Creators on Creating: Soon Jones

We're excited to publish These Aren't My Woods Anymore! How did this collection come about? What are you hoping readers take away? 

Thank you, I’m excited too! It’s been a long time coming for me.

I printed a ton of poems and then spread them all over my floor, then I organized them into piles based on themes (can you tell I’m a Virgo). I picked out ones I liked the best, and from there realized I had a coming-of-age thing going on and had accidentally written the story of my childhood. Once I figured that out, I ended up with what would become These Aren’t My Woods Anymore.

It's a melancholy collection, but what I hope is that someone who needs it finds this chapbook and feels less alone, and know that there are others like you, and you can survive a rough childhood and come out stronger for it, if you choose to.

When did you first start writing poetry? Have you always written? 

I started writing stories pretty much as soon as I could write, but I didn’t write any poems until I was a teenager. During my undergrad is when I started taking poetry seriously and attending classes for it. There was one class where the professor brought a box of poetry books for the class to keep and do a presentation on, and I snagged “Picture Bride” by Cathy Song and fell in love with it. It was my first time reading poems by another Asian American, and I thought “Wait, I can do this too.”

Why do you write?

Honestly, it’s pretty simple—if I don’t, I’ll lose my mind. All the stories and poems build up and I have to let them out. It’s like a pressure cooker. If for some reason I don’t write for a few months or longer, I fall into a bout of depression that won’t go away until I write, and that’s a lesson I have to keep relearning.

You're currently finishing your MFA in Poetry at Oklahoma State University. Could you share a bit about how this experience has been?

It’s been ups and downs for sure, but I’ve had the good fortune of meeting incredible poets who have pushed me to better my craft, and have made some great friends along the way. There was this one summer workshop where we were writing and workshopping a new poem every other day for a month straight, and having to churn out new material so quickly really helped me level up. An early version of “The Last Summer” came out of this workshop.

You also write prose, could you share a bit about that? 

Writing prose is actually what I started doing as a kid. I have to switch back and forth between “poetry mode” and “story mode,” because it’s a different muscle for me. I mostly write genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, horror) to explore my anxieties about the world and modern society in an abstracted place, or to just have a fun little adventure (which still ends up being about my anxieties about the world), but with poetry I’m trying to capture a specific feeling that doesn’t have a name, or the truth of a moment in time. I think of prose and poetry as the difference between a movie and a painting: they’re both in the same technical medium, but the goals and the effect are not the same. That doesn’t mean you can’t have poetry in your prose though, or prose in your poetry. That being said, writing poetry has improved my prose by leaps and bounds. If you write prose, I definitely recommend trying poetry.

Do you have any favorite poems, short stories, or books to teach?

Soft Science by Franny Choi and WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier are personal favorite collections to teach (and read), and pretty much anything by Danez Smith. There’s also “Lady Sings the Blues” by Terrance Hayes, “Girl Powdering Her Neck” by Cathy Song, and the short story “Natural Skin” by Alyssa Wong I use as an introduction. I’ve also used The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams to illustrate humor, and excerpts from The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri and Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto as good examples of worldbuilding. I also like to teach The Oval Lady collection of surrealist stories by Leonora Carrington to get students to think of writing prose in a new way.

Who are some of your literary (or other artistic) influences? 

There’s so many! For poetry, I’d narrow it down to Cathy Song, Willyce Kim, Janice Gould, Connie Fife, and Franny Choi. In fiction, Malinda Lo and Ursula K. Le Guin for sure, and as a kid Anne McCaffrey and Madeleine L’engle were major influences. Björk’s and Fever Ray’s lyricism has also been an influence on how I write.

What is your writing and editing process like?

Once I’m done with a poem, I have to set it aside for a while. Then I’ll print it out and start crossing out lines or adding new ones, and rearranging stanzas or experimenting with placement. If it’s a poem I’ve been lucky enough to have workshopped, I’ll go over notes I took and see if there’s anything I can implement. Sometimes workshop notes end up taking me in an entirely different direction than anything that was discussed, but it will get my brain working in a new way. I’ll edit a thing to death though, and I struggle with making myself stop to either send the poem out or work on something new.

Do you have any favorite writing rituals, if you believe in them? 

I love to have a little ritual! I believe having your own writing ritual is great for getting in the right headspace, and if you repeat it enough you can Pavlov yourself into writing when you don’t feel like it. For poetry, I will listen to instrumental music and read some poems I like before I start. With prose, I’ll listen to a special playlist I’ve made for that story/novel and get myself a "special drink." Sometimes this is making tea, sometimes it’s going out and getting like a fancy lemonade. If I’m having stubborn writing block, I’ll go for a walk and write down ideas or lines as they come to me. The first draft of “Horse Girl” was written on my phone while walking.

How do you know when a poem is done or at least ready to be sent out into the world? 

I make an educated guess! I’m overly critical of my own writing and am never happy with it, but if I wait until I’m happy I’ll never get anything out there. So at some point I give up and send a poem out, and if it gets a bunch of rejections, then I’ll go “okay time to work on it more.” If it gets published somewhere then I go “okay so that one was ready,” and try to calibrate from there.

What are you currently working on? 

Right now I’m working on my MFA thesis, a full-length collection of poems written during my time at OSU. I’m also working on a Goryeo- and Joseon-era inspired fantasy novel that I’m hoping we’ll be able to start sending to editors in 2026.

What are your hopes for your writing life going forward? 

I’d like to sell some novels and more poetry collections. It would be cool to get a writer-in-residence type position at some point, and I’d love to be able to teach writing full time as my day job. But regardless of anything else, I want to keep writing until the day I die.

Do you have any advice for young writers? 

Keep writing and keep studying your craft! You need to know the "rules" if you want to break them effectively. Absolutely keep everything you write in some way, even if you hate it. You might come back to it years later and find a kernel or a line you can work into something new—plus it’s helpful to be able to look at old work and see how far you’ve come. Read all kinds of poetry from all kinds of people. Get experimental with it, get forms-y with it. Not everyone is going to understand your poetry in a workshop-style setting, but find the ones who do and work with them. Find your people who share your vision and passion and help each other grow. Don’t cut other writers down, but lift them up—like JFK said, a rising tide lifts all boats.

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Soon Jones is a Pushcart Prize-nominated Korean lesbian poet and author originating from the rural countryside of the American South. Their work explores the unending cycles of grief, trauma, and finding inner strength in your darkest moments. Soon is a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow and is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Oklahoma State University.

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