Jung Yun: On Having Patience in Building a Writing Career
In this interview, author Jung Yun discusses how living through a historical event helped inspire her new novel, All the World Can Hold.
Jung Yun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. She received her MFA in English and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of O Beautiful, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a New York Times Group Read, and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year. Her debut novel, Shelter, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Follow her on Instagram.
In this interview, Jung discusses how living through a historical event helped inspire her new novel, All the World Can Hold, her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Jung Yun
Literary agent: Jennifer Gates, Aevitas Creative Management
Book title: All the World Can Hold
Publisher: 37 Ink
Release date: March 10, 2026
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Previous titles: O Beautiful, Shelter
Elevator pitch: All the World Can Hold is about three strangers who decide to take a cruise to Bermuda five days after 9/11. Once on board, tensions build and circumstances force them to confront their regrets and reimagine the possibility of their lives.
What prompted you to write this book?
I was living in Brooklyn on 9/11, and I left the city soon afterward to study writing. In many ways, that event is what finally made me commit to becoming a writer, so I’ve been circling the idea of a 9/11-related book for most of my career. The strange thing is—now I keep referring to All the World Can Hold as a 9/11 book that’s not actually about 9/11. At its heart, it’s about three people who have to examine how they’ve been living and consider how they might live differently, and better.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
Matt Bell wrote an excellent craft book called Refuse to be Done, in which he discusses the shadow novel—the novel you write before you figure out the novel that you actually want to write. With All the World Can Hold, I started two shadow novels (and countless “shadow stories”) over the course of two decades, which isn’t a misprint. I revisited this project off-and-on for 20 years before I realized all my past attempts were about 9/11, which wasn’t the book I wanted to write.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
By the third book, one might assume that I’ve been through the process enough times to understand how things generally work. But I publish once every five-ish years, and I’ve found that the industry changes quite a bit in between. The biggest surprise this time around was the end of The Washington Post’s Book World, where I not only wrote occasional reviews but read reviews to learn about new releases. It’s a huge loss that reflects how the number of outlets for quality book reviews is shrinking, which is terrible for both readers and writers.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I mentioned how this book had a really long incubation period. But once I finally decided to set it on a cruise ship, everything just kind of clicked. I ended up writing the manuscript in just under three years, which is incredibly fast for me—definitely the fastest of my three books to date. I think it came more easily with this one because the situation and the characters all feel quite close, and this book had been waiting so long to be born. It just took me a while to see the shape of it clearly.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I always tell my students that if a story elicits genuine feeling out of them, something amazing has happened. The writer has transformed black letters on white pages into something capable of reaching a complete stranger. That’s a lot to ask for, but I do hope that readers are moved by this book in some way, and perhaps even encouraged to look inward at their own lives as a result. I also hope they’ll feel free to laugh a little, because there are lots of things about a cruise ship that are genuinely kind of bizarre and funny.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
I wish I’d been kinder to myself as a younger writer. The publishing industry can often be very unkind, not to mention filled with rejections, disappointments, and gatekeepers at every turn. My best advice is to encourage people to be kind to themselves and patient about the realities of building a writing career. For most of us, it’s a long game.
