“The Tunnel”

I wrote this piece last month about following the stars to pursue something that took courage during a Poetry Therapy session:

“I was in an ugly, abandoned lot with graffiti and broken glass. I saw the stars above testify to something better on the other side. I entered a dark tunnel. For a long time I walked through it wondering if I made the right choice following the stars. The tunnel didn’t give me hints but it ended. I got out, and I was on the other side: a green pasture.”

For me, writing is going to be like following the stars into the tunnel. May God bless me in my endeavor and help me be a blessing to others with what I have to write!

A roadmap for my short novel!

I am writing a novel. I am writing diligently so that by Eastertide or Summer 2028 at the latest, I can submit a manuscript to an independent press in New York (and many other publishers, too). I chose this press because it was the only one who would publish the small, quiet, unknown book called Clay Walls in 1986 that is today a landmark in Korean-American literature.

I aspire to write a bildungsroman about a Korean-American girl who matures into proper Christian and Korean womanhood despite facing tests and challenges. It will be based on my lived experience because I think it would articulate the experiences and issues a lot of other daughters of Asian immigrants growing up in Diaspora face, but my focus is within the United States of America. I had no role models growing up in the late 1990s and 2000s of proper Korean-American womanhood!

I want to tell a story of a little girl and young woman who experiences things no little girl should experience and feels she is locked out of being pure and a future wife and mother in the Church and her Korean community. It is about how she discovers that by exercising her uniquely human attributes of searching for meaning, turning to God and having faith in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, she can be what she has always longed to be: a Proverbs 31 woman!

My very first publication!

Today was a beautiful Easter Sunday on April 5, 2026. I am 37 years old. I discovered a poem I wrote was selected to be published in Open Spirit at Edwards Church’s Facebook in celebration of National Poetry Month! This is my first time having anything I have written be chosen among other pieces for publication! It meant so much. I am a girl who has always read and written privately but lacked the courage to submit anything for publication or enroll in a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in her twenties. This quiet little publication gave me the bravery to make an “author website” and commit to writing a manuscript of a bildungsroman to submit to an independent press by Eastertide next year. Here is my poem:

“Cushing Park”

By Noelle Lee, March 23, 2026

A frosty early spring morning in the outlines of Framingham, Massachusetts,

the dew beads and forms a forgiving halo around the severe grass.

Sunlight in a minor key focuses in and out, a bare tree of fractals shimmers

like a mirage in the fields, sparrows rejoice in the dust underneath.

My unassuming chestnut dog, a mutt from a shelter, meanders through 

the track, ragged ears and drying nose absorbing the sun.

Children break through the silence, shouting and echoing, chasing

a ball rolling hesitantly towards Penny’s way, and she is good, she sits.

I am overjoyed by her obedience and cry out in delight, hugging

her and pinning her to my chest, and she sighs, resigned.