Jenny Heijun Wills

Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Seoul, South Korea and was adopted and raised in a white family in Southern Ontario. She is the author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related, which won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize in 2019 and the Manitoba Book Awards’ Best First Book Prize in 2020. She is a Fulbright Alum (Harvard) and in 2015 was Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. She holds two BA-Hons (Journalism, English), an MA, and a PhD, and currently teaches at the University of Winnipeg.

Instagram/Threads: @jennyheijunwills

FESTIVAL BOOK

Everything and Nothing At All: Essays

As a transnational adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the spaces of race and ethnicity. As a pan-polyam individual, she occupies a liminality between family—adopted, biological, chosen—and “community;” heteronormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. As a person who self-harms to cope with mental illness, she moves between the desire to be beautiful and the urge to make herself ugly, longing for visibility while daily wishing her body would disappear. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, her love language is to feed, but she finds it near-impossible to consume anything herself. These facets of Jenny’s personhood have served as both the anchors she has clung to, in the time before self-discovery and understanding, and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be.

Everything and Nothing At All weaves together literary criticism, cultural context, and personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge. Yet Heijun Wills is acutely aware of the cost of this knowledge: the more she uncovers, the more parts of herself she must reconcile. And though she is guided by those who came before—her Korean grandmother, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, even Emily Brontë when read with intention—and the loves she has sewn into her life, they cannot shield her from the combined weight of this knowledge. It feels at once like everything she has been seeking in order to set herself free, and that which threatens to extinguish her, one day, into nothing at all. Devastating, illuminating, and beautifully crafted, these essays breathe life into the ambiguities and excesses of Heijun Wills’ life, where she lingers always at the intersections and edges of identity.

GET THE BOOK

Owl’s Nest Books | Calgary Public Library | Audio

BE CURIOUSER

• Five Questions with Jenny Heijun Wills. –The Quarantine Review
• ‘Identity is So Inconsistent’: An Interview with Jenny Heijun Wills. –Hazlitt
• Finding a way home: The crisis of transnational adoption. –Jenny Heijun Wills, The Globe & Mail