Min Jin Lee

Lately, we don't seem to have anything sort of in the middle and I guess I'm critical of both.

I do think there's a third category and that's the story that leaves you utterly heartbroken.

You know, something like Moonlight.

I was thinking about the movie Moonlight.

Yeah, yeah.

Or there's a new movie that's just come out that I got to see called Women Talking.

I haven't seen that yet.

And you're just sort of left destroyed at the end without...

knowing whether anything good is going to happen or not.

You kind of hope that it will, but given our knowledge of the world, it's very hard to feel that way sometimes.

Yeah, I guess I have to rail against that kind of art in some ways, I guess because I really like Aristotle's poetics.

Like I think that my highest goal is to achieve catharsis in my viewer, my reader.

And in order for me to do that I need to have recognition and reversal.

And recognition and reversal requires a sense of hope.

My work has to be shot through with some sense of hope.

Perhaps it's not the answer but it has to give the will to live, the will to persist.

That's very important to me.

So I totally understand what you're talking about with that kind of work, and I admire it.

But very often, this is what I have to say as a writing teacher, is that you can have a situation, like when you have a tragedy.

That's a situation like something very bad happened.