Blog # 3: Experience vs Research: Jess Yaun

All of the difficult and unusual experiences of my life revolve around the heart. I’ve been abandoned and adopted, witnessed addiction and abuse. I’ve fallen in love and become a mother. I’ve witnessed the disintegration of my adopted parents’ thirty-six year marriage. These experiences fueled my writing since childhood. Learning early in my life that silence meant safety, I retreated into my words and they brought me redemption. I am ready to experience a different kind of adventure.
I love history and culture. My life has taught me that I can only understand a person when I know not only what has happened to them, but the larger context that shaped them as well. Once I dove into sociology for my Bachelor’s, I discovered that beyond an insatiable curiosity for understanding people, I delighted in following the threads of time and their revelations of how tribes and nations have developed into who they are collectively.
Yet I feel the limitations of research and my imagination. I would love to travel the world and see the cultures that I’ve read about. I want to feel the history in the century old buildings in Europe, see the tribes in Africa living the way humans once lived for thousands of years, (before they all disappear) and witness the unique rituals that define places and their people.
I’ve always played a game of sorts while walking in the woods or touring historic places like St. Augustine’s in Florida. I place my hand against something like a tree or the rough stone of an old building, close my eyes, and try to imagine who might have stood in that very spot a hundred or five hundred years before me. What were they like? What were their hopes and passions? What world had shaped them without them even realizing it? My idea for the novel I’m working on began from this game. I was hiking in the North Georgia Mountains when I suddenly needed to know what people had lived there and what they had loved and lost in that forest.
Consequently, I’ve been researching the Cherokees ever since, and slowly weaving a narrative that revolves around my protagonist going back in time to live among them. Although my research informs me on subjects ranging from their worldview and how it shaped them, their religious ideas and modes of behavior, even what they ate and how they prepared it, I can only hope my imagination can take me to the place where I understand what life was like for a Cherokee. The heart part of the story, at least the grief and the loneliness of my protagonist, those are the parts I’ll write from experience.