There’s an institute in the United States called the Dead Letter Office. It’s where letters and packages go to die when the address of the recipient is illegible and the sender provides no return address.
Instead of dead letters, this page is a repository for features that are no longer active on this website but that I cannot bear to consign to the great trashcan icon in the sky. Think of it as an archive of good intentions.
Blog
From 2016 to 2021, I had a weekly blog called Shanghai Noir on all things Shanghai: its history and my family connections to that thriving metropolis on the Huangpu River. That, in turn, led to an obsession with the fashion, music and dance, opium, and dance halls of 1930s Shanghai and its slide into war with Japan, much of which informed my novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle.
With the publication of The Dancing Girl and the Turtle, the focus of my blog shifted to another iconic moment in Chinese history: the Communist takeover in 1949 and the labor reform camps that arose across China to house an ever-increasing population of Mao’s enemies from within. Why? Because these are the settings, respectively, of my second novel, The Pencil God, and third novel in linked short stories, Laogai.
That is not to say that my focus has always been razor-sharp. I will occasionally dither about Dutch and US politics, my struggles as an amateur gardener, the preparing and consumption of food, and a round-the-world trip that ended just in time for the pandemic.
If any of these topics are of interest to you, you can find these dead letters in my archived blog here.
Newsletter
My weekly newsletter was also born in 2016 as a delivery vehicle for my blog, book reviews, and publishing news. After the pandemic, I slowed the pace to a monthly newsletter and mini book reviews which appeared in the body of the newsletter.
As of November 2024, I am switching once again my focus as well as the delivery vehicle.
The heart of my new Substack, Swimming Upside Down, will be the lyric essay, a form of creative nonfiction that I have come to love above all others. My cunning plan is to deliver via Substack a new lyric essay each month, together with book reviews of lyric essay collections and any publishing news that might come my way. As you can see from the logo for Swimming Upside Down, my aesthetic has changed since the days of Shanghai Noir. A little darker but comical, too.
For those of you interested in a glimpse of past newsletter ruminations, you can find those dead letters here. If you’d like to join me on my journey into the land of the lyric essay, please subscribe to Swimming Upside Down. It’s free.