Things I Like: dublit

John Yi is co-founder and managing director of dublit, a website on which writers record and post their original creative writing in audio and text formats. I talked to him about dublit, the challenge of being both a manager for and a contributor to the site, and the desire to share our stories.

How did you get started as a writer?
In college at West Point I wrote a paper on "triple seven syndrome," basically a tongue-in-cheek title that described the impact of perceived gender inequalities at the academy. To my surprise, that paper helped me win an award for "Most Distinguished Writer." Then I had to travel a lot for work so I didn't have a chance to get serious as a writer. 11 years later I'm sort of back in the game.

How did dublit happen?
I always wanted to write, and working for the government I had a lot of training in project management and personnel management. In 2001 I intended to take a year off and write a novel, but I ended up accepting a job with the American Red Cross right before September 11 happened. So I spent two more years doing relief work, initially with the families of Flight 93. After that I started a tech company down in Santa Barbara and about a year and a half ago I was commuting there and finally got sick of having nothing to listen to. At the time I'd been taking creative writing courses and thought there were a lot of valuable stories I heard there. So I connected the dots: a dearth of things to hear in those in-between times and tons of writers with stories sitting around not reaching anyone.

Does managing the site make you hyper-analyze what you post? Do you ever edit or delete something after posting it because of how it makes you appear as a representative of the site?
I considered it at the very beginning, when one of our engineers pointed out that very few pieces had been contributed and one of mine had the phrase "blow job" in the first minute. But really, we're all adults. I don't want to sugar-coat or regulate. A person is free to like it or not like it, and the dublit system will eventually allow readers to filter their content based on personal preferences or standards. And waht's more, probably in part because of my background working in really tough environments and being faced almost daily with grave situations, I try not to dwell on things I consider largely superfluous, like how people perceive me. That being said, I know my writing has a long way to go and I am as much a beneficiary of dublit's peer-feedback capacity as anyone.

In some senses, it seems like audio storytelling is flourishing. We have Prairie Home Companion, This American Life, tons of audiobooks. What's the source of that impulse?
One of the companies I run has a product that gives a visceral sense of low frequency sound, so I'm certainly not averse to multi-modal sensory entertainment. At the same time,  no fancy electronics can hold a candle to the emotional impact of a human voice coupled with our imaginations. It imparts something we can't replicate. I don't know why it happens, but it happens to me. For example, there's this amazing story--"Sweet Glass" by Patrick Downes. It was published in Story magazine two issues before it went out of print--and I recorded myself reading it. This was a while ago, and recently I listened to the recording on a car ride and it made me cry. I realize it's a little ridiculous, crying at the sound of my own voice, and also because I've read or heard this story one hundred times before. But the turn of phrase was touching, the story was so efficient and powerful. When a story impacts me like that, I think to myself "We're on to something here."

The genres represented in dublit are all over the map: fiction, personal essay, memoir, poetry, romance. Are there any genres that work particularly well when they are recorded, and are there any that don't?
Honestly, I don't know yet. When we started, not only did we not know which genres would be most popular, we didn't even know what length technically constituted a short story. I'm sure it's on the books somewhere, but we didn't look it up. Our only consideration was server space, really. In the end, our testing said that stories between five and eight minutes were most popular. I grew up watching cartoons and listening to songs that were about that length, so I wonder if that's something biological or behavioral: bite-sized entertainment. So length is a determining factor, if there is one. As for genre, it's too early to tell.

What's your favorite word in any language?
O-l-c-h-u-n-e-n is I guess how it would be spelled in English. I had lunch with my mother recently; we had a Korean hot pot and she said it was "olchunen." I heard her say that before and finally I asked what it meant. When it's cold or you are feeling stuffed up or hungover, "olchunen" is something spicy that makes you feel warm and good inside.