Min Jin Lee, PACHINKO

[1:51]Zibby Owens: I'm Zibby Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books. This thirty minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, three hundred and sixty five days a year for about thirty minutes. I am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction and memoir. Our books are already out now, and you can check it out on zippybooks.com. And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle features. That's at zippymag.com. We have classes at zippyclasses.com. And I recently opened a bookstore in LA called Zippy's Bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue at 11th Street in Santa Monica. I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings. But this Here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018. And no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing. Enjoy. I'm re releasing this episode with Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, which has become a TV show and a massive sensation. I interviewed Min Jin Lee in a business center at a hotel in LA after attending a conference she was at. And it was a creative, a creative way to do it as we sat with the glass door to the lobby and, did an impromptu quick episode. But I would do anything and still would do anything to talk to one of my favorite authors. And I was absolutely riveted by and obsessed with Pachinko and couldn't wait to talk to her about it. So it's funny to now revisit this year's later. I hope you enjoy our conversation. I'm thrilled to be here today with Min Jin Lee. Min Jin Lee is the award winning best selling author of Pachinko, a multigenerational novel about a Korean family and the Korean diaspora. Mashinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction and a New York Times 10 best books of the year in 2017. It will be translated into 24 languages. Her first book, Free Food for Millionaires, was also a national bestseller. Min Jin Lee has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, and many other notable publications. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Born in Seoul, Korea, Min moved to Queens and graduated from Bronx Science High School where she was inducted into the Bronx Science Hall of Fame and then went on to Yale University, winning prizes in both fiction and nonfiction. Now based in Boston, she will be a writer in residence at Amherst College from 2019 to 2022. So you've said that you worked on the story Pachinko for almost thirty years, that you've written it and rewritten it multiple times, even starting completely from scratch in 2008. I wanna know what it felt like the minute you threw the draft away and then you had to sit back down at your computer and start over again. When the cursor was blinking, moment, what was that like? What did that feel like? How did you motivate to start it again and then again?

[4:54]Min Jin Lee: Well, I'm really familiar with feeling discouraged. So it helps. And it's kind of funny, but at the same time it's also something that I realize about not expecting very much from what you do. So I have really low expectations of outcome, but I feel very committed to my projects. And I'm also really slow. So I just kind of think no one's expecting this. I didn't have a contract, so I don't work on some sort of contract basis. I work on spec. So it was okay. I just decided that nobody cares anyway. So I might as well just do it. I know that sounds really strange, but no, not strange. Not having expectations is really freeing. It's true. It's a good way to look at it. A lot of people get blocked because they have all these expectations of like how this book is gonna somehow save their lives or it's gonna give them money, power, glory. I've never actually met a writer who has any of those things. Just let that go.

[5:48]Zibby Owens: So then when you actually finished, how did it feel? Did you feel this enormous sense of accomplishment once you said, okay, this is my final draft. I'm done. And then to see it come out, what does it feel like? I felt free.

[6:00]Min Jin Lee: This project is not normal. I don't think most writers work on books for almost three decades. So after I finished and they agreed to publish it, I just felt the sense of like, Oh, I'm free. I don't have to work on this book anymore. And the fact that it's been well received, that's totally gravy. I did not expect that because I didn't think anybody would care about 600,000 people because that's pretty much how many Korean Japanese are in the world today. So I figured like, you know, I wrote this thing. It was really hard to do. For some reason I felt called to write it, but I didn't think people would actually buy this book. The fact that it's doing so well, that's a real mystery.

[6:37]Zibby Owens: It's not a mystery. It's so good. Oh, thank you. Thank It's dense and powerful and full of heartbreak and ups Oh, and thank you. Thank you. I'm sure you know it, but whatever you did over those years.

[6:49]Min Jin Lee: But it's not about being modest. If you really think about it, why would anybody care about these people? Because they haven't before. This is the first book ever written for adults about the Korean Japanese in the world in English as a novel form. So I used to think nobody wants this book. That's the reason why when I finish it, I can just sort of forget about it and go to the next thing. It almost felt like somebody had put the spell on me. Mhmm. And I had to go finish it. And I was like, oh, the spell is broken. Now I can be free. And then I figured if it does well, great. But if it doesn't do well, that's to be expected. But really, it goes back to what you were saying in the literary affairs escape that you spoke at today. It's not really about just this group of people. It's about all humanity and family and everyone can relate to that. And parenting. And parenting, yeah. And it became about parenting which was not in the first version because I became a parent. Okay. And I don't think I realized just how much I would change as a result of being a mother. So my son's going to be 21. So that space of twenty one years, that really dovetails in with the period that I was working on with the book, especially with the book, the versions that were working. So in a way, every aspect of parenting really fit into this book about what does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a mother? What does it mean to have children? What does it mean to like have wishes for your child, which you can fulfill? Like that was a really important thing. As I get older, kind of think I want all these things and I realize, does he want all these things? Right. And also everything that he wants, will he get them? And if I have to witness him getting things and not getting things, it's so hard. It's really different than when I don't get things that I want. Right. It's so much worse. It's so much worse. It's heartbreaking.

[8:29]Zibby Owens: You have this passage speaking of mother daughter relationships and parenting. You have a mother daughter scene towards the end of the book with Hannah and Edsuko, mother and daughter to Etsuko sitting reflecting about the difficulty of their relationship and what ended up happening in the family. And you wrote, when Etsuko had been a young mother, there used to be only one time in her waking hours when she'd felt a kind of peace and that was always after her children went to bed for the night. She'd long to see her sons as they were back then. She wished she could take back the time she had scolded her children just because she was tired. There were so many errors. If life allowed revisions, she would let them stay in their bath a little longer, read them one more story before bed, and fix them another plate of shrimp. That just got to me. I feel like that's every mother's every parent's really what they say, right? It goes so fast and you wish you could go back and all the mistakes and then you're just left sitting there and they're like grown up. Right. It's like

[9:20]Min Jin Lee: but when you're in it You're so tired. Yeah. There's too much. There's too much. You're so tired and you want things to be according to your plan. Mhmm. And children don't go according to your plan. But if you really think about it, it's the real gift of having these children and being with them and you don't see it at that moment. And I was just holding this baby earlier today. Her name is Esther and she's so little in this perfect little bundle. And I thought to myself, I wish I had been as grateful as I am right this moment when I had my own son because that felt interminable to me. It's like, when will he walk? And all of a sudden he's running and now he's in college and I'm holding Esther and I thought what a gift it is just to hold this little person and her not crying. Yes. That was a gift. That is a gift. Right. That's really good.

[10:07]Zibby Owens: In terms of the process of writing Pachinko, how did you keep all the storylines straight? Especially

[10:13]Min Jin Lee: all out. Yeah, outlined a lot. And for my second book, use a software called Scrivener, which is an academic and nonfiction software. Usually people who write dissertations and nonfiction books use this. It's a very organizing software.

[10:28]Zibby Owens: And I used it for it because it was so much research. Wow. Okay. You said earlier you do about a 100 interviews for each book. Easily.

[10:37]Min Jin Lee: Easily. Easily. Usually more. Sometimes they're like fifteen minute interviews. Sometimes they're actually several days long or I could take a class. It's a whole semester. And I do it because it makes me feel more confident about my subject matter. And I'm very confident about my subject matters after I finished my book, because at that point I know it, but I produce so little, like I only have two books. So I'm sure there's a way you could tell people are much better, more. And also I was a parent, like I was really busy. I was, I'm a full time mom and writing was my second thing. It's true. Cause it didn't pay anything. No one was paying me to do it. So it was my job to deal with the dishwasher and the laundry and showing me PTA. I did all those things. I think there's this belief fiction is just, oh, what's going on in your head? You know, you just write up all these stories, but yours is not really like that. Yours is like serious historical fiction with a lot of real life influences throughout. Yeah. But I, that was my second thing though. My first thing was really being a parent. Yeah. And if you look, if I had to clock my hours in a spreadsheet, you'd see that most of my time was really spent being a mom.

[11:42]Zibby Owens: Well, won't ask you to, you know, compute your billable hours for this session. In the book, Hansu is a real central character. In fact, it was Sunja's first interactions with him that ended up changing the whole trajectory of everyone's life basically in the whole book. I So found as a reader that my feelings towards Hansu kept shifting and I don't know if that was deliberate on your part. Was wondering, I wanted to ask you. You know, at times I really hated him and at times I felt very grateful to what he was doing for the family and sometimes I felt pity like towards the end. How did you feel about Would you want Hansu to be a person in your life? Yes.

[12:19]Min Jin Lee: But I wouldn't let him be my lover. Like I think when you have a person like that who's that powerful, they're really intoxicating to be around. Because they can make things happen. It's very cool to have somebody make things happen because you and I have all these wishes. Imagine if you just call somebody and go, Hey, by the way, can you get my friend a job? Or can you make this building open for me for the use that I need? Like he's that kind of person who could just make it happen. The door is open. Yep. That said, if that person became your lover or the father of your children, they have that same level of control and you become the thing that they control. And that's very different. So in my experience of meeting people like that, you want them in your life in a way, but just be really careful about how much intimacy you have with them. Interesting. So I always tell women don't sleep with tonsil.

[13:11]Zibby Owens: Okay. Don't do it. All right. Now I won't. But he's very sexy. I think people like that are very sexy. Yeah. Well, the confidence too. Sure. The confidence, the power, the ability to move the dial. It's very cool. And you in fact, you addressed this in the book in the beginning. Hansu says, Sasunya, sorry if I'm pronouncing this wrong by the way, people are rotten everywhere you go. They're no good. You wanna see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let's see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants. Do you believe that? Do you believe that when people get power, the power itself you said earlier you believe that empathy is sort of is inversely proportional to power. As power goes up, the empathy levels sort of go down. Do you think most men or women too, I shouldn't say men, do you think people when they achieve power become

[13:56]Min Jin Lee: bad? I think when you have an extraordinary amount of power, you have to work very hard to check yourself. I think we need to have checks and balances all the time because your heart is filled with things that you want. And sometimes what happens is that you can become more compromising with your ethics because you think, oh, well, I'm a good person and I want this. So it's okay if I fudge a little bit here and that's when you start to get in trouble. That's the reason why you have become more transparent about what you're doing to other people. Someone can say, you know, I know you want that and I know that you're a good person, but that's a little shady. And I find that a lot of really powerful people aren't transparent because they justify that because they're benevolent, it's okay that they're authoritarian.

[14:41]Zibby Owens: Yep.

[14:43]Min Jin Lee: It happens. That's really what I found. So I don't have that kind of power, but I kind of think if I did, I would have to become more transparent with other people, especially people who are going to be brave enough to tell me the truth. Right. Cause you can become isolated from people who are willing to confront you. Mhmm. And we all need to be confronted.

[15:03]Zibby Owens: Right. I think. Yeah. That's why it's like you have to keep people from back in the day. Right? Right. To keep you honest. Yeah. It's like the guys in Entourage. You have to keep those guys way back when I don't wanna give anything away about anything in the book, but the scene that you wrote when Isaac returns home Mhmm. Was so heartbreaking. I was literally, like, covering my eyes and trying to, like, read it, like, through my eyes, like, opening it. It was like a movie. Like, I felt like that scene was happening to me. Do you get overwhelmed by emotion the way I was getting overwhelmed by emotion at that scene? Like do you ever find when you're writing that your eyes are tearing up or your heart is pounding or is it just Absolutely.

[15:41]Min Jin Lee: You do absolutely. I have so many feelings and they're very uncomfortable. I'm very uncomfortable with the fact that I feel so much. And when I was younger, I used to think it was really bad that I had all these feelings. So as I've gotten older, I realized, so that's where I'm really strong. I'm very good at feeling things and I'm very good at recognizing other people's feelings of certain things. And I realized, oh, I have to use that in my fiction. So when I am working on difficult scenes, I do sob all the time and I think part of my job is to stay there sobbing and to finish the scene rather than walking away. Do I always have that courage? No, I do eat a lot of cookies, but then something like, okay, you've had the cookie and I go back to your desk and finish your sobbing and finish that scene. But it's uncomfortable because you don't know if that scene will destroy you or that feeling is too much. Sometimes it feels like it's too much. Yeah, I know what you mean. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[19:33]Zibby Owens: Kyung Yi and Yosep's marriage was really complicating and heartbreaking itself. And when I was writing up my questions, every question I wanted to say was heartbreaking. This is heartbreaking. And I'm like, your your book should just been Prachinko heartbreak or something because everything is heartbreaking. Kungy ends up using these Well, you know what Carly Simon says.

[19:52]Min Jin Lee: What's that? She says in the song, don't mind if I fall apart. There's more room in a broken heart. I love that. I love this idea that after your heart is broken there's actually a lot more room because we were constricted by having our heart intact. So a part of me always just feels like okay you know what you have to make a mess sometimes and then somehow you'll become a more expansive person so I think it's a good thing but I'm sorry if I made you cry. It's okay, sorry.

[20:22]Zibby Owens: So this particular woman in the book shows so much strength and selflessness and she becomes like this ultimate model of not thinking about herself at all despite all the challenges which just kept piling up throughout the book. What do you think made her that way? Do you think it was this whole culture wide mandate that you referenced in the book about a woman's sort of not just right but sort of obligation to suffer which Her lot is to suffer. Of Gohsang I think you called it. Yeah, Gohsang. Mhmm. So Gohsang. Suffering. So was that just something that she inherited or you know should we view her as this was it a good thing that she was so selfless and suffering

[20:57]Min Jin Lee: or should we feel sorry for her? I don't think that it's a good thing that women suffer. If I could Or not to suffer, obviously. No, no, no. Mean, I know what you're saying is that her selflessness and her suffering is something it is. You're absolutely right. It's almost a cultural mandate. And for some, so many women of this generation, including today, if you look at all the fairy tales in South Korea and Korea, basically throughout the history of time, It is about women should sacrifice and suffer and forget about their own happiness and their joy. I find that to be very problematic. I don't like it. I want women to be empowered and happy and fulfilled and all those things. That said, I think it's realistic to say if you love somebody, you will sacrifice and you will suffer. You can't always have your way. And I mean being a parent, Oh my goodness. You're going to have to give up a lot of things to be a parent. And yet if you do, you also get to be part of something that's much bigger than you. So it's one these trade offs about love. Whenever you love somebody, you have to give up something about yourself. And as I get older, the more I realize it's a privilege to be in a love relationship, whether it's vertical or horizontal or diagonal, whatever kind of love relationship that you're in, it does require negotiations and compromises and some suffering.

[22:18]Zibby Owens: So Noah, you were so funny what you said in the lunch how people are sending you messages on Twitter like page four fourteen like what's going on? How could you do that? You know what happens with Noah in the book, again heartbreaking in this sort of portrait of him, I was wondering what makes you want to write these heartbreaking stories? Did something happen in your life that made you wanna explore sort of this pain element or the inner workings of people's hearts and the tragedies? Do you know I mean? Like Well,

[22:50]Min Jin Lee: I study Aristotle's poetics, and part of the thing that he writes about about the way tragedy works is that when the when the viewer of the play, of the tragedy, experiences catharsis, then you have done for the viewer what the viewer needs. I think we all need to experience catharsis because all of us are carrying this pain within us. Art has the power to release that emotion. I think it's really cool for me to create something that could make you feel this catharsis, but also I'm feeling it when I'm making it. So you're absolutely right. There's something in me that has all this pain. I'm trying to figure out how do I get this thing out, But ideally it's not just about releasing it. How do I create something beautiful and intact and a kind of model in which you can experience catharsis and become more whole? Because we don't want to be carrying that pain And if you could feel more connected to your sense of why you have a family and what you want with your family and your sense of history and you become a bigger person and a more powerful person as a result of it, then I think it's worth releasing that pain. I think most of us are kind of frozen because of the pain that we have. I do see that quite a lot. People kind of stuck in a certain pattern. Yep. Thanks for giving this vehicle, you know. Oh, yeah. I hope so. I mean, even a little way, even in a small way, maybe really something that I want to do. So going back to the beginning of your career for a second, when did you know you were a writer? Or do you still not even consider I feel like you're so self deprecating. You're gonna say, I'm not a writer. I'm like Oh, I feel like a writer, but I don't think that I'm the same writer that I was when I started. I think it took me a really long time to figure out that I know what I'm doing. It took me a really long time. It took me the twelve years to publish my first book, but after I published it, I thought, Oh, I know how to do this omniscient thing. Most people don't do this anymore, but I really have figured it out. And that was really amazing. Then I thought, my second book, I'm going to figure out how to write that book. I knew how to do the craft of it. I didn't know how to do the subject. For Jingo, I kept on trying to approach the subject in every different corner and I just couldn't get in it. But it wasn't the craft part, but the craft part took a really long time to figure out. In terms of when did I decide I was a writer? I think you're a writer if you're writing. I don't think you're a writer because you're publishing. But I think in terms of how you perceive your own talent level and your skill level, that takes a really long time. It does.

[25:28]Zibby Owens: And you said earlier today, which I hadn't read anywhere else about you, I feel like I've tried to dig up what I could what I could learn, that you didn't speak really until middle school. Yeah. I didn't really talk to other kids. I had a lot of social anxiety as a kid too. What you were saying about not being able to figure out how to enter into a conversation. I had this one summer where I was traveling in France with this whole group and I just like couldn't talk. I just couldn't. I just was felt paralyzed. And I spent a lot of time thinking about language and conversation, like, how is it so easy usually? And I would watch everybody else talking and thinking, how were they doing that? It's, like, coming so naturally to them. I feel like what you were saying earlier today about your experience that you would just watch and not jump in made you feel like sort of such an oddball. Anyway, I I related I to I read a lot of interactions.

[26:16]Min Jin Lee: Mhmm. And reading interactions in fiction really helped me as well as observing other kids. But then I would watch these other children and young women who are so successful socially. And I would think to myself, Oh, I can't do that. I don't look like them. And I don't know how to have that sort of manner. And it took me a really long time to figure out, Oh, they're really just being themselves. And they have given this freedom away of being liked. Yep. And I think at some point when I decided I'm going to be okay if they don't like me because I know I'm a little off and that again gave me a kind of freedom like, okay, well, maybe two people will like me and 10 will not. And that's not terrible odds, right? Rather than thinking I'm going to get all 12 people to like me. Yeah. You can't please everyone. No. And then also I decided that I would like all 12 people. Okay. That was a huge decision for me too. I decided, okay, forget about the response. What will be my action? And I was like, I'm going to like all 12 of them and try to see them for their intentions. And

[27:23]Zibby Owens: that gave me a lot of power in the social dynamic. Yeah, I agree. I think being nice to everybody is the way to go, right? Everybody has something to offer.

[27:33]Min Jin Lee: I totally agree. I do. Even the most reprehensible person still wants to be loved. I've really have seen that because I've interviewed a lot of people who do very, very bad things and I'm going, Oh my goodness, what am I going to do with you? You are not nice. And then I think, okay, well you probably have a mom. Yep. What is she thinking when she sees you? She probably thinks that you heard the apple of her eye, even though you have done not good things. Or

[28:00]Zibby Owens: what happened to you that made you want to do that?

[28:03]Min Jin Lee: But I think about that a lot. I think about like, what would your mother think or the person who delights in you? Somebody delights in you, or at least I hope so. Yeah. Right. You hope so that somebody loves you, you know, in this kind of spectacular way, not just like tolerates you, but like just adores you. What is he or she thinking about you? And I think I want to see what that is even if I don't feel that way. I want to understand that because somehow you're appealing to somebody

[28:32]Zibby Owens: And you're writing now another book. Right? The third part of this Korean diaspora trilogy. What's that called and what's that gonna be about? If you can say. It's absolutely it's called American Hagwon

[28:42]Min Jin Lee: and H A G W O N. Hagwon is a for profit tutoring center. So a very simple explanation would be like Kumon. That's a Hagwon. You send your kid for enrichment and become better in math or English or something. Or SAT tutoring. You send your kid to get SAT tutoring. In South Korea today, starting at the age of four, children start getting enrichment tutoring even before starting kindergarten. So I'm writing about these tutoring centers that are all over the world that Koreans start. But now it's not just Koreans who go to these tutoring centers, other people go to. So this book will be set in Los Angeles and Boston and Sydney and London and New York and Washington DC, that sort of area. And I'm writing about the tutors themselves who are often artists who are pursuing dreams and they need to make money. And I'm also writing about the parents who have these wishes for their children. And I'm also writing about the young people who are the students themselves. And it'll be a very global book. And the question that I'm asking is, how do you live a wise life? That sounds great. I hope so. Are you on any sort of timetable for this? I'm in the interview stage right now and also doing field work. So I actually go visit the sites and it's really nice because it dovetails in very well with all of my touring.

[30:04]Zibby Owens: Oh, yeah.

[30:06]Min Jin Lee: So are you going to check out some already have Here in LA? Orange County for example has a very serious tutoring culture. So I'll be doing some more interviews with them at the end of December I think. We really love this place called Mathnasium. Have you heard of it? Oh yeah, they have them around the country. Yeah. So we've been able see that. Right. Not not the four year olds, but But I heard but methanazium apparently makes math really fun and more of a game for kids. Totally. Which is great. My daughter, like, keeps asking me to go. I'm like, you don't have to do this. Like, you don't need you don't have to. She's no. That's what I wanna do. I wanna But I don't know what I mean, I that's sort of interesting because it's not that I'm so pro academic in Richmond or I'm not, but I've noticed in The United States there's an incredible stress towards sports. Mhmm. Yes. Right? Mhmm. That sports are incredibly important in this country. And I like sports a lot too. Mhmm. There's a lot of virtue in being in a team and also learning how to be personally excellent. But if a kid says to you, I really like math and science and they want to pursue this, I think, okay, why not? Yeah, exactly. And you don't have to play lacrosse. But people often make fun of kids and parents in this country if they focus on those things. And I kind of think no one would ever blink if you said I'm going to go to tennis camp in Florida and you're going to pay $10,000 to go. But if you said I'm going to spend $10,000 a year on your kid going to a physics camp, people would roll their eyes and I kind of think, why is that? Yeah, you're right. Maybe it's like people feel like you're trying to get ahead in some way. Like it's like cheating yourself. Right. But then if you play baseball and you pay $10,000 that's why is that not cheating? I don't know. You're right. You're absolutely right. So do you have any advice to any aspiring writers out there? Absolutely. I think that the most important thing is reading. That mean that's really how I learned. I don't have an MFA, so I would read the books that I really love. I would read, I would read them, especially the ones that are just truly great at point of view. That's the thing that I think is the most important decision that a fiction writer makes. Which point of view will I employ? And for me, I chose omniscient, which meant that I had to study all the omniscient narratives and try to figure out how it's done and how the transitions work. I was very mechanical in the way I approached it. The other thing that's really harder than learning the skill is just staying with a project. That's really difficult because no one's asking you for this book. For most of us, no one's asking us for our books. To toil in obscurity or to toil in privacy, whichever way you look at it, that's difficult. And the other thing that I think is curious is I think most of us have the wrong projects. This is very upsetting for people to hear this. I had to recently write a letter for National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo. It's gonna come out pretty soon. So if you sub sign up for NaNoWriMo, you'll be getting a letter from me. And one of the things that I try to share with people that I've worked with who are my students is a lot of the times you think you want to write a book about something, and that topic is very respectable. But that respectable topic, whether it's your grandfather who did something heroic or some important subject that commands attention. Those are they sound great, but if they don't have your personal important questions tied up with it, you're not going to finish it. So I always say that topic that you choose and the questions that you have have to be as important as something intoxicating and alluring as something like an illicit love affair. It has to be that compelling that you would break public and social bonds. Then you'll get up in the morning every day and you'll work on your book. So I really encourage people to find their very most important questions. The questions they're almost afraid to tell their best friend. And choose that question and try to answer it in your book because then you'll do it. I love that. That's fantastic. Thank

[34:02]Zibby Owens: you so much and thanks for doing this interview. Coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Alright. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.