So it was really fun to write and put together.

We’ll certainly be looking forward to it!