Alumni Spotlight: Chloe Chun Seim

You can often find Chloe Chun Seim at The Bourgeois Pig. If the weather's good, she'll be outside with a cold brew in hand-or, depending on the day, maybe a Manhattan. And she'll have a laptop in front of her, working on her next project. 

Seim' s first big project came out of those days at The Pig. In 2023, she released Churn, an illustrated novel-in-stories. Seim describes a novel-in-stories as a book of interconnected short stories, often with shared elements such as characters, setting or themes. (Think of James Joyce's The Dubliners or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.) Seim, whose first artistic love was drawing and painting, took this genre and added her own illustrations into the mix. 

"The thing I really love about textual and visual arts is that you can kind of complicate meaning and play stylistically when you're including illustrations," Seim says. "So something I really liked about doing it for this book was finding images that maybe would not be what people would think of in their mind when they think about the chapter, but that kind of highlights something that shows the undercurrent of the story."

Churn is a coming-of-age novel following a brother and sister who grow up in rural Kansas. The siblings are both queer and a quarter Korean. Their parents have a violent and chaotic relationship. Toward the novel's beginning, the family goes on a trip to connect and reconcile, but another fight ensues. To escape the turmoil, the siblings swim to the center of a lake, where they are pulled underwater and face a near-death experience. When they reemerge, they are changed: the girl spews smoke when she's angry, and the boy flops like a fish when he's emotional. The rest of the novel then progresses through 20 years of their lives.

Seim's writing journey began in her later years as an undergraduate student at the University of Kansas. Seim, 33, wrote the first draft of one of the Churn short stories in a creative writing class at KU. 

Tom Lorenz, an associate professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, says that the short stories Chun wrote in his class "had a poet's flair for original language coupled with a kind of visionary imagination that gave her characters a mythic dimension."

And Adam Desnoyers, a lecturer, notes Seim's distinctive voice. 

"Chloe's stories always had this strange and wonderful other layer to them. Nothing was mundane; there was always a sense of something bigger and darker behind the scenes."  Desnoyers wrote in an email to Lawrence Magazine. "She can transform a story about family or siblings or friends into something ethereal that you haven't experienced before. I love how she writes about Kansas." 

Seim graduated from KU with a degree in art history and studio art, then earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She has lived in Lawrence for 14 years and is a development specialist at the nonprofit Literacy KC. Seim, who is bisexual, a quarter Korean, and has a brother, says the novel is "definitely inspired a lot by my personal history, my family history." 

Seim describes her book as "a love letter to Kansas and Lawrence and Salina." Her portrayal of the state and its cities is not simple — they include criticism as well as praise. Seim wanted to show that there is diversity and complexity in small-town Kansas. As a mixed-race family in Salina with two queer children, the characters in the book not only experience racism and homophobia but also find their people and community.

Lawrence spots, such as Liberty Hall, make appearances in Churn. In one of the chapters, "Clinton Lake," the sister — who now lives in Lawrence — invites her brother to visit in an attempt to convince him to move from the "dead-end central Kansas town" to the "less-of-a-dead-end eastern Kansas town." 

"I really liked writing that Clinton Lake story because it's always been such a beautiful area to me," Seim says. "And also, there was that year where flooding was so bad, and then it really changed ... the landscape and all the trees had this paleness, to the parts that had been submerged." 

Seim completed the illustrations for the novel toward the end of her writing process. She felt the illustrations would tie the stories together since the novel does not have a standard chronology. Completing the illustrations also brought Seim back to her first artistic love. During her time at KU, Seim struggled with self-confidence in creating art, which is when she switched over to creative writing. In Churn, Seim brings both of her talents together. 

"So the illustrations in the book are kind of me coming back into art making," Seim says. The process also helped Seim come up with the title Churn. Illustrating the book made her more aware of some of the atmospheres in the story. "Churn" refers to the weather elements in the book — like thunderstorms, tornadoes and river currents-and connects to the story's emotional core. 

Seim hopes readers will finish her book with a better understanding of trauma and recovery, understanding "how that can be a very long-term project in your life." Recovery is not always linear, Seim notes. "It can often be cyclical."

Seim encourages aspiring writers to experiment and pursue unconventional ideas that are interesting to them. She originally had doubts about the structure of her novel and its fragmentary nature. 

"But, you know, it ended up paying off in the end, and I think the work was so much better because I took those chances," she says. 

-Lauren Kanan

The original article was published for Lawrence Magazine in 2024.