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To Teach or Not to Teach
I’ve been invited to join the faculty at the International Writers’ Collective, a creative writing community here in Amsterdam. I’ve said yes (of course) and have flung myself headlong into the training process. Last month, I audited three of the types of classes I’m likely to teach. This month, I read The Art of the…
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Mind Map
This is the map into my interlocking novels, The Shanghai Quartet. It’s a bulletin board my husband made for me, 6 feet wide and 4 feet tall. The backdrop is a map of modern Shanghai, enlarged many times over, onto which I’ve pasted the street names in use when this was Old Shanghai. Onto that…
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Laogai
Laogai will be the third volume of The Shanghai Quartet and its star will be Song Kang. We first see Kang in The Dancing Girl and the Turtle as the returned student, the prodigal son, called back from America to care for his ailing sister Anyi. Eighteen years later, we meet him again. He’s in…
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Genesis of a Quartet
Since the publication of The Dancing Girl and the Turtle, people keep asking me: what’s next? They’re astonished to hear that I’ve got 3 more novels in the works. It’s all part of my master plan to complete The Shanghai Quartet. Was that the idea all along? Far from it. plotters and pantsers In 2011,…
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Labels and Charlottesville
last week I ran into an article by Lan Samantha Chang entitled Writers, Protect Your Inner Life. Sam’s day job is director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. When school’s out, she gives writing workshops in Paris (2014) and Napa (2016). At Napa, Sam gave a craft lecture on the interior life. She gave us a…
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McTyeire School for Girls
The tricky thing about writing historical fiction is getting the details right. Were there ballpoint pens in Shanghai in 1937? (Yes.) Or plastic chopsticks in 1954? (No.) The average reader might not care but mine would. They already know something about China or they want to delve deeper. My readers want a story that feels…
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Wanderlust
I like to wander. To travel without any clear sense of a destination. I call myself a wanderer in my new Instagram account. The photos there all come from a recent trip to Germany. Hence the title of this blog post. Originally coined in German during the 19th century, wanderlust means an urge, an impulse,…
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Lost in Translation
When I first moved to the Netherlands, I worked as a translator. A catalogue for the Rijksmuseum, a Ph.D. dissertation on patients’ rights, an environmental law journal. I translated because it was a way for me to learn Dutch, word by word. It felt like an algebra exercise. Each sentence was an equation. All I…
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Mine mine mine
For me, writing is a series of synapses: firing, sparking, veering off into places unknown. I connect a newspaper article with a podcast with drinks last night with an incident in the park this morning. Writing is both an act and a release. The deliberate use of my imagination in order to drive the train…
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Fear of Failure
We all fear rejection. To be the last kid picked for the kickball team or the only wallflower at the school dance. We long to be popular, wildly so, or at least to seem that way. This human desire predates likes and followers, obsession with crowd sizes or the invention of money as a measure of…