Don Southerton

In The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron recommends writing "morning pages," handwritten pages where thoughts surface in a stream of consciousness as the brain moves from sleep to wakefulness. You end up with some fascinating ideas on paper. That habit is what led to this essay, a look back at the story behind twenty-five years as a writer.

Two memories surface. One is from fifty-five years ago, in freshman English class and a creative essay that earned a poor grade, after which I found other passions and walked away from writing.

The other is from nearly twenty years later, in the middle of a life-changing crisis, when I returned briefly to writing and then just as quickly returned to my work routine.

Neither time did the habit stick. The third time did.

Finding My Voice at Forty-Seven

I returned to college at forty-seven, in the middle of a career change, to finish a bachelor's degree after a twenty-seven-year break. Money was so tight that first semester back in college that I budgeted nine dollars a week for food: homemade pancakes for breakfast, microwaved frozen burritos for lunch, inexpensive campus coffee to keep me going.

I enrolled in Managerial Accounting, Psychology, and Microeconomics, along with an American History elective. The accounting class required a final paper analyzing an IPO of a publicly traded company, and I chose one I had worked for, Master Glazier Karate.

My professor was intrigued and supportive, patient with a returning student for whom writing was still a weak point. She asked me to fix my font size, since my draft was in 10-point and I did not yet know how to change it. There was no Grammarly, and my typing was slow, my hands conditioned by years of traditional martial arts knuckle work. I worked at it, and got an A.

A summer English course further stretched my writing, and by fall I had settled on history as a major, with a weekly rhythm of class writing assignments and book reviews. Then came an opportunity I had not expected. One of my history mentors, James "Jay" Fell Jr., had been approached by a local family to compile a family history, and he passed the project to me. It gave me an academic identity I badly needed.

After a review of the manuscript, Jay reminded me that I needed to rely less on other people's opinions: “Don, you are the historian.” I also had department-wide mentoring, including the late Mark S. Foster, the department’s most prolific writer, all the while spending weekends at the Denver Public Library's Family History Archive chasing down Connecticut's early settlers.

Early mornings on campus that second year started with a campus breakfast burrito and coffee before classes. Writing, when I had spare moments, was consuming, and it was therapy, and I wanted more of both. That is where "Making of a Writer" begins.

The Archives

As a historian, Mark Foster encouraged me to dig into local archives for topics that interested me. The first was James R. Walker, whose papers sat in the Colorado Historical Society's Dr. James R. Walker Collection. Walker had worked on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, not far from where my mother's family had homesteaded, land I had visited as a teenager and where I had seen the reservation's hard conditions firsthand.

After research, writing, and several rounds of peer and editorial review, the piece was published by the South Dakota State Historical Society in 2004, my first published work. In 2008 I was invited back as one of thirteen contributing authors to a collection on twentieth-century Sioux political and cultural life.

No sooner had I finished with Walker than I found the Henry Collbran Archives at the same historical society. Collbran, a British-born entrepreneur who made his fortune in Colorado railroads, left for Korea in 1896 and went on to build the country's first railroad, its early streetcar and power systems, its first telephone network, mines, and more, before Japan's protectorate forced him to sell out. That research became part of my second book in 2005, and later its own biography.

It also marked the pivot point: Colorado's overlooked ties to Korea, and a story of Americans as opportunity-seekers abroad, became a thread I would follow for the rest of my career.

From Historian to Business

After finishing my Colorado studies, I moved to Los Angeles to pursue Korean studies at USC.

While taking a joint class at UCLA, my professor, a respected Korean scholar, pushed back on my plan to stay in academia. Given my business and teaching background, he said, Korean companies would value someone who could bridge the culture. I sent a short mailing to Korean companies around Southern California offering a program, not yet named, on Korean history and culture. Hyundai Motor America called first in the summer of 2003.

Their HR team wanted six lunchtime sessions for Western employees. When they asked what to call the program, the name that stuck was “Korea 101.” My company name came from the work we did: Bridging Culture. Worldwide would come later, once we went international. In the meantime, a waiting list for Korea 101 formed immediately.

That period also produced Intrepid Americans: Bold Koreans, built on the Collbran research and the idea that early American traders and Korean officials, working through mining, rail, and port concessions, had shaped the roots of modern Korean business culture: trust, adaptability, and cross-cultural ties that still show up in the work today.

Songdo and the Hyundai Way

Two threads have run through nearly everything I have written since. One is Songdo, the city built on reclaimed land on Incheon's coast, where I have advised the original developer and later chronicled the district's transformation from an idea into a functioning Free Economic Zone.

The other is the Hyundai Motor Group, where close to twenty years of study produced Hyundai and Kia Motors: The Early Years, then Hyundai Way: Hyundai Speed across three editions. Broader Korea books include: Korea Facing, Korea Perspective, Korea 2020, and Korea 101: The Book.

Each book was aimed at the growing number of Westerners doing business with Korean companies, whether as employees, vendors, or leadership trying to manage a relationship from a headquarters half a world away.

The throughline across all of them is what I have come to call the "work funneling" model: how Korean chaebols like Hyundai acquire companies, build internal demand across affiliates, grow those companies to profitability, and eventually take them public or sell them at a multiple. It is the analytical lens I keep coming back to, whether the subject is Glovis, AutoEver, Hyundai Steel, or, more recently, Boston Dynamics.

Into Fiction

By 2006 I had added fiction, launching A Yankee in the Land of the Morning Calm. After years of documenting Korea's business culture in the language of case studies, the stories I kept uncovering, Collbran's ventures, missionary influence, the collision of cultures in a Korea just opening to the West, demanded a form that could bring people to life rather than simply document them. The three-book series follows Connecticut Yankee Josh Gillet through the Hermit Kingdom's final imperial decades, work published in 2006, 2007, and 2013.

A New Normal

These days the pattern rarely changes. Up by five-thirty. Writing hints on Medium, a scroll through Substack, LinkedIn, coffee, email. All day recalling what needs to be added to new manuscripts I am drafting, then obsessing over details with pagination and formatting consuming more attention than they should. Last edits before bed, new ideas in the middle of the night, repeat.

Twenty-five years in, still obsessing, still writing, still Korea-facing.

My university studies required a course in Immigration and Ethnicity, which I later taught. It traced the waves of people who came to America, including the Scandinavians.

As I dig into my Norwegian roots, records show that about one-third of Norway's population emigrated to the United States between 1825 and 1925. Only Ireland lost a larger share of its people.

Many, like my ancestors, settled in the rural Northern Midwest.

Why did they leave? My family research points to land and opportunity. Many became homesteaders. In Norway, custom gave the family farm to the oldest son. Younger sons worked for a brother or left, which may explain why so many emigrated.

How did they get here? In the first immigration wave, ships left Norway's main ports every spring, usually bound for New York or Quebec. Those headed for the Midwest continued west by boat through the Great Lakes to cities like Chicago.

Later generations mostly took feeder ships from Norway's coastal ports to Britain, crossed by train to departure ports like Liverpool, then boarded steamships for the Atlantic crossing to North America. From there, most were funneled to Midwestern rail hubs.

Trained as a cultural historian, I've rooted my work in American history and Korean studies. Growing up, my English heritage was downplayed. My paternal grandmother's side kept German food traditions alive. My mother grew up on a homestead in South Dakota. My Norwegian roots run through my mother's side of the family, specifically through my great-grandfather Albert Larsen. He was born in Norway on August 29, 1851, and came to America in 1854 as a toddler. As a child immigrant, he likely became a citizen through his father. Albert died on January 29, 1936, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Sioux Falls.

Albert's parents made the crossing in 1854, in the sailing ship era before the great immigration waves. The first Norwegians settled in Illinois and Wisconsin, with later waves reaching Iowa and Minnesota, and finally the Dakotas.

Following this path, Albert moved west to Dakota Territory around 1879 and homesteaded in Minnehaha County, Township 104, Range 52, near Clear Lake and Humboldt townships. His land patent was issued in 1886.

He and his wife, Clara (born Clarissa Williams in England in 1855), reared ten children. Seven of them later moved farther west and filed land claims under the Homestead Act on an area called 71 Table, near the town of Scenic, South Dakota.

This land was named 71 Table because many of the horses roaming these open plains carried a local rancher's "71" brand. Table, or tableland, was a common term for a plateau. A section is a one-square-mile survey unit.

Norway Patronymic 101

Our family tree records list Albert's father as Berge Baker Larsen, born 1816, and his mother as Jensena Josephine Peterson, born 1825.

In old Norway, most rural families had no fixed surname. Berge Larsen simply meant Berge, son of Lars. Jensena's father was a Peder, so in Norway she would have been Jensine Pedersdatter (datter means daughter).

Then there is "Baker." It may be the family's farm name, Americanized from Bakke or Bakken, both common Norwegian farm names. The farm name was more an address than a family name. If someone moved to another farm, they usually took the new farm's name. My next task is tracing Berge's farm in Norway.