I’ve been waiting for Wen-yi Lee’s book to come out for what feels like years at this point. I remember her sharing small bits of her Spring Awakening book on Twitter when I was just starting out Bookish Brews, and I’ve been waiting patiently to see this book come to fruition this entire time. Wen-yi is a brilliant writer, an incredible community member, and a wonderful friend. You won’t want to miss her book coming out on August 13.
Bookish Brews Snapshot
The Dark We Know by Wen-yi Lee
For her abusive father's funeral, a bisexual art student returns to the haunted, conservative small town she ran away from. She must grapple with her remaining family, her surviving childhood friend–and the monster from the mountains that took the lives of their friends, before it takes her too.
💫 Atmospheric ❤️🩹 Trauma and Healing 👻 Supernatural ✒️ Debut Author
- Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Young Adult
Interview with Wen-yi Lee
Amanda: Can you tell us what you’re most proud of about this book?
Wen-yi Lee: Wow, what a question. Finishing it, honestly. Getting it out of me. This book got overhauled so many times I’m frankly stunned it settled at all. But I think I’m also really proud of the rawness and vulnerability; it’s the first time I really tapped that vein so widely in my writing and I’m proud of how it layered the characters, who are all kind of messed up. (That’s partly because they’re inspired by a kind of messed up source material, Spring Awakening. But there’s also things about mental health and loss and alienation, particularly from growing up in a religious community.)
It’s a book that has a lot of hurt and crawls toward healing. I find it a little difficult to revisit because of the place I was in when I wrote it, but I think there are those books that are necessary to untangle from yourself and this was definitely one.
Amanda: What is the most important thing you hope that readers get from this story?
Wen-yi: I’ve always loved how Spring Awakening ends–even after two deaths and one suicide attempt, the show’s final note is about living on with the memories of those you’ve known and loved, and about hope for a better future with the changing of the seasons. I drew a corkboard string from that to the line in Taylor Swift’s ‘seven’ that goes ‘are there still beautiful things?’ Because Isa is an artist, that clicked so neatly for me with who she was and what she needed to learn for herself. She feels like she’s lost all the beauty in her life because of her own ghosts, her trauma, her family situation; throughout the book her drawings are corrupted by supernatural influences as she grapples with herself and her past. It’s a lot of simultaneous disillusionment and yearning for the lost innocent wonder of childhood. But I wanted the arc of the story to be that yes, there are still beautiful things, and you can find them again. That there will be new people who will give you strength, that you’re not alone, and that the capacity for love hasn’t passed you by.
Amanda: What are some themes you worked to tackle in this story?
Wen-yi: Spring Awakening is about adults ultimately harming their kids by restricting them from education about their own bodies. So sort of marinating on that, The Dark We Know is also a lot about families, and secrets and traumas that are passed down and built upon. There’s a lot of characters in the book for the genre, I think, but I was just very interested in different parent-child relationships, and more broadly these paternal relationships between church/community and the children. Shame plays a big part in maintaining those secrets, and alienation and isolation emerges as a result. There’s shame about queerness, failure, abuse, about a Chinese teen mom in a mostly white town never quite able to feel normal. The end point of all that I think is finding your own identity, being able to express that, and breaking cycles.
Love also ended up playing a surprisingly big part–it was one of those themes I didn’t set out to explore but eventually realized I was writing about. Platonic love, romantic love, familial love, how both individual traumas and societal judgment can corrupt them and leave vulnerable wounds for false ideas of love; grappling with love that feels dirty, grappling with not being deserving of love or feeling incapable of it.
Amanda: Are you a part of any writing groups or communities? How have they helped you in your writing and in your publishing journey?
Wen-yi: I’ve gotten to meet so many writers and debut authors online through the process of writing drafts and then querying manuscripts and then navigating the publishing journey, and I constantly say that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without them. Some of these random online people are now some of the friends I talk to most often.
Every author needs a creative community, and everyone in publishing professionally needs a support network of peers, because this industry is so draining and isolating otherwise. Besides the moral support and needing people who get exactly what you’re feeling, having a network in this really opaque industry is also so important for information–learning about experiences at other imprints or other agents, learning what’s normal and what shouldn’t be accepted, etc, especially for young and marginalized authors. I think I also grapple a lot with how being published turns this passion of yours into a commercial project, and being in touch with the other authors around you, exchanging celebrations and ideas, being excited about each other’s work, etc, is really good grounding in the joyful human side of this.
