Susan Kim
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Susan Kim

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When I was a kid, my family—all six of us—lived in a three-bedroom apartment in a middle-class suburb of New York. Back then, there wasn’t much in the way of ergonomically-correct, Scandinavian-influenced, beautifully designed play-spaces for kids—you were considered lucky if you access to a rusty swing set and a splintering sandbox filled with filthy sand studded with cigarette stubs. But what was far more intriguing to me as a 7-year old was the area behind the playground my building shared with its neighboring twin. If you squeezed your way through a hole in the chain link fence and fought your way downhill through vines and brambles, you found yourself in a desolate wooded area, where all the kids went. It was, in retrospect, pretty bleak--an abandoned mattress, broken beer bottles, and sodden trash figured prominently—but it was cool because it was only us kids. It wasn’t lawless by any means; there was a hierarchy, unspoken rules, swift punishment for infractions, and a slightly scary sense of community. The older kids—intimidating and majestic at 12 and 13 and 14—smoked cigarettes and talked tough, and the younger ones played, fought, ate pilfered food, and traded stuff. If you got cut, you would rub dirt in it. If you threw up, everyone would mock and imitate you until it was over and then make you kick dirt over it. It was dangerous, it was thrilling, and there were absolutely no adults around. And I thought it would be cool to write about a world like that. Years later, when I started writing WASTELAND with Laurence Klavan, I realized I was tapping into many of those old memories. As a writer, I find that everything in my life comes up in my work: not only my own memories and experiences, but also the people I've met, places I've been, and stories I've heard. Our first graphic novel, CITY OF SPIES, was inspired by a story an elderly friend of mine told me years ago about being a little girl in NYC during World War Two. Our second graphic novel, BRAIN CAMP, is about two teenage losers and a truly creepy summer camp their desperate parents send them to. That's certainly based on not only my own childhood, but also the way I see kids today pushed by their parents into achieving at all costs. On a totally different note, I also wrote a non-fiction book for adults called FLOW: THE CULTURAL STORY OF MENSTRUATION. It's a funny, non-fiction look at this most natural yet taboo of bodily processes and how people have projected all of their crazy fears, feelings of disgust and shame, and not so subtle sexism onto it from the Ancient Egyptians to today. I wrote it with graphic designer Elissa Stein. I also write tons of television and plays, too. And I teach writing at Goddard College and New York University.
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