1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first published book, In an Uncharted Country, was a collection of short stories, most of which had appeared in small magazines. I already felt like a “real writer” because of those publications, but the book sealed the deal for me and confirmed my identity not just in the eyes of other people but also in my own mind. That was a significant change because writing was a second career for me. More importantly, probably, the book earned me a fellowship to a prestigious writers’ conference, which did even more to change public perceptions and my own confidence in my abilities. Since then, my work has evolved, although until recently I was still exploring some of the same themes I wrote about in the earlier stories. In a structural sense, I’ve shifted to a focus on the novel form for the last several years, having learned a lot about writing from doing the short stories. Novels, obviously, are a whole different animal, in terms of the planning, writing, and also the publishing, but the more one writes anything, the more one learns about the craft. My new novel, Oliver’s Travels, which comes out in May from Regal House Publishing, owes a good deal to original focus on short fiction in part because the protagonist is a short story writer!
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
My writing dream developed when I was in high school, reading the kinds of novels one reads in high school. Except for textbooks, I didn’t read non-fiction or poetry, so the seed that was planted back then was the fiction seed. While I did develop a taste for poetry in college in graduate school, it was still fiction that I was drawn to as a reader, so it seemed natural to write fiction when I finally began. Also, before I wrote anything, I got an MA in English, and while poetry was part of the curriculum, it could largely be avoided, and I did. I spent all my time during that period reading novels and short stories by British and American writers—good preparation for a fiction writer, which was what I was after with that degree. It’s only recently that I’ve taken a stab at writing poetry and I’ve also been wanting to try my hand at the personal essay form.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I love thinking about this, but so far the answer is different for every project. When I started writing short stories during my MFA program, I mostly didn’t plan them, and I still don’t, really. Beginning with a germ, whether it’s a character or an image, I just write until I discover what I seem to be writing about, and then I’m able to go back to the beginning and rework the piece to fit the discovery. That means the end-product looks very different from the first draft. On the other hand, my second book was a novel in stories and after I figured out who the characters were, which I did during a prolonged planning phase, the stories nearly wrote themselves. Well, no, they didn’t, but it came relatively easily and didn’t require all that much revision. Novels, as I said earlier, are different. For my first novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, I did a fair amount of research, so I had a lot of notes even before I began writing. But that doesn’t mean the writing went according to plan or that I even ended in exactly the place I thought I would. That applies to the novel I’m working on right now, which continues to shape-shift and change as I work on it. And then there’s the novel coming out this May, Oliver’s Travels, which is a hybrid, in a way. My original concept for the book was a novel in very short chapters, which were a bit like my short stories in the way they emerged messily. In the end, though, they mostly got shmushed together into longer chapters, and the book now doesn’t look at all the way I intended it. But that’s probably a good thing.
4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Yes. After I finished my MFA I was writing short stories with no sense that there was a book in them. In fact, I had a manuscript of a novel that had been my thesis for that program, and I was trying to get that published (it didn’t happen), so the stories were something of an escape from that larger project. Eventually, though, after many of my stories had been published in magazines, I realized I had a book-length pile of stories. The stories were linked by theme, setting, and character, and it wasn’t hard to compile a manuscript that made sense and had the kind unity I think publishers and readers like to see in a collection. After that experience, I wanted my next project to be a novel, or at least to be novel-like, on the theory it might be easier to attract an agent and/or a publisher that way (that was partly true—I did sign with an agent), but I enjoyed writing stories, and felt I had gotten better at it, so I conceived from the beginning of a book made of independent stories that told a single larger narrative. For that project, while it came out in pieces and most of the stories were published separately in magazines, I knew I was working on a book from the outset. My first novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, began as a tale that I quickly realized was probably too big to be a short story. And sure enough it grew and grew and grew into the novel it became. In contrast, with the novel coming out this year, Oliver’s Travels, I was dabbling in flash fiction all about this one character (Oliver, naturally). I hoped it would be a book, but it didn’t really feel like one until I built a metafictional frame for it—a character (also Oliver) who was writing the stories. The current work in progress is and always has been a book project. I’m struggling to make it shorter!
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing readings, even though I’m somewhat shy and not a natural performer. I don’t get particularly nervous. I’ve spoken to large groups and I’ve taught, so standing up in front of an audience (especially with a book as a prop) is not difficult for me. I’ve come to the conclusion that short readings are more effective than longer ones, so that there’s more time to really interact with an audience instead of just talking at them. One of the best readings I’ve attended was a writer who spent almost all of his time talking about some interesting aspects of his career and then, just to fulfil his obligation, read one page from his recent book. I love the Q&A format for appearances and have done several enjoyable events that were billed as “conversations.” As far as the creative process is concerned, I don’t generally read unfinished work at events, because honestly the point is to promote a book. If it’s not finished, I’m going to keep a tighter lid on it.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
There are questions that I’m asking myself in each project, and I hope those come through in the finished work, although not in too heavy-handed a way. I don’t like to talk about these inciting questions or the themes of my work, though, because the reader will take from it whatever he or she sees. I’m not an agenda-driven writer and I don’t have a particular axe to grind, but I am interested writing the Truth, with a capital T.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
As with most creative artists, and probably all professionals, or maybe just all people, the writer’s role depends on ambition. I think some writers, including fiction writers, want to change the world and so they write about big issues, cultural questions, and various crises that we face—climate change, racial and ethnic conflicts, and so on. Up to now, my own subject matter has been much narrower, although in my current project I’m trying to address bigger problems. So, for those writers, their role is to contribute to and maybe even shape the dialogue surrounding these questions, or maybe even to propose solutions. Many non-fiction writers certainly do this, and some fiction writers also. The same can be true of filmmakers and visual artists and I suppose composers. But then there are artists who stay far away from issues and seek only to entertain or distract. I suppose that’s an important role, too. For sure, during the past year we’ve needed some distractions. Ideally one does both.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Having published a lot of short stories, I’ve worked with a lot of editors at magazines, and that process has been very helpful, but I can’t say that it resulted in huge changes to my work. Improvements on the margin, probably. But for one of my books, I knew there was something about it that was making me uncomfortable, a more fundamental flaw. An editor helped me discover what that flaw was and when I addressed that issue the book became much better, in my view. But other than editors at a publishing house, I’m not generally working with independent editors. I like to get feedback from trusted readers, but that’s about it. I do believe that self-published writers would benefit from having an editor, and not just a copyeditor. It’s very hard to spot flaws in your own work and having someone with an unbiased eye take a look can be helpful.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
At the moment my favorite advice is to retype when you revise because it forces you to relive your thinking about every sentence and every word. A writer can get lazy when editing, especially on a computer screen, but if you force yourself to retype, good things will probably happen. Right now I’m retyping/revising my work in progress. Some of the sentences in the draft I’m working from I wrote four or five years ago. Even if I don’t change a syllable, I’m finding it valuable to feel the sense of the sords again.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?
I started out years ago by writing a novel. That was what I wanted to work on when I began my MFA program, and the novel became my thesis. But most people in the program were working on short stories, so I started doing that also, and that kind of down-shifting, so to speak, was easy. After finishing a collection of those stories, my next project, as I mentioned, was a novel in stories, What the Zhang Boys Know. In a way, I was easing myself back into the rhythm of novel writing. (Shall I stick to the gear-shifting metaphor and say that I was now in second or third gear?) I think that really was helpful when I went full throttle (!) into the next book, a novel. I really like short stories, reading and writing them, and I think a lot of writers do, too, but non-writers usually don’t read a lot of short stories. They prefer novels, and I think, to be honest, that’s one of the appeals of the novel to writers.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I’m fortunate not to have another job that demands my time on a fixed schedule, so my writing is my job. Which means I’m at my desk in front of my computer first thing in the morning, usually before 8:00 am. In general, I only write or edit until about noon, take a lunch break, and in the afternoon handle other matters like blogging, marketing, research, and so on. I do try to put other tasks off until the weekend if I can and I don’t usually write on the weekend, which is probably some kind of a character flaw. In terms of beginning each day, I go over the last little bit of what I did in the previous work session and begin from there. More often than not, it’s mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence with a note to myself about where I was intending to go with it, so it’s pretty easy to get started again.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Very often I begin my writing day by reading poetry at my desk. It’s not usually work by famous poets but new books by emerging writers. That helps to put in the right frame of mind to create. Depending on the project and the voice I’m using, if I’m struggling with my own words I may pull a book that I greatly admire off the shelf and type a paragraph or two from it, feeling the rhythm, helping me to solidify that voice in my mind. My problem isn’t getting stuck or blocked so much as it is getting distracted, and it helps if I can just turn off email and social media. That’s a big IF.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
This is a really interesting question because it assumes I even know where home is. I suppose home is where I live now, because somehow I’ve been in this house for two decades, by far the longest time I’ve lived anywhere. But home is as much where you come from as where you live, right? It’s the home of your memory. I can’t say that my childhood home comes back to me in that way, but there’s really only one fragrance for me that recalls a specific place and time. It happens to be a place and time of incredible importance in my life, even though I only lived there for two years. Right after college—so I had just turned 22—I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to South Korea to teach English. (This was a long time ago, so Korea was still a poor country recovering from the Korean War.) I lived in a traditional home with a family on the edge of a small city, and there are many smells I associate with that time, including the wonderful food. The one fragrance that brings that time back to me, however, wood smoke. Not just any smoke, but sometimes I’ll smell a fire and I’ll be transported back to rural South Korea. I don’t even know what kind of wood it is, so it isn’t something I can replicate. Sometimes it just happens.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I have a lot of interests in a wide variety of subjects, so I’m influenced by all of the world around me. Being on the Board of Trustees of a classical theater means that I see a lot of Shakespeare, and derivative work. Visual art is also an influence because I love art museums and I see art as another way of telling stories. That notion has come up in a few of my short stories over the years and it plays a fundamental role in the novel I’m currently working on. But more broadly, I’m influenced by travel. I’ve had the good fortune of traveling extensively outside the United States, both for pleasure and for work, including some long periods of residency abroad, and that experience inevitably informs my work in myriad ways: subject matter, imagery, language, cultures, character.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m probably heavily influenced by some of the teachers I’ve had the good fortune to study with in my MFA program and at conferences. Some of the better known of these are Elizabeth Strout, John Casey, Richard Bausch, Tim O’Brien, Grace Paley, Russell Banks, and Christine Schutt. Their work is certainly important to me because it reflects what they taught, I hope. But any writer to tackles serious subject matter in a palatable way is going to have an impact, and here I’m thinking writers like Colum McCann, Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Powers, Colson Whitehead, Zadie Smith, and so many others.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
That’s going to be a pretty long list. If we’re talking about writing, I really want to write a full-length play or screenplay. I’ve dabbled in the form but haven’t gotten beyond very short pieces. As I’ve noted, I enjoy traveling, and this year of lockdown has prevented me from going anywhere, but there are a lot of places I still hope to get to: India, Russia, and I’ve never set foot in Africa, which is a major gap in my experience.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Well, I had a whole other life before I began writing seriously, and that revolved around being an international lawyer. As a student, I tried to prepare myself to be a writer, but the same preparation—learning to write well, critical thinking, research—turned out to be a sound basis for practicing law. When my post-college Peace Corps experience awakened me to a world beyond the midwestern U.S., I was keen to engage with it. Law school and then law practice, first in a very large international law firm and then in the legal department of the World Bank, allowed me to do that. After twenty years of practicing law, though, I was anxious to reapply myself to that first desire—writing.
To think a little more fantastically, I’d like to be an architect. I spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of house I’d build for myself if I could, so that’s probably a wish that’s coming from within. It’s too bad that I have zero drawing talent.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
As I said above, I did do something else first, but in some ways my law work was a postponement of my writing career. In high school, I loved to read and developed an ambition to be a writer. (Actually, writing was a different notion, which I had no idea how to do, being a writer sounded great.) There wasn’t anything else that appealed to me. My father worked in sales, as did his father, and I couldn’t see myself doing that. One of my sisters was a journalist married to a doctor and the other was a nurse married to an engineer, and none of that sparked an interest either. I majored in philosophy in college because, as I noted above, I thought it was good preparation for . . . something. A possible rephrasing of the question is to ask what made me leave my law practice to become a writer, and that’s hard to answer. I really loved my work at the World Bank. Its mission of alleviating poverty is one that I wholeheartedly support, and it gave me the opportunity to travel extensively. But at the turn of the millennium, when I’d been practicing law for twenty years, I asked myself why I was doing it. It seemed an auspicious time to do something for myself and to try my hand at something I’d thought I wanted to do for a long time. So I took a leap.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The best book I read in 2020 was Apeirogon by Colum McCann. It’s a genre-bending novel dealing with real events in Israel and Palestine, and while the issues are specific to that conflict, he enlarges them and draws parallels to other conflicts, including the sectarian issues in Ireland, which he knows well. Other than that, the best book I’ve read recently is The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, which is a beautiful novel about the AIDS crisis. And I also loved Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys last year. I’d say all three of these novels are important for our times.
As for films, I’m not a big moviegoer, but before COVID-19 hit I had joined an indie film series at a local theater and saw some excellent movies. Two that stand out were Pain & Glory starring Antonio Banderas and JoJo Rabbit.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on a novel that I don’t want to say too much about, but it’s the most ambitious thing I’ve done. It is set in two different time periods in Southeast Asia, so it has required much more research than I’ve done for other projects, and in general it explores the consequences of unequal power dynamics. I’ve been working on it for years, but I think, maybe, possibly, I’ll finish it this year.
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