How did your debut novel arrive on the windswept plains of northwestern China in 1910? Despite the foreign terrain, in what ways were you writing what you know?

My father was born and raised in China as the son of Congregational missionaries in the early twentieth century. I grew up in a household decorated in part with Chinese objects and old, brown-tinged photographs of my grandparents. I have never been to China, but I have an impressionistic sense of the place. Also, I read my grandfather’s journals which document the eerie beauty of that region and some of the customs of the people there. I did some research, but I also relied a lot on my imagination. Apparently, I had a stored up sense of what China felt like at that earlier time.

For years, you approached your writing with great discipline and now you have six manuscripts and many stories and poems to show for it. How did you sustain such motivation over the years and largely on your own? What’s your daily writing routine? How does your short fiction experience inform your novel writing? (more…)

I held my hands in front of me as if in prayer, waiting for the speaker’s next words, on my first morning at the Greater Richmond Convention Center. I wasn’t alone; the others in the conference room sat in the same reverent position.

In front of us, the poet Allan Wolf told us to imagine that our closed palms were the book that we would write or would eventually occur to us. “Now open it with me and gasp in wonder,” Wolf said.  All of us opened our hands in unison and gasped.  The moment was punctuated by embarrassed laughter and nervous smiles to the people around us.  But nonetheless, the 2012 James River Writers Conference began with a writer’s affirmation of faith in the act of creation.  (more…)