Indies Introduce Q&A with J.B. Hwang

J.B. Hwang is the author of Mendell Station, a Summer/Fall 2025 Indies Introduce selection. 

Katherine Nazzaro of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, served on the panel that selected Hwang’s book for Indies Introduce.

“Mendell Station is both comforting and catastrophic, often at the same time. It’s about the monotonous slog forward through grief and about the unique trauma of being a frontline worker in the early days of the pandemic,” Nazarro said. “Mendell Station is a revelation. Do not miss out on it.”

Hwang sat down with Nazzaro to discuss her debut title. This is a transcript of their discussion.

You can listen to the interview on the ABA podcast, BookEd.

Katherine Nazzaro: My name is Katherine Nazzaro and I’m the manager of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I am here today talking to J.B. Hwang, who received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Florida. Her short fiction and translation can be found in The Temz Review, The Denver Quarterly, Oxford Magazine, and december magazine. She lived in San Francisco for eight years and worked as a mail carrier during the pandemic. She currently lives in Philadelphia, and today we will be talking about her debut novel, Mendell Station.

Mendell Station comes out July 22, 2025. It’s a truly stunning debut about a woman dealing with the loss of her friend and a crisis of faith, who becomes a mail carrier right before the start of the pandemic. As a member of the Indies Introduce panel, I fell in love with this book from the first page, immediately underlining sentences. I think this is going to be a book that really sticks with you after you read it. Welcome J.B.!

J.B. Hwang: Thank you so much for having me and for all those kind words. It’s truly an honor and so exciting to be a part of Indies Introduce. I’m just really thankful to everyone that gave my book time and thought and felt a connection with it.

KN: Fantastic. We’re so excited to have you [and] we’re so excited to have you as a part of the list! Let’s start off with the questions.

Mendell Station is a very insulated novel [that contains] so many excellent characters and depictions of community and that is one of the things that I love the most about the book. Which of these [characters] was your favorite to write?

JH: I don’t know if there was a specific character that was my favorite to write, but the [most fun] thing to write was the humor of the Postal Service. It’s so specific and hilarious and just remembering it brought back good feelings. It’s very self-deprecating, very fatalistic, but also kind of cheesy in an aunt and uncle kind of way. And I just wanted to make sure I could convey how much humor was a part of surviving the work of the Postal Service.

KN: I love that and I think that really came through in the book, which leads me into my next question: you yourself worked as a mail carrier. I have a lot of respect for the post office — truly [the] best uniforms out there.

JH: Yes, thank you. My book waxes poetic about the uniforms quite a bit.

KN: It really [does]! One of the reasons I was really excited about your book is because I was like, “I love the post office. I love a book about the post office. I feel like they don’t get enough love!” But you yourself worked at a post office. Was there any additional research you did for this book before writing it?

JH: A lot of the additional research was more informal, in the sense that my coworkers were always telling me stories about their years working in the Service. They [would] talk about what was happening, what they went through at other stations, or just some of their craziest or favorite moments. So, research in the sense [that] I was just gathering their stories and kind of putting them in the novel.

Another thing I did do: the union, at orientation, did share with us about the famous mail strike of 1970 which is [this] crowning achievement, [this] really cool thing that happened. I did want to add a few more historical details so I did more research on it for the novel just to add those. That was the extent of my research on the Postal Service.

KN: Very cool. This book has a lot about the ins and outs of the Postal Service. Was there anything you changed because it made a better story?

JH: One thing [I changed] is, my station was so nice and everyone was so kind, there was no interpersonal drama. That doesn’t make for a good novel when everyone is just super nice. I do think I conveyed some of their kindness, but I needed some drama so that I changed. Again, this was based on some of their stories. I tweaked and combined elements here and there, but [the drama] was the most fictionalized element. I didn’t go through everything Miriam went through, but that was what I was drawing from.

KN: That’s excellent for you to have in a workplace, not as great for a story. That makes sense!

I was also an essential worker during the lockdown period of the pandemic and one of the reasons that I really loved your book is that I found your depiction of that to be very deeply relatable. What was your experience of being an essential worker and how did that influence your writing?

JH: I think the major narrative out there about lockdown is [people] being locked up at home, super isolated and lonely, only seeing people in [their] bubble. But for me as an essential worker, and for Miriam, the lockdown was the most social that she had ever been and the most that she [had] ever traveled around the city. I wanted to make sure that narrative of the essential worker and the lockdown was conveyed, which is kind of the opposite of many people’s experience.

A lot of being an essential worker — which is connected to the themes of the book — is when so much of your life and things you take for granted are suddenly taken away or destroyed or gone, what remains essential in terms of what you need to do to keep going? Because life goes on, even when these huge parts of your life suddenly disappear, whether it’s Miriam’s best friend or her faith. The Postal Service and the essential work there also exemplified that and I wanted to make those connections.

KN: That makes sense. Miriam comes into this job right at the start of the pandemic, which does change her everyday [experience]. I feel like that major change in her life also really captured working as an essential worker — everything was so up in the air that it felt like a major life shift, even if your job was the same as before the pandemic and you were still going in.

JH: That’s so true, yeah! The work at the Postal Service was the same before and after the lockdown, but because the context [was] suddenly so wildly different, everything about it also start[ed] to feel different. I think the same could be said about a lot of aspects of Miriam’s life as well, whether it’s her friendships or her relationships outside her job. That’s a really good point.

KN: You captured that so well. We’ve talked about your research; we’ve talked about the post office. What was the rest of the writing process like for this book?

JH: When I set out to write the book, I knew that there would be three main threads of the story. The first one would be the loss of the friend, and the grief and the friendship. The second thread would be the spiritual crisis and all of the theological questions that [Miriam] has. And the third would be [about] being an essential worker during the pandemic through the Postal Service.

The first thing I did was write out a list of all my most memorable moments and stories from the Postal Service — things that I thought needed to be included in the book. Then I mapped out the arc of the friendship between Miriam and Esther, [the] essential moments and defining experiences that they had, and also the experience of Miriam’s grief. Then I wrote out some religious questions or ideas that I knew Miriam would want to talk about, whether it was the nature of work or hell.

I needed to weave these three strands together to make sure they weren’t isolated threads that didn’t converse with each other, but rather have them affect each other, affect what happened next, and affect how she saw things. That was how the book was crafted.

KN: I love that. You did an incredible job of weaving those [threads] together and forming the story. They were definitely different themes, but reading the novel, it didn’t feel like three different threads. It was all so consistent.

JH: Oh, great. I’m really happy to hear that.

KN: We’ve talked about this crisis of faith a little bit already. I will say, I was the first person on the panel to finish your book, and that was one of the things that my fellow panelists were immediately asking: “So how does that end? How does that resolve?” That is one of the very compelling things about your novel; you depict this major crisis of faith in a way that I have not seen depicted in fiction previously. Can you talk about that depiction a little bit and what inspired it?

JH: Yeah! I wanted to avoid just talking about the oppressive and hypocritical aspects of religion or the most beautiful parts of religion and why so many people center their lives around it.

I think the best fiction that deals with religion shows both what’s repulsive and attractive about it and the wrestling that happens [between them]. Some books that come to mind are James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead or Home, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

It was really important for me to show why Miriam could never go back to her faith and the ways in which it burned her, but also how much she missed parts of it, or how much it will always be a part of who she is and her identity, even the hole of the religion — the absence of it. I’m really glad you picked up on that aspect of it.

KN: Definitely. Every part of this book, I think it was really well done. I am not somebody who has personally had a lot of religion in my life, and still that part really resonated. Do you have anything else you would like to say about Mendell Station before it comes out?

JH: I’m just really pleased and thankful for this honor. All the things you mentioned were the major parts of the book that I wanted to make sure came across. It’s just extremely gratifying as a writer who’s been working on a project kind of for so long, to have these things understood and feel seen, and also to see the reader interpret and interact with it in new ways that I hadn’t thought of. I’m just extremely thankful. Thank you so much for enjoying the book as you did.

KN: Of course, and thank you so much for coming here and being a part of this podcast, and for being a part of Indies Introduce.

JH: Yay, thank you!

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Mendell Station by J.B. Hwang (Bloomsbury, 9781639736188, Hardcover, Fiction, $26.99, On Sale: 7/22/2025)

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