Christabel
Choi
크리스타벨 허드슨 최
On a hike in the Siskiyou mountains as a teenager, I watched a dragonfly emerge from its mottled grey shell. I recognized nature telling a story — with a lesson that has shaped everything I bring to my writing, teaching, and presentations. My art is to draw out powerful and beautiful stories, regardless of the shells they may hide within.
The seeds of Rice Paper Window were planted and replanted many times through a series of otherwise unrelated events.
My wildly diverse life started with divorced parents at opposite ends of the political spectrum. This was quickly followed by a gathering mosaic of found family which happenstance blended together into a White-Asian-Black multigenerational household — from the time I was seven years old. This has been my fortunate world ever since.
At age nine, my mother handed each of us kids a journal, and the instructions to write a complete and grammatically correct sentence in it every day. It seemed painful at the time, but we are forever grateful to her now. It helped some of us learn English, and all of us to express ourselves in writing. I have kept a daily, narrative journal almost every day since — first sitting in a tree in the forests behind our house, then through the excitement of a hard-earned trip with a Finnish friend across Europe at seventeen.
A journal was in my pack with Search and Rescue deep in the mountains of Oregon, at Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, on maritime research with SEA Semester in the Caribbean, and during a journey from Finland to Istanbul with my grandfather, as his last adventure before dementia kept him home.
Then, as a student and as an instructor at Yonsei University, Korea was my home address from 1986 to 1992. Rice Paper Window draws from only one of many journals during those years. There is always more to tell.
Journalling carried me across Russia just after the Soviet collapse, and into Paris until 1995. It accompanied me into marriage, recorded the adventures of a family business training hundreds of Taekwondo students, homeschooling three highly curious and active kids, more research at sea through the Pacific Gyre, teaching brilliant adult students, and caring for elderly parents. My mother, who had started my writing habit in the first place, benefited from it in the end as I could share stories with her while she lost her own voice and memory.
The journal has followed me on research for my books, from Venice to the Mongolian Steppe. Always a writer, I finally found time to publish. Sharing the Korea Journal from 1989 is a first volume of this new journey. Now, once again a teacher, a speaker, still a traveller and a writer — I can share with others the richness that I learned in all that journalling. One of those lessons is that I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t have a story worth telling: every person I meet has a story that can change at least one other person’s world. I love helping people bring out the richness of their stories. That’s what I do.
My workshops don’t just develop writers — they develop insightful storytellers. My approach to feedback is specific, practised, and kind: people leave knowing how to give critique that sharpens without wounding, and how to receive it inspired, without defensiveness. The result is a writing community. My workshops are diverse: some writers on their second or third book, and others who have come with an old manuscript that was gathering dust in a drawer somewhere — a story they have been trying to tell for years. They walk out having restarted. And they keep writing.
“Meeting Christabel each week is like opening an advent calendar door. What delightful surprise will she have for us today?”
A workshop participant
Read the book. Attend a workshop.
Bring Christabel to your audience.
Have a question for Christabel? Something you’ve wondered about Korea, about writing, about any of the threads that run through this work? Visit the journal — your questions may find their way into a post.