[Bread-Baking Typewriter] 25 Female Writers Including Park Kyung-ri... Their Words, Lives, and Philosophy

[Asia Economy Reporter Park So-yeon] Writing has the power to expose uncomfortable truths that the privileged class wants to hide. Writers are a species that never give up. They relentlessly expose the scenes where humans are impoverished by violent and contradictory systems. They warn against the 'moral fatigue' that assumes the future cannot change, and ultimately, both the writer and the reader become guides to a life that makes us truly human.

Within writing, there are not only the ugly aspects of life and the present we want to avoid, but also alternative worlds, warm comfort, and hope. Those who pick up the pen save themselves, others, and even change the world.

For writers, writing is sometimes a lifeline. After cancer surgery, writer Park Kyung-ri began writing Toji just fifteen days after being discharged. The Dark Age is a book she wrote clinging to the day she left her deceased child at the crematorium.

Chinese-American writer Li Yun is a survivor of the Tiananmen Square incident. He tried to participate in the protests at the time, but his father locked him inside the house, anticipating the bloodshed. Having survived this way, he wrote about the decades-long experiences of Tiananmen survivors?stories that could not be lived without vomiting them out like blood.

The new book Writing, Fighting, and Surviving contains the lives and philosophies of 25 women who changed the world through writing. Great women writers such as Marguerite Duras, Virginia Woolf, Park Kyung-ri, Frida Kahlo, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Emily Bront?, Susan Sontag, and Li Yun. Reading this book to the end is like watching 25 short films, vividly portraying their lives before your eyes.

How did these 25 women writers begin writing? What happened to them at the critical moments of their important works? The author carefully traces these questions and introduces their representative works.

Among them are familiar works and some unfamiliar ones. The book makes you want to find and read most of the works mentioned. It plunges you instantly into the intense lives of these writers.

Duras was scolded that she could not make a living by writing alone. Woolf is often listed among the "tragic female artists" who ended their lives due to depression caused by reading books and writing. Park Kyung-ri did not fit well into Korea’s established literary circles, which were run like salons centered on male writers. Literature dealing with women’s experiences at the time was classified as trivial fiction.

Stories of women who wanted to express their lives and live as themselves were often devalued.

However, the author of Writing, Fighting, and Surviving completely disagrees with this perspective. To the author, Duras was a brilliant woman who built the foundation of her life through writing and changed her own life. Woolf’s death was a historical choice made when she could no longer write as a writer, crushed by the horrors of war. Park Kyung-ri was a great writer who left the harsh pain she experienced as an individual as universal literature for humanity.

The author gathered writings and words directly left by female writers. She carefully rewrote the records of their failures and successes, showing how each wanted to direct their own lives. The author maintains a warm view of humanity while sharply pinpointing the issues. Through the author’s hands, the lives and philosophies of writing women finally reveal their true value.

In this book, we come to see the lives of women writers, which we had misunderstood or known in distorted forms, clearly. Closing the book feels not like an end but a beginning. You might find yourself unconsciously ordering the works of the writer in the book who draws your heart...

(Writing, Fighting, and Surviving / Jang Young-eun / Minumsa / 15,000 KRW)

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.