Countdown to Publication-Week 6: I'm Currently in Hermit Mode

In six short weeks my book will be on bookshelves across North America. I feel like I should be doing something, but this past week I've been a hermit. I couldn't bring myself to the internet, this blog or even out and about much. I just wanted to go inward and be alone. I don't know if this is usual for someone who is about to have a book published. I feel like I have already put so much of myself out there and in April I'll be doing it again on book tour. I am so looking forward to April and all the events that are coming up, but I can't seem to shake this need to retreat.

Maybe I'm storing up energy for what's to come. Or perhaps I'm just plain tired. All I've wanted to do lately is fix myself a big cup of herbal tea after my classes at the college and melt into my bathtub with a good book. I've wanted to do simple things like cook a meal for my husband or gather all the loose paper clips from the bottom of my book bag and organize them into one location (trust me, this is not like me). Sometimes I just stand and stare out my office window at a bird and sometimes I sit at my desk and do absolutely nothing.

I wanted to do a vlog today, but my current "hermit mode" status won't allow it. I'm surprised I was able to bring my fingers to the keyboard today and type this post for week six. But I think it is important to share. Maybe other writers or even non-writers can relate. Do you ever feel just plain tired of being connected? Connected to the internet, connected to your job, connected to all your responsibilities—have you ever just wanted to step away from it all? I haven't wanted to go on Facebook and have even found it difficult to check e-mail. I even entertained the idea of a new blog: 365 days of Cave Living. I'd go out and live in a cave in silence and pen my blog posts out on paper to later be typed onto my cave-dweller's blog by someone else, because I'm not allowed to use electronics so long as I'm a cave dweller. I'd meditate, chase butterflies, live off the land, wake up at sunrise and go to sleep at sunset.

For now, I think I can live with the near-silence of my office. I'm warming up again to the sound of my fingers punching out the keys on my keyboard. I'll settle for the cup of tea next to me and the long weekend ahead with no classes. I'm grateful for this time to soak in all that's around me. I've forgotten what it feels like to do next to nothing. I've done all that I can do. I've laid down the foundations, I've written the book and it's gone to print. It will be coming soon!

While in "hermit mode," I noticed that the daffodils in my garden are starting to poke through the dried out leaves that fell from my camellia tree last fall. I can almost smell them, but I can't force them to bloom. I'll just have to wait. And I'm perfectly fine with that.

Countdown to Publication-Week 7: I'm Vlogging Today (Not Blogging)

Week 7—About 52 days to go until the book is released. Today I present you with my attempt at a vlog (video log). Enjoy! Please leave comments, as this is my first time to vlog and feedback is appreciated. Also, please view my west coast book tour schedule on Facebook and share it with your west coast friends. I just found out I'll be at The Book Passage in Marin County, CA on April 13 at 7PM. An RSVP to the events listed on my book tour schedule page would be much appreciated. More soon friends! Now for my vlog:

Countdown to Publication-Week 8: A Surprise Visit from my Publicist

Somedays I feel a bit like a female version of Clark Kent: I'm a blogger/book writer by day and an ESL teacher by night. Last Wednesday, I was solely an ESL teacher because I was covering a day class for a friend. After snoozing in my car between my seven-hour teaching marathon, I decided to check my email.

Sitting in my inbox was a message from my publicist, Eva, that read,

"Lunch on Friday?"

Are you kidding me? Whatever I had plans for that day at the noon hour would have to wait. Eva was in town!

"Sure! What time and where?" I typed back.

"What about 12:00pm at Chanterelle in Edmonds?"

I had never met my publicist, who is stationed in California, in person. This was an opportunity I did not want to miss. Of course I knew we'd meet eventually, but she was here NOW! So on Friday, after having breakfast with a friend, I hopped into my car and drove down towards the Edmonds waterfront. I parked my car in a nearby neighborhood and walked towards historic Edmonds. It was a sunny day in Washington, quite rare for this time of year, and the Olympic Mountains and a ferry boat on Puget Sound created the perfect backdrop to our meeting spot.

From outside, I saw her sitting in a little window seat and we both smiled and gave each other a little wave. We had a lovely lunch and chatted about life and book-related stuff.

I'm so excited about all the events that are coming together and there will be more news as time goes on. I have created a countdown here to keep you posted on book readings and other news related to the release of my book in April. It's available now for preorder at the sites listed on the sidebar. So here's what I know so far:

Tuesday, April 3, 2012-My book's birthday!

Saturday, April 7, 2012-Book launch party at Yoon's Yoga Bliss near Seattle from 9:45-1pm (Yoga class from 9:45-10:45, book reading/signing from 11:10-12:10, mingling, cake, appetizers from 12:10-1). Book sales by East/West Bookshop.

Thursday, April 12, 2012 @ 7:30pm-Book reading/signing at Powell's Books in

Portland, Oregon.

(I will be in the Bay Area at The Book Passage in Marin County, but don't have dates yet. I hope to be there on Saturday, April 14, 2012)

Saturday, April 28, 2012 @ 7:00pm-Book reading/signing at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Washington

(I also plan to visit New York and Chicago on tour, but don't have dates yet, will keep you posted)

Friday, June 1-Sunday, June 3-Open Up To Your Life's Purpose Yoga and Writing Retreat with Seong Yoon Lee (The monk I married) and Katherine Jenkins at The Yoga Lodge on Whidbey Island, WA. This is already HALF-FULL, so go to info@yoonsyogabliss.com to find out more about it and to reserve you space! (This is not a book event, but an event to explore life purpose through yoga, writing, collaging, etc.)

There will be many more dates, events, etc. To make sure you don't miss something in YOUR neck of the woods, it would be good to become a fan on my Facebook fan page or Twitter. That's where I post the most up-to-date info.

Anyway, this is all starting to feel a little surreal, but I'm excited and I really hope to meet many of YOU out there. Please leave a comment here and let me know if can make an event. I'd love to here from you. Please let your family, friends, co-workers and acquaintances know about this post. Thanks friends and stay tuned!

All the best to you,

Katherine

31 Writers, 31 Lessons-Lesson 31: Be Strong—Don't Give Up Searching

Last but not least, a post by the monk himself. How could I host the event 31 Writers, 31 Lessons on a blog titled Lessons from the Monk I Married and not include him? So here he is—please welcome my husband, former Korean Buddhist monk and current Yogi, Seong Yoon Lee, or simply Yoon:

I clearly remember the day when I heard the sound of a gong while I was in an evening chanting ceremony in a remote temple in Korea. It was not just the sound of a bell, it was the sound of awakening for me.

I thought that if I became a monk someday, I'd come back to this temple. Two years later, I came back and became a monk. Through many years of sincere practice and everyday life in the monastery, I have learned so much. Of course, it had its own challenges, joys, frustrations—the same as mundane life. I know things are always changing, but I never thought I'd come back to mundane life.

But the winds carried me in a different direction. Sometimes we need a different direction for our growth. I faced many struggles, emotions and fear about this change, but I learned something that I want to share with you here.

My master in the temple told me that I had to finish my degree in Buddhism, so I decided to come back to my college and study there. In my free time, I also studied English and Japanese at a foreign language institute nearby.

That's where I met my wife.

I never expected this would happen, but as we got to know each other, I found that we had a deep connection to one another. It was not easy for me and it was also not easy for her to come all the way here—to this point where we are now. I was a Buddhist monk and she was an English teacher. But also, I am just a human who feels different emotions in me. I don't want to tell all the stories here. You can read all about those in her wonderful book, coming soon, called Lessons from the Monk I Married.

Ultimately, I decided I wanted to be with my wife because of the deep connection and love I felt for her. I had to leave the monastery and start all over again. I also had to face my fears in that process:

How can I make money?

How can I pay bills?

What will other people think of me?

I struggled with all of these questions and had to face each one of them.

Shortly after I decided to leave the monastery, I moved in to Kathy's apartment. However, she had plans to meet her family in New York. These plans had been set months before. After she was gone, I was all alone in her apartment. There was nothing but miso and cabbage in the refrigerator, so that's what I ate. Perhaps this was her test for me. Could I survive on my own without the temple and without her help?

Somehow I needed to make money. But what kind of work can an ex-monk do? I didn't know what I had to do. I looked in the local newspaper and found a position posted for a sushi waiter. I had an interview and got the job. They needed people, also I needed money. But I didn't survive very long there. I moved too slowly and messed up on many orders which resulted in yelling sessions from the manager. I had become his servant. In his eyes, I was just a stupid server who was good for nothing but fetching cigarettes for him.

So I quit. I was back to nothing again. But I started to think about my training and all that I had learned. I had been trained in yoga and meditation in the monastery. I knew I had so much to share about this. So I put up some posters around the apartment building, and before long people were coming to practice—both Korean and foreigners alike were coming. By the time Kathy returned from New York, her apartment was full of people practicing yoga.

So it became my career. I became a yoga teacher. I operated two yoga schools in Korea and am now the owner of Yoon's Yoga Bliss near Seattle. I have met so many wonderful people through this yoga adventure. I found a life where I am able to share all that I am. I learned how we become authentic and at the same time universal. Through creative energy and love, we become the embodiment of who we are, and that authenticity also continues to evolve through our own searching.

So don't be afraid of the different winds that come to your life—even the unpleasant winds. Life is an adventure. Sometimes we find treasures and sometimes things fall completely apart. If things aren't working the way you want them to work, maybe the universe wants to offer you something better, but you can't see that right now.

Be strong. Don't give up searching and you will find those treasures that are beautiful and priceless.

Seong Yoon Lee studied Buddhism at Donguk University in Korea. He was trained as a monk in the Chogye order at Songgwang Temple. He met his wife in 1996 and later they married in 2003. He owned and operated two yoga schools in South Korea, one in Seoul and one in a nearby suburb. He has taught yoga to hundreds of students and his yoga school and unique approach to yoga were featured on a major television network in Korea in a documentary about stress. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife and is the owner of Yoon's Yoga Bliss near Seattle.

31 Writers, 31 Lessons-Lesson 30: Spice Your Writing with the Details of Life

A writer is always writing, even when a writer isn’t writing.

I taught English for a time in Thailand. This was ten years ago, and I did no writing at all then—or so I thought at the time.

Instead, I jotted down notes, at night under mosquito netting, sometimes by flashlight or candlelight, while the mosquito coils gave off their pungent smell. I saved the scraps and notes and carried them across the Pacific Ocean with me back to the U.S. My notes sat packed away for days, weeks, months, years, but eventually I dumped them out on the floor and started sifting through them.

I discovered recipes I’d forgotten I had jotted down, including a Burmese dish I loved made of peanuts, parsley, cilantro, carrots, roasted red peppers, garlic and lime juice. Another recipe I found consisted of bean paste fried into thin, crispy shells, stirred with onions, vinegar, and oil.

Writing is a lot like cooking. Someday, we will stir the ingredients together and create something delicious for others to taste. But today, even if your life doesn’t allow you to create that five-course novel you’re planning, you can still be collecting the most amazing spices and ingredients and even experimenting with them in a poem, or story, or blog. You never know how one little tidbit you set aside today might season tomorrow’s dish. It doesn’t matter if you write fiction or non-fiction—they both need salt and pepper.

When I taught English in a Thai village I learned from the villagers to dip un-ripened mango slices into a mixture of salt, sugar, and red pepper flakes. I learned to season my noodle soup with lime juice and vinegar and basil leaves, red pepper flakes and fish sauce and sugar. Thai food is a marvelous explosion of hot, sour, salty and sweet, all balanced together perfectly in the same dish. So notice the spice of your daily life—a salty conversation, a sour scene, a hot character, a sweet thought. Jot these savory morsels down and someday maybe you can throw them together in perfect balance and create a sumptuous feast for others to enjoy. Below are some "morsels" I jotted down during my trip in Thailand:

Some of my students were Burmese refugees who had left their turbulent country behind and were on their way to other countries. They paused on the border for a brief time—it was just a pit stop. But they were hungry to learn English because that was the language of most of the countries they were headed to. Late at night, they played softly on guitars under the stars. One student was only a teenager when he fled to the Cambodian-Thai border, where he found gems to sell in Thai markets.

“One night some drug addicts pound on my hut and shout at me, demand my money,” he explained. “Then they broke in and stabbed me. I was bleeding and I ran into the jungle. After that, I find some of my people here.”

He fell silent and strummed pensively on his guitar. Then he began to sing.

“What’s this song about?” I asked him.

“I miss my—“ he paused and I assumed he was searching for the word “girlfriend” or “lover” or “fiancée.”

“I miss my nation-state,” he finished.

Another student, on his way to a new life, lay in a hammock dialing through a short-wave radio. Under the nearly full moon, he was trying hard to learn the meaning, from Voice of America, of bugaboo.

“Because he has a bugaboo about getting fired, he’s a workaholic.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed, when the Burmese translation of gung-ho was given.

A little later, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out from the radio, and was then translated into Burmese.

“I have a dream!” someone burst out in the night, trying out the phrase on his tongue.

Lynne Walker has worked as a journalist and teacher, among other things. Her book Strange Sky is now available on Kindle on Amazon. She is also working on the book The Mystery of Garabandal, coming soon. You can find Lynne's work, sprinkled with just the right spice of life, over on her blog called Strange Islands. She is also a contributor on the blog Writers Rising.

31 Writers, 31 Lessons-Lesson 29: Anyone Can Learn To Live a Creative Life

Before my research on wholeheartedness (and before the 2007 breakdown spiritual awakening), I was completely disconnected from my creativity. My disconnection took the form of judgment, resentment, and fear:

"A-R-T - how nice. I have a J-O-B - I'm doing real work."

"I'm not the creative type."

"Spending time creating is self-indulgent."

Behind all of these emotions was disconnection. I had the creativity scars that many of us have; the ones that come from not being able to draw a still life in middle school and being told that I better stick with writing and reading.

Today, I'm reconnected with my creativity and it's transforming every part of my life. Creativity brings me joy, helps me stay more grateful, calms me down, and inspires me. It helps me keep my perfectionism in check and has become a powerful way to connect with my family.

In The Gifts of Imperfection, I summarize what I learned from the world of Wholehearted living and loving:

1. “I’m not very creative” doesn’t work. There’s no such thing as creative people and non-creative people. There are only people who use their creativity and people who don’t. Unused creativity doesn’t just disappear. It lives within us until it’s expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear.

2. The only unique contribution that we will ever make in this world will be born of our creativity.

3. If we want to make meaning, we need to make art. Cook, write, draw, doodle, paint, scrapbook, take pictures, collage, knit, rebuild an engine, sculpt, dance, decorate, act, sing—it doesn’t matter. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning.

I'm so grateful for what I've learned and for all of you who are creating and sharing your work with the world.

Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. Brené spent the first five years of her decade-long study focusing on shame and empathy, and is now using that work to explore a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness. She poses the questions:

How do we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities and imperfections so that we can engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to recognize that we are enough – that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy?

Brené is a nationally renowned speaker and has won numerous teaching awards, including the College’s Outstanding Faculty Award. Her groundbreaking work has been featured on PBS, NPR and CNN. Her recent TED Talk on vulnerability struck a nerve with audiences across the globe and has become one of the most shared talks featured on TED.com with more than 2 million views.

Brené is the author of The Gifts of Imperfection (Hazelden, 2010), I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Telling the Truth About Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power (Gotham, 2007).

Brené’s current research focuses on authentic leadership and wholeheartedness in families, schools, and organizations.

Brené lives in Houston with her husband, Steve, and their two young children, Ellen and Charlie.

31 Writers, 31 Lessons-Lesson 28: No Form of Success Comes without Rejection

On a recent interview, a kind young man asked me, “So, what’s it like never to be rejected anymore?” I laughed so hard that I couldn’t answer. Of course, I still get rejected all the time. Being an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author doesn’t mean you get to avoid rejection. It only means that different people reject you.

What I have learned is that no form of success comes without rejection, whether it is the rejection slip from your dream agent or the cute boy who falls in love with your best friend. When I was growing up, I spent some time thinking about what success truly was. I moved from Hong Kong to New York and worked in a Chinatown sweatshop with my family when I was only five years old. For a long time, success meant simply escaping that ruthless, draining life of manual labor. Then when I was lucky enough to study at Harvard, the world opened up to me. Suddenly, I had access to some of the brightest minds in the world. I began to realize that success might mean more than simply escaping. It might mean contributing too. That was when I made the decision to become a writer.

All along my path, I slipped and fell and got up again. When my family and I worked as hard and as fast as we could in the sweatshop, the factory owner cut our wages so that we couldn’t earn any extra money. At school, I was the awkward, badly-dressed Chinese girl and on top of everything, I was a brain too. Few girls wanted to be my friends. The boy I liked didn’t know I was alive. My first teacher didn’t care that I didn’t speak a word of English and gave me a zero on every test. There were times when I felt rejected on every front.

As I became older, I learned English and became better assimilated. I was lucky enough to have a gift for school and achieved some success there, but with every step that I took, I faced new challenges and the possibility of rejection again. Do I hate rejection? Absolutely. If I could, I would incinerate every rejection letter I received. I want to curse and scream and stomp my feet like a three-year-old.

Then I take a deep breath. I tell myself that we all need to follow our own paths, whatever they are. I remember that I am worthwhile, even if I have just been rejected by this person or institution. I bear in mind that the world is big, and I will have another chance. This allows me to go on when I get rejected. I’ve seen that every person who succeeds in some way – whether it’s professionally or privately – has faced rejection many, many times and overcome it.

In fact, rejection lets me know that I’m continuing to challenge myself. If I only did things that came easily, I would stay in the safety of my comfort zone. That’s not enough for a full and satisfying life. So when it comes to rejection, I say: bring it on.

Jean Kwok immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. She won early admission to Harvard, where she worked as many as four jobs at a time, and graduated with honors in English and American literature, before going on to earn an MFA in fiction at Columbia.

Her debut novel Girl in Translation (Riverhead, 2010) became a New York Times bestseller. It has been published in 15 countries and chosen as the winner of an American Library Association Alex Award, a John Gardner Fiction Book Award finalist, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, an Orange New Writers title, an Indie Next Pick, a Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award nominee and the winner of Best Cultural Book in Book Bloggers Appreciation Week 2010. It was featured in The New York Times, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. The novel was a Blue Ribbon Pick for numerous book clubs, including Book of the Month, Doubleday and Literary Guild. Jean lives in the Netherlands with her husband and two sons.

Learn more about Jean here:

www.jeankwok.com

www.facebook.com/pages/Jean-Kwok/213583280524