Jihoon Park is a writer from San Jose, California, a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz, and a graduate of George Mason University's MFA program. In his debut novel, Stickman, Park explores contemporary alienation, modern masculinity, and the Asian American experience through Juni, a demoralized rideshare driver whose obsession with a childhood classmate who became a notorious school shooter pushes him to the edge of reality. Blending deadpan humor, psychological grit, and surreal elements, the novel examines the dark, uneasy boundaries between internal isolation and extreme violence. In this episode of Salt Lake Dirt, host Kyler Bingham talks with Park about the winding genesis of Stickman, transitioning the core motif from a literal surreal stick figure to a thematic element in visual art, and his academic background teaching Japan's I-novel tradition. They also examine the psychological underpinnings of the protagonist's self-destructive cognitive loops, how immigrant identity shapes myth and fantasy, and the discomfort that arises when literature forces readers to confront ugly human truths.
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