Mistakes, I’ve Made a Few

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Architect of Courage accompanied me to the Princeton Public Library’s Local Author Day. I sat with friend and awesome fellow thriller-author Kevin G. Chapman, and the crowd was impressive. The library’s community room included dozens of authors, a number of whom publish children’s book, who decorated their tables with stuffed animals, princess crowns, and the like. One of Kevin’s book covers includes a knife-blade dripping with blood. And his titles include words like Assassin, Dead, and Fatal. We passed on having an appropriately themed display for our table.

Another local author visited with us and spent an excruciatingly long time at our table after telling us he doesn’t buy books. Instead, he re-reads favorites from decades ago. He then had a long—very long—rap about how, unlike Kevin’s Assassin, Dead, and Fatal covers, his bloody knives and corpses, the cover of Architect of Courage doesn’t signal “thriller.” I’d heard that before, but filed it in the category of “can’t do anything about it, so why worry?”

Kevin laughed when the next person to stop at our table said, “Oooh, I love that cover!” But she didn’t realize the book is a thriller. Of course. So, too late to reprint, I did finally take these comments to heart and ordered see-through labels that read “International Crime Thriller” to affix underneath the title of the copies I have, and I created a graphic that does the same. I’ve replaced the book cover photo on my website and used the new one in an ad I’m running this summer. So, that long diatribe we suffered through was actually helpful! Big smile.

Now I’m all set for The Flemington Summer Book Fest May 28, the Burlington County Book Festival June 3, along with pals from the Central NJ Chapter of Sisters in Crime, The Passaic County Book Festival June 10, and, later this summer, the Public Safety Writers Association annual conference! Hope to see you there!

Don’t Miss Jan Vermeer on the Big Screen!

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Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition (trailer) is an Exhibition on Screen film by David Bickerstaff that may flit through your community—catch it while you can. It showcases the once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of the paintings of Jan Vermeer currently on view at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. A great many American art lovers planned a trip across the Atlantic to see it. A great many more were disappointed, because tickets to the exhibit’s four-month run sold out within days.

The film shows you all 28 paintings in the show and is packed full of interesting details about the life and times and the artistic accomplishments of the painter. It leads off with two of his landscapes, and you don’t see any evidence of growing mastery as time wears on. It’s as if he was a genius from the first moment he picked up a brush. Maybe he burned all his early work, who knows?, but there are only 34 (Wikipedia) or 35 (film website) surviving Vermeer paintings. This is the largest assemblage of them, ever.

The commentary by art experts is engaging and adds a great deal to the film. They talk about the lack of brush strokes, the yellow fur-trimmed coat you see in five different paintings, he frequency of (different) maps in his backgrounds, the light blue outline on the back edge of the jacket in “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.” (You probably won’t actually see it in the photo above; the big screen gives you that detail. What you may notice is a bit of vibration against the background. It’s an optical effect.). What struck me is how the subjects look as if they might turn and speak to you at any moment. I think it’s the slightly parted lips on many of them that cause them to appear actually breathing.

Of course, seeing the paintings in person would be an unforgettable thrill, but on the big screen, you get a much closer view than you might in person! Without the jet-lag. And no crowds.

Find a screening near you. (Be sure to select your country.)

Debut Authors’ Struggles

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It turns out that the thrill and satisfaction of a rocket launch is rarely replicated in the launch of books by debut authors.The Bookseller, a London-based magazine about the book industry, reports on a survey of debut authors regarding their publishing experience. These findings may strike a chord with debut authors everywhere. More than half of the survey respondents said the ordeal negatively affected their mental health. Less than a quarter described an overall positive experience.

Most of the 108 respondents (61%) wrote adult fiction, and 19% wrote non-fiction. About half used an independent (that is, small) publisher, while almost half (48%) were published by one of the four majors. It seems to have made no difference which type of publisher an author used, as the negative effects on mental health were between 44 and 47% for the two groups. Statistically, the two percentages were probably about equal, especially given the rather small number of authors in the survey.

Perhaps dissatisfied authors were more likely to respond to a survey like this, but at least they also identified specific problems that publishers might be able to address. Chief among them were lack of support, guidance, and “clear and professional communication from their publisher.” Often authors didn’t know whom they should take a problem to. Googling staff directories is hardly ideal. Said one author, “it felt like a parent/child relationship with a lot of gaslighting and fake conversations”; and another, “infantilizing,” “opaque answers wrapped in praise and flattery.”

Still, there were bright spots. Comments from authors who reported a positive experience judged it a “great collaboration” (suggesting effective communication in that instance) or a good relationship (ditto).

About half of the debut authors organized their own launch events, though in one apparently unusual case, the publisher offered to pay part of the cost. Again, authors expected more support—public speaking training perhaps, and more information about events they were booked to speak at.

In many cases, support simply disappeared after publication of the debut or dwindled with each subsequent book. A few authors reported they were dropped without explanation (another example of poor communication). These longer-term problems may be heightened by significant staff turnover at publishing houses. Authors who have good, responsive agents may be able to get help from them on problems of sustainability and continuity too.

All told, not a pretty picture.

What Were They Thinking?

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Could the image of a four-drawer filing cabinet, whose drawers extend backwards into, well, near-infinity help explain some of society’s current communication disconnects? In a recent New Yorker article, Jill Lepore suggests you can divide all human knowledge into these four drawers: The little paper label on the top drawer says “Mysteries,” the second is “Facts,” the third is “Numbers,” and the bottom drawer is “Data.”

In her analogy, the Mysteries drawer (drawer 1) contains things only God knows, “like what happens when you’re dead.” In the past, this drawer would have been crowded with speculations on such matters as how distant are the stars, what happened to the dinosaurs, how do cells and molecules and atoms work? Thanks to advances in the sciences, these topics have been moved into the Facts drawer (drawer 2). That drawer “contains files about things humans can prove by way of observation, detection, and experiment.” The Numbers drawer (drawer 3) holds what you might think: censuses, polls, averages—stuff that can be counted.

It’s drawer 4 on the bottom, “Data,” that captures most of Lepore’s and society’s attention today. Humans cannot know data directly, in her metaphor, but must derive it from a computer. This drawer used to be empty but is now jammed full. More full than we can use with all practicality.

Not only do the drawers collect different types of knowledge and information, they work differently. They follow different logics. You learn about mysteries by revelation and the discipline that studies them is theology. You collect facts “to find the truth” and you study them by way of law, the humanities, and the natural sciences. Numbers are collected in the form of statistics, acquired through measurement, and you study them through the social sciences. Data analysis by computer enables prediction, pattern detection, based on data science.

For any complicated question (the example she uses is mass shootings in the United States), she says “your best bet is to riffle through all four of these drawers.” Each has something useful to contribute. However, the default in recent years has been to reach for that bottom drawer, as if data science contains the only answers. I saw evidence of the shortcomings of this approach in a news story last week about American students’ declining test scores in history and civics. One commentator noted that the data do not point to reasons for the decline. “Ongoing debates over how to teach history may well be getting in the way of actually doing it,” he said. Once the data are there, then what?

Data science certainly doesn’t preclude the need to open the other three drawers; nor does it demand that we renounce “all the other ways of knowing,” Lepore, a historian (drawer 2), says. Her article goes on to discuss other topics, but she also might have considered whether the main reason people today can’t seem to reconcile differing points of view is that they are basing their views on the contents of different drawers.

Another cultural columnist, Virginia Heffernan, writing in the current issue of Wired, pulls all this together in a way that emphasizes the importance of data science in an article about the complexities of manufacturing modern silicon chips, “I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory.” She calls these chips “the engine of nearly all modern abstraction, from laws to concepts to cognition itself” (drawer 2). The global economy of semiconductor chips (drawer 3) is “as mind-boggling as cryptocurrency markets and derivative securities (drawer 4). Or as certain theologies, ones that feature nano-angels dancing on nano-pins” (drawer 1).

Another danger of over-reliance on technoscience and the hubris that goes with it is one familiar to people as far back as the ancient Greeks, whose myths addressed the world-changing intervention of fire. Just ask Prometheus how that worked out for him.

Further Reading
How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms by Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones
Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society, by Sun-ha Hong
“Frankenstein’s warning: the too-familiar hubris of today’s technoscience” by Richard King, The Guardian 30 Apr 2023.

Oldest Female Debut Novelist Tells All

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Guest Post by Bobbie Jean Huff

I was twelve when I wrote my first novel. It was four pages long, and in it Martha, the butt of bullying by her eighth grade classmates, graduates top of her class. Not much else happens, but with the novel’s completion I had accomplished a major life goal.

Nearly sixty years later I started another novel. For two years I basically lived in the quiet room of the Ottawa Library, and then another year in the Princeton Library, ignoring cracks from my sons about posthumous publication. That novel was published a year ago.

Writing it, I discovered, was actually the easy part of the publishing process. The next step was finding an agent.

I’d been warned by my editor. She told me that as an older author I might have trouble finding an agent. She knew a Canadian agent who prided himself on never taking on a debut novelist over the age of 45.

The reasoning behind this: first novels typically don’t sell—or so I was told. If a novelist is to succeed, it’s usually the second or third book that pushes them over that hill.

In view of all this, I thought it best to hide my age. My Twitter profile pictured an older lady, her white hair done in a braid. My name was beneath it. My Facebook profile showed that same lady holding a newborn who was clearly a grandchild—or worse.

I needed to get younger, and fast, so I called my niece and suggested lunch. A few days later, if you checked my profile pictures, you would have seen a young woman with her blond hair piled on top of her head with a purple claw clip.

And so, the younger me proceeded to search for an agent. This took time: multiple query letters, various extracts from my novel (fifty pages to this one, the first chapter to another, the full manuscript to another). Persuading an agent to even take a look at your finished manuscript is nearly impossible for a debut author, whatever her age. You might as well send it to www.themoon.com

But an agent did respond. The upside of the pandemic: she suggested a phone call instead of a meeting, and courtesy of contemporary hearing aid technology, phone calls to my phone go directly to my ears (providing I remember to charge the hearing aids each night).

People say I have a young voice. When the agent said, “Tell me about yourself,” I told her that I moved down from Canada to New Jersey a few years before, to be near my four sons. And that when I was in Ottawa, I had written and published essays and poems and short stories. Also, I said, I played church organ. Then I quickly changed the subject to the writing I was currently doing.

Here’s some of what I left out: My sons are all over forty, I have five grandchildren, and some of my organ playing has been for the funerals of close friends.

I signed with her. There then followed a month-long nerve-wracking process: submission of the novel to publishers, the offer, the negotiation of a contract, the unbelievably lengthy period of time that passed before signing, and then, yikes; a request from the publisher for a photograph!

No photo, no publication? I panicked. Then I recalled an author photo I had seen years before—was it Margaret Atwood’s? That picture featured a lone hand holding a pen. I contemplated doing that, but then decided no, I was tired of all this. I’d send the damn photo, but before that I’d do The Big Reveal. I called my agent and said, timidly, “There’s something you need to know.” And then I told her, fully expecting that as soon as those two awful words—seventy-four—were out of my mouth, she would gracefully bring the conversation to a close and I’d never hear from her or the publisher again.

That night I called my third son. “Of course they knew your age,” he said. “They only had to type your name into Google.” I tried it and discovered he was right. Google even knew my birth date. But superstitiously I waited until publication day to replace the photos of my niece with pictures of the old lady with the white braid.

British novelist Martin Amis was once quoted as saying, “Octogenarian novelists on the whole [are] no bloody good. You can see [them] disintegrating before your eyes as they move past 70.” (It should be said that Amis’ most recent novel, Inside Story, was published in 2020 when he was 72.)

Then there was Simone de Beauvoir: “A novel is the least suitable form of literature for the elderly writer, because they risk simply repeating things and are past imagining new possibilities.”

When The Ones We Keep was published last year, it occurred to me that at 76 I might be the oldest traditionally published female debut novelist. I’ve spent some time searching “oldest debut female novelists” and the same names keep popping up: Laura Ingalls Wilder, 65 when she published the first book of her Little House series, Mary Wesley, 70 when she published Jumping the Queue, and Harriet Doerr, 74 when Stones for Ibarra came out. Then there is Delia Owens, whom everyone thinks is the oldest female first novelist. But Delia was only 69 when she published When the Crawdads Sing. Compared to me, Delia was just a puppy.

Now, once again, I am searching for an agent and a publisher. By the time The Ones We Keep was published, I had another novel ready to go. My agent loved it and submitted it to my publisher. Early indications were good, and I was told that the editorial staff were over the moon about it. But the sigh of relief I heaved was premature. To everyone’s shock, Sales and Marketing gave it the thumbs-down.

I was crushed.

That rejected novel has now been paused. My agent told me that, based on its rejection, another publisher would only wonder why my own publisher didn’t want it. Instead, I have a third “slim” novel (aka novella) ready to go. My job now is to find a publisher who will like it enough to take the risk of publishing an “older” author. If I succeed in finding that publisher, all well and good (and I will continue the sequel I’ve already started to The Ones We Keep).  But if I don’t? I will never know whether it’s because I am, as de Beauvoir put it, “past imagining new possibilities,” or just, according to Amis, “no bloody good.”

Regardless, I no longer try to hide my age, which is now 77. After all, anyone looking at my book jacket can figure that one out.

Bobbie Jean Huff’s essay, originally published in Bloom, has created a stir in the Author’s Guild community, whose members have set up a pair of meetings to discuss it further. Good job, Bobbie!

Weekend Movie Pick: The Lost King

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You really wouldn’t have to say much more to me than “Sally Hawkins,” but when I saw previews for this film she stars in about an incident I remember well, I couldn’t wait! And it did not disappoint. For centuries, the memories of England’s King Richard III have been shaped by Shakespeare’s wonderful play, but there have been doubts . . .

He was writing during the Tudor era, and the Tudors (Henry VII) had wrested the throne from Richard, the last of the Plantagenet kings, by defeating him in battle. “A horse! A Horse! My kingdom for a horse!” famously says the unseated king. Shakespeare had to hew the ruling dynasty’s political line here. And did.

The movie was directed by master storyteller Stephen Frears and written by him and Jeff Pope (trailer). Along with Hawkins, it stars Steve Coogan as Hawkins’s husband and Harry Lloyd as Richard III. Hawkins, as Philippa Langley, embarks on an impossible quest. Her husband has left her, her job is unbearable, and she suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which makes it hard to do much. But she sees a production of Richard III that really touches her. Was he really so bad or just misunderstood? She embarks on a quest to find out.

Introduced to the myths and mysteries surrounding Richard, she becomes consumed with a desire to find where he’s buried. Tradition holds that his body was dumped in the River Soar in Leicester, a city in England’s East Midlands. But Philippa finds scattered reference to a burial in the town’s Greyfriars Church, long since demolished.

Aiding her in her quest is King Richard himself, who appears to her (and only to her) occasionally, encouraging her on. They talk. Hawkins is perfectly cast as this tentative, but determined woman whom everyone sells short, except Richard himself. She has a brilliant way of simultaneously portraying vulnerability and strength.

Not only is it interesting, with some bureaucratic villains with all-too-familiar personalities, knowing it’s based on the true story of an amateur investigator’s triumph over hidebound historians unwilling to ask questions is quite satisfying. (You’ll loathe the university hacks.) Loved it!

(Richard en route to his new burial site, 2015.)

The Long Creative Life

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Hong Kong (now U.S.) author Xu Xi has published essays, appeared in and published anthologies, and novels, including The Unwalled City: A Novel of Hong Kong. In sum, fifteen books. In an interview, she shared some thoughts about the creative life that would encourage authors, both aspiring and experienced. “Being a writer is also an issue if you’re not published” (or, perhaps, not published where you want to be). And it’s hard to break into U.S. literary journals, short story publishing, “never mind selling novels.”

Xu found that living in New York City, enough people were trying to be an artist of some kind—musician, painter, actor, novelist—that made life easier. They understood her. They understood her day job was just a way to put groceries on the table. This is a heartfelt validation of the importance of “community.” Some of us find it in groups of other writers. Some find it in groups outside the writing community.

Still, Xu had to reach a point where the daily demands on her were not primarily about relationships, family, and work, in order to be free to write beyond herself. She quotes Confucius’s description of the various decades of life, which culminate at the point that you can “follow [your] heart’s desire without overstepping the line.” Alas, the Master said that point comes when you reach an advanced age, which maybe is why we hear about authors (like me!) whose first book is published after age 50. Not that that’s a piece of cake, either.

Xu, who is past 50 herself, says she thinks of writing “as fate, destiny, the thing you were born to do but didn’t know how to go about or weren’t quite ready for when you were younger.” Interestingly, in her day jobs she was considered a quick study, but she finds the process of writing, “incredibly slow.” Nevertheless, she finds pleasure in learning how to improve, which is long-term and yields incremental improvements. It’s fulfilling in a deep, “things are right with the world” sense, which more quickly mastered accomplishments often lack. How many times are authors pitched on “this book,” “this course,” or “this software” that will lead them down an immediate and short path to success?

International artists who write in English, Xu believes, are one way for readers to better understand both the universal aspects of life while appreciating differences in human experience and building empathy with people whose perspectives are different. This comes to the fore in her writer’s guide and anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories.

At some point Xu realized she “could waste an enormous amount of creative time and energy on all kinds of ‘okay’ things, and, as well, produce work that might actually prove more readily publishable.” That choice would mean other work would suffer—work that require a deeper examination of our interior selves to reach for the fundamental, rather than the superficial. Such works don’t demand that you stretch your writing muscles. Xu is willing to do this and thereby is, she believes, writing to the future of the English language.

Xu Xi is the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The Lost Americans

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If you’ve ever traveled to Egypt, Christopher Bollen’s fast-paced new thriller, The Lost Americans, will take you back there. And, if you’ve never been, when you finish this book, you may feel as if you’ve made the trip. The Sahara dust settling on everything, the smells of baking bread and dirty camels, the competing cries of the muzzeins, the golden, dust-laden light of late afternoon, and the vicious, inches-to-spare traffic.

Manhattanite Cate Castle has never visited Egypt, so it’s all new to her, overlaid with a pall of grief and anxiety after the shock of her older brother’s death in Cairo. He reportedly died in a fall from the balcony of his room in the Ramses Sands Hotel. In the country on business, Eric was not yet forty and working for a boutique international arms supplier called Polaris. Egypt is one of Polaris’s best customers.

Back in New York before this trip, Eric’s death doesn’t sit right with Cate. She doesn’t believe the emerging official line that Eric committed suicide and insists on asking questions. She even enlists a retired forensic pathologist to examine his body. Defensive wounds. Injuries on both sides of his head, which a fall wouldn’t produce. Not to mention that his hotel room was only on the third floor. A fall from that height would likely be survivable. If you think Cate is becoming a little obsessed, you’ll also agree she has plenty of reason to be—especially when Polaris offers her family a multi-million-dollar settlement.

Thus, the trip to Egypt. She’s a fundraiser for an arts organization, not any sort of investigator, but what she lacks in experience she more than makes up for in motivation. Where to start that won’t get her in trouble? Let’s just say that she doesn’t need to go looking for it. From the moment she sets foot in the Cairo airport, it seems she’s in danger, and the pace of the novel never slackens.

Everyone seems to be lying to her, including Eric’s former work colleagues, his boss’s wife, the hotel staff, Eric’s embassy contact. It’s a cinch they’re not telling her everything. Cate stays busy finding people to interview and doesn’t spend much time sightseeing. But the sights and exoticism of Egypt are all around her. Her Grand Nile hotel is on the banks of one of the world’s longest and oldest rivers, which not only cleaves the country, it makes it possible. A few miles east or west is basically desert. To someone like Cate, who grew up in the sylvan Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts, the compression of so many people, so much living, and so much history into this narrow strip of land feels almost claustrophobic.

Bollen has an admirable literary writing style. He conveys ideas and feelings in ways that are both inventive and quite on point. From that standpoint and the fact that he’s willing to assume some cultural awareness on the part of his readers, the writing stands out. On the negative side, from time to time, he goes on too long with backstory.

I’ve been asking myself whether Cate is a plausible female protagonist. She’s certainly plucky and determined. Perfectly likeable. A little irrational, in that she broke up a good relationship back home through her own infidelity. But does she act like a woman would act when she wants information someone doesn’t want to share, or the way a woman would act in a tight situation? Or does she act more like a man with a woman’s name? I can’t put my finger on what bothers me about her, but just the fact that the question occurred to me makes me think she doesn’t exactly ring true, but it’s a small point in an otherwise well-conceived, extremely evocative thriller that respects the reader’s intellect. I liked it a lot.

Get The Lost Americans here (Amazon affiliate link) and, if you ‘re looking for great reading, try my quarterly newsletter. Sign up here and receive three prize-winning short stories!

Two River Theater: Romeo and Juliet

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Solid appreciation is needed for the decision by Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, and its new artistic director, Justin Waldman, to present a radical reimagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, running through April 30. Contemporary playwright Hansol Jung has transformed not only the work, but the theater itself. Jung and Dustin Wills direct the production, presented in partnership with the National Asian American Theatre Company.

On one hand, like any project making massive changes to a beloved classic, some aspects will be more successful than others. On the other, this play is so familiar that the creative deviations are immediately recognizable. The circular platform that serves as the stage allows some audience members to sit behind it and on the sides. While it isn’t quite theater-in-the-round, it’s a good way there. Members of the cast engage with some audience members before the show, and occasionally even during it. At one point, Romeo (played by Major Curda) walks up an aisle for the balcony scene. At the performance I attended, he sat down next to an audience member and gave his line, “What light through yonder window breaks?” and the audience member replied, “I have no idea.”

That actually sums up parts of the experience for a number of audience-members. It’s as if we were watching two plays. The thread of the original goes throughout, and substantial sections of Act II are presented fairly conventionally. On those theatrical bones, Jung has constructed a farce—antic behavior, dashing about, plain silliness, and some truly comical moments. Music is brought in nicely. In the early scenes, during Romeo’s mopey period, he plays a guitar and sings woefully. Other characters occasionally sing too. Various instruments make themselves heard from time to time. Near the end, Jung included spoken and sung allusions to Prince’s “Purple Rain,” with its references to perfect, unattainable love.

The staging was done with an eye to engaging audiences on all sides, but that creates a few complications. Since the actors are unmiked, at times they are speaking with their backs to part of the audience. While the speeches by Capulet (Brian Lee Huynh) were always clear, I had trouble understanding the fast-talking Juliet (Dorcas Leung). In the last act when all the baskets and boxes from around the edge of the platform are put up onto it, friends sitting lower down said their sight lines were blocked.

The energetic cast gleefully shook the cobwebs off the audience’s preconceptions about their roles. In addition to those mentioned are Purva Bedi (Friar Lawrence), Jose Gamo (Mercutio), Zion Jang (Benvolio), Mia Katigbak (Nurse), Rob Kellogg (Paris/Tybalt), and the notable Daniel Liu (Peter/Lady Capulet). His scene trying to gently persuade Capulet not to banish the willful Juliet was heartbreaking and truly memorable.

Loving the Long Creative Life

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Hong Kong (now U.S.) author Xu Xi has published essays, appeared in and published anthologies, and novels, including The Unwalled City: A Novel of Hong Kong. In sum, fifteen books. In an interview, she shared some thoughts about the creative life that would encourage authors, both aspiring and experienced. “Being a writer is also an issue if you’re not published” (or, perhaps, not published where you want to be). And it’s hard to break into U.S. literary journals, short story publishing, “never mind selling novels.”

Xu found that living in New York City, enough people were trying to be an artist of some kind—musician, painter, actor, novelist—that made life easier. They understood her. They understood her day job was just a way to put groceries on the table. This is a heartfelt validation of the importance of “community.” Some of us find it in groups of other writers. Some find it in groups outside the writing community.

Still, Xu had to reach a point where the daily demands on her were not primarily about relationships, family, and work, in order to be free to write beyond herself. She quotes Confucius’s description of the various decades of life, which culminate at the point that you can “follow [your] heart’s desire without overstepping the line.” Alas, the Master said that point comes when you reach an advanced age, which maybe is why we hear about authors (like me!) whose first book is published after age 50. Not that that’s a piece of cake, either.

Xu, who is past 50 herself says she thinks of writing “as fate, destiny, the thing you were born to do but didn’t know how to go about or weren’t quite ready for when you were younger.” Interestingly, in her day jobs she was considered a quick study, but she finds the process of writing, “incredibly slow.” Nevertheless, she finds pleasure in learning how to improve, which is long-term and yields incremental improvements. It’s fulfilling in a deep, “things are right with the world” sense, which more quickly mastered accomplishments often lack. How many times are authors pitched on “this book,” “this course,” or “this software” that will lead them down an immediate and short path to success?

International artists who write in English, Xu believes, are one way for readers to better understand both the universal aspects of life while appreciating differences in human experience and building empathy with people whose perspectives are different. This comes to the fore in her writer’s guide and anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories.

At some point Xu realized she “could waste an enormous amount of creative time and energy on all kinds of ‘okay’ things, and, as well, produce work that might actually prove more readily publishable.” That choice would mean other work would suffer—work that require a deeper examination of our interior selves to reach for the fundamental, rather than the superficial. Such works don’t demand that you stretch your writing muscles. Xu is willing to do this and thereby is, she believes, writing to the future of the English language.

Xu Xi is the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.