Category Archives: Fiction

“A Question of Identity”

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tiger, mask

At Manhattan’s KGB Bar last week, members of the New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America read from their works suitable (grim, gory, ghostly) for the spooky season. I read the last section of my short story, “A Question of Identity,” published at Halloween a few years ago by King’s River Life. There’s a summary paragraph to get you into it, then the conclusion.

“A Question of Identity” is about two nine-year-old girls—neighbors and best friends—who receive mysterious packages containing Halloween costumes. Tamika Greene, is Black. Hers is a fox costume. Blonde, blue-eyed Jen Nielsen receives a tiger costume. Done trick-or-treating, they have the bright idea to exchange costumes, go to each other’s houses, and see how long it takes their families to notice they’re the wrong girl. Trouble is, they never do. We start at Tamika’s family’s dinner table.

Mr. Greene was famous for quizzing his children over dinner, and he started right in. “What do you know for sure?” he asked his older son, who responded with the details of a recent football player-trade.

Asked the same question, the younger brother said, “The Forty-Niners are going to the Super Bowl this year for sure!”

“Now, see,” Mr. Greene explained, “you’ve drifted away from the solid land of facts into the swamp of opinion and wishful thinking. You don’t know for sure about the Forty-Niners. Can you help your brother out with a for-sure fact, Tamika?”

“Uh, a football field is a hundred yards long,” Jen said, “not counting the end zones?”

The young man rolled his eyes, but Mr. Greene said, “It may not be a new fact, but it is definitely a fact. Good job. Now, Tamika, what do you know for sure?”

Thinking back to Tamika’s nature book and the pictures of the Big Cats, Jen said, “Tigers can’t purr. They chuff, like this” She demonstrated. “The only Big Cats that can purr are cheetahs and mountain lions. Pumas.”

“How interesting. Why is that?”

And she explained, sort of.

Two houses away, Tamika was presented with a plate of so many aromatically spiced vegetables that she barely realized there was no meat. After the dishes were done, Jen’s sister Gail invited her to her room to draw fashions. Tamika, having only a pair of rowdy brothers, had never spent an evening this way and was delighted.

“Your drawing has really improved,” Gail told her. “Have you been practicing?”

Tamika smiled slyly.
#
Over the weekend, Tamika’s brothers took Jen to a football game, and when some of the boys asked who she was, she heard them say “my sister,” and nobody blinked. Maybe the increasing number of blended families made this plausible, even to kids. Or, especially to kids. When Mrs. Nielsen saw Tamika in Jen’s best new dress, she nodded and said, “Very pretty.”

It was fun having a whole new wardrobe. The girls read each other’s books and, like budding anthropologists, observed how the other family lived. And yet . . . and yet . . . it wasn’t home. The Greene and Nielsen families had different rhythms, their houses didn’t smell the same (maybe because the Nielsens were vegetarian, Tamika thought), the night noises were unfamiliar. Even the touch of the other mother’s hugs wasn’t quite right.
#
Monday morning, the girls met at the bus stop and exchanged lunches. “I’ve been thinking,” Tamika said. “We have to visit Mrs. Lachlan.”

“When she was our teacher, you always said she was a witch.”

“Yeah. I hope I was right.”

After school, the girls slipped down the block and around the corner to Mrs. Lachlan’s house.

They told their former teacher the whole story. At the end, Jen started to cry. “Make it stop. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“Are those your costumes in the bag?” Mrs. Lachlan pointed at the folded-over shopping bag between them.

“Yes. We thought maybe there’s something . . . wrong with them,” Tamika said.

Mrs. Lachlan gave Tamika a look. “Enchantment? Not likely.” She laid the costumes over a chair. “It’s true they’re special.” She examined the masks and pinched her lower lip. “Now this is what we’ll do.”
#
Tamika trotted home in full fox display, and Jen stealthily walked to her front door dressed in her tiger bodysuit, wearing her tiger mask, and swishing her tiger tail. Her key worked—finally—and she walked inside.

“Just in time.” Mrs. Nielsen peered around the kitchen doorway to look at her. “Dinner’s in the oven. Set the table?” Jen bounded up the stairs to her room, took off the costume, and returned in jeans and t-shirt.

At the Greenes’ house, Tamika was glad to be back in her own room. One of her brothers, standing in the doorway, blocked the light from the hall.

“Hey, little sis. How you doin?” He looked her up and down. “Halloween’s over.”

“Maybe for you.” Her tail twitched. When he walked away, she took off the costume and mask. She twirled and twirled and laughed and laughed. Her bed, her closet, her desk, the view of the sky from her window. All these familiar things whizzed by.

At the dinner table, passing a platter of roast beef, one of the brothers asked, “What the heck was that noise before we came down? Sounded like dog with a cough being strangled.”

“It didn’t sound like a dog to me,” his brother said. “More like a, I dunno, a fox or something.”

Tamika tore into a slice of roast.

“Knife and fork, please, Tamika. What’s gotten into you?” her mother asked.

Mr. Greene frowned, as if overtaken by the uneasy feeling some facts were slipping out of his sturdy grasp.
#
Down the block, Jen leaned on the kitchen counter, watching her mother peel about a hundred carrots. Remembering the Greenes’ meaty dinners, she chuffed with pleasure.

Gail breezed through, grabbing a water bottle from the fridge. Mrs. Nielsen stopped her, saying, “Before you go up, would you please put more corn in the squirrel feeder?”

“Mom,” Gail complained, “nobody feeds squirrels. In colonial times, people got a bounty for squirrel scalps.”

“That’s disgusting,” her mother said. “It’s uncivilized.”

“Right here in Pennsylvania,” Gail said. Pushing her luck, she added, “And they ate the squirrels too.”

Grrr, Jen breathed.

Their mother said, “Well, Gail, if you don’t want to do the corn . . . You know they love it. They come right to you.”

“I’ll do it,” Jen said. Her fingers stretched wide and the tips curled in. And her nails . . . how they’d grown.

Dead Drop

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James L’Etoile’s award-winning crime thriller Dead Drop takes a 360-degree look at the intertwined issues of illegal immigration, drug and arms smuggling, and unfettered violence plaguing the southwest United States and the challenges they present law enforcement. After a career spent in the California penal system, L’Etoile has seen these problems play out first-hand. In this action-packed story, you do too.

When it comes to the illegal border crossers, Phoenix, Arizona, detective Nathan Parker tries vainly to hold on to the principle, “Yes, they’re desperate, but what they’re doing is against the law.” But when he’s faced with some of the realities the immigrants confront—and, ultimately, when he becomes an illegal border crosser himself—he starts not just to see, but to appreciate the other side of the story.

In this novel, the immigration issue has many troubling dimensions—fentanyl trafficking, rapacious coyotes, weapons galore, disregard for human life, and the spotty coordination of federal, state, and local efforts to combat any of these. The quest for personal and organizational glory makes inter-agency cooperation more difficult, as always.

While the U.S. Attorney is working to create an airtight case against the drug smugglers—a process that’s taking literally years—people are dying in real time. One of them was Parker’s long-time partner, a death for which Parker blames himself. A new lead appears when a cell phone number is found on a dead man. He’s one of four found in the desert, sealed up in 55 gallon oil drums. Parker’s encounter with the owner of that cell phone leads to his suspension from the force.

The barrels were discovered by Billie Carson, a woman living on the raggedy margins of society, scavenging whatever she can find abandoned in the desolate landscape. Billie has learned how to navigate a dysfunctional support system and, contrary to his expectations, Parker learns a lot from her. Suspended, he isn’t supposed to keep investigating any link to his partner’s shooting, but (of course) he does, and Billie and he may be at risk because of their connection with the bodies in the barrels.

Given all the players—criminals, law enforcement, bystanders, innocent or not—it’s a complicated plot with a lot of characters and a lot of agendas, much like real life, probably. L’Etoile writes convincingly about his law enforcement characters, and some have managed to maintain a sense of humor. Billie’s a solid female character, but several of the other women are less believable.

The way L’Etoile describes the unforgiving desert environment of northern Mexico and south Arizona, for many people and even for a time for Parker, it’s almost as much an enemy as the gun-toting coyotes smuggling people through the tunnels under the “impenetrable” U.S. border wall.

It’s a memorable story, and if you want to read more about this troubled area, I recommend Don Winslow’s The Cartel and Down by the River, riveting nonfiction by the late investigative reporter Charles Bowden.

Order here from Amazon (if you use these affiliate links, Amazon sends me a small payment):
Dead Drop
The Cartel
Down by the River

drugs, El Paso, Rio Grande, narcotraficantes, DEA, Border Patrol, Mexico, Texas
U.S. Border Patrol agents on the Rio Grande (photo: c1.staticflickr)

How Do I Write? Part 2

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woman writing

But if pantser authors don’t know where they’re going (i.e., where the story will end up) how do they get there? I use before-the-fact and after-the-fact techniques to manage this process. Before I know whether I’ll need them or not, I drop in potential clues early on (and make a note of them in the unanswered questions list). It can be anything potentially, but not certainly, important. Then I just keep going. In the early pages of Architect of Courage, the first murder victim has long vertical scars on her wrists, evidence of a serious suicide attempt. I didn’t know whether that would make sense or not as I got to know her better, but hundreds of pages later, it fit the evolving story meaningfully. I credit my subconscious mind for working that one out!

After the fact, when I find a story has worked out a particular way, I may realize that I haven’t laid sufficient ground work. I haven’t described the characters or situation in a way that makes the conclusion, as they’ve said since Aristotle, “both surprising and inevitable.” At that point, I have to go back and find the best places to weave in the necessary missing bits.

Plotters too sometimes find the story escapes the structure they’ve built for it. At the Book Festival where I gave this presentation last weekend, my colleague Jeff Markowitz and I had a long conversation with an author who says she’s a confirmed plotter. She told us she’d been writing a story in which the main character was an injured soldier. All planned out. Very neat. One day she burst out of her office yelling, “The nurses have taken over the story!”

All this discussion about plotting versus pantsing reflects a basic difference not as much in how people write, but why. Plotters have a particular story in mind for their novel and are working to produce the best vehicles for that story. For me, the joy in writing is the joy of discovery. I like to discover what happened, how the pieces fit, in much the same way a reader will.

This takes me back to my opening point from yesterday’s post: what do I want people to get out of my novel? I’ve come to believe, as a lot of other writers before me have, that when I write “The End” at the close of a story, it isn’t truly the end. It’s the beginning. The story will come to its full potential and fruition when readers—working as my unseen collaborators—read it, add to it their own experiences and world views, and find elements there that are meaningful or entertaining for them.

Part 1 of How Do I Write?

How Do I Write? Part 1

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Handwriting, boredom

Every fiction author develops a unique recipe for making diverse ingredients—characters, plot, setting, language, and theme—emerge from the creative oven as a whole creation. A work of wonder. A novel. I’m often asked how that happens, though I feel I hardly know and can only speak for myself.

Last Saturday, at the Hoboken Library Festival, I gave a short talk that answered some of the questions readers often ask: how do I put a book together and what do I hope they will get out of it? Starting with the end product in mind, I held up my crime thriller, Architect of Courage, and said my hope with it was to give readers an exciting adventure that, along the way, shows the risks in making assumptions about people, the meaning of loyalty, and the ability of an ordinary person to find ways to accomplish extraordinary things.

You’ve probably heard that fiction writers divide roughly into two camps. The plotters—those who have dozens of 3×5 cards or different colored post-its or Scrivener index cards noting every scene and major plot development. They shuffle these around until they achieve what they believe will be be the most effective, compelling, reader-aware sequence to get to the end they have in mind.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the “pantsers,” so called because they write by the seat of their pants. They start writing (not always in the right place, but that’s what revisions are for) and find the story developing before them. They go where the story leads them.

Suffice it to say, neither camp understands how the other one works—or can work!

Truthfully, although most authors probably are in mainly one camp or the other, they often try the other approach too. I find I write a chunk (say 20,000 words of what will turn out to be a 95,000-word manuscript), then take stock. At that point, I might make myself a map of who the main characters are, their conflicts, their strengths and weaknesses, their alliances and antagonists, and look for new ways they might come interact. Arrows all over the place. That sets me up to write another big chunk. When I finally see the end coming, I do have to be more organized to make sure that when I get there, all the story questions have been answered. (Like, how DID Charles know Adeline was allergic to peanuts? Or where DID the money to buy the lake house come from?)

I keep a running list of story questions as I go along. Since, as in real life, some questions are unanswerable, the story must recognize that that particular element is beyond reach. I show that the characters may not know the answer, but they (and I) haven’t forgotten the question.

Another way I stay organized is to put a table at the head of the long Word document that’s the novel. The table lists chapter number, 2-3 words describing the main action, who’s the point-of-view character, date the action takes place, word count. That table lets me easily navigate around the document. It was a godsend when my editor suggested shortening the timeframe of the novel. If I hadn’t known the exact dates when events happened, I would have been lost. That revision necessitated another table column, “New Date.” I know Scrivener automates this kind of thing, but I stick to my homegrown approach.

How Do I Write? – Part 2 tomorrow

Writing Tips: 38 Ways to Improve

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Click-bait headlines like “The Six Grammar Mistakes Almost Everyone Makes” or “Ten Rules for Writing Mysteries” lure me in every time, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when a savvy friend forwarded me a blurb for The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack Bickham. It was originally published in 1992 and reprinted in 1997. Anyone familiar with this book or him?

Amazon lets me take a look at the table of contents, and it’s charmingly aggressive: Chapter 10, “Don’t Have Things Happen for No Reason,” (so unlike real life, then); Chapter 16, “Don’t Let (Characters) Be Windbags,” (no BOGSAT* here); Chapter 28, “Don’t Worry What Mother Will Think”!; and, something every writer needs, Chapter 37, “Don’t Give Up.”

I have a shelf full of writing-advice books and some are really excellent. And some are more excellent at some times than others. A lot of this advice kind of passes over my head, but when I’m faced with a particular story problem, even one I can’t quite define, the same advice I’ve read many times before finally hits the bulls-eye. A book organized like Bickham’s would at least help me focus on what I think is the problem, though I may be wrong!

While a lot of story constraints and possibilities have changed since 1997—social media, cell phone ubiquity, as examples—the fundamentals of character development, plot clarity, and scene construction stay pretty much the same, unless you’re writing experimental fiction (which I find generally unreadable).

Bickham, who wrote and published more than 90 novels in various genres—crime, espionage, westerns—and under various names, died in 1997. He’s was a University of Oklahoma professor and was awarded the university’s highest honor for teaching excellence. I think that comes through in the down-to-earth approach he takes in this book. If you find you like The 38, he’s written five other books on such craft specifics as scene and structure, short stories, and the like.

If you know this book, tell us whether you found it useful.

*BOGSAT: Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around Talking

Image by Markus Winkler for Pixabay.

The Epilogue of August

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The Epilogue of August, the captivating debut crime mystery by Jennifer Milder, unwraps the title character’s secrets like a succession of nesting boxes. It demonstrates the truth William Faulkner captured when he said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Janus is a middle-aged woman living in Brooklyn when she receives a phone call she’s awaited for years. Her mother, August, is dying in the oceanfront town of Seaville, North Carolina. Bad timing, of course. The Thanksgiving holiday looms. Janus has no desire or, initially, no intention to go to her prickly mother’s bedside, but there’s no one else. She goes. The competing pulls of duty and self-preservation are palpable here. In a way, it’s curiosity that wins out.

The name Janus (mostly called Jan in the book) is a perfect choice for the main character. Looking backward and gradually revealing the layers of her mother’s and her own lives—eventually, even her grandmother’s—and looking ahead to her mother’s death is exactly what occupies Jan in this novel.

Jan has indelible, unhappy memories of her chaotic early years living with her single mom in camps and communes. August has painful memories too, especially of the murder of a pair of sisters that took place in the town one long-ago summer. Nelson McCready, a young Black man, was tried and acquitted of one of the killings and never brought to trial for the other. Because technically the case is still open, he can’t leave, sentenced to live in a community where everyone believes him guilty.

As August’s fragile health declines, Jan seeks out friends from her own past and that of her mother and grandmother. You may anticipate a few of her discoveries, but author Milder has significant twists in store. To Jan, the journey she’s on is personal, but as her mother’s story is gradually revealed, she comes closer and closer to uncovering the secrets behind the long-ago murders.

All told, this is a complex, layered portrait of mother and daughter, and even though family dramas are not usually my cup of tea, here the characters are completely, heart-breakingly believable. Coupled with an accomplished writing style, that realism makes the story immersive and deeply engaging. The story packs in so much, it’s hard to believe that the present-day action takes place over the course of only about a week.

The book appears to be self-published, and a commercial publisher might have suggested different formatting choices. Some readers may be put off by the book’s 579 pages, but that number is misleading. The way the pages are laid out there are fewer words per page than in a conventional book and, trust me, it moves along rapidly. This is a truly remarkable debut, and I look forward to more from this author.

Imagining Holmes’s Place in History – Guest Post by Richard T. Ryan

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Where exactly is Sherlock Holmes’s place in history? Well, if you’re a writer the answer to that is rather simple: It’s anyplace you care to put him—within reason.

Like so many other pasticheurs, I enjoy placing Sherlock Holmes in situations that are grounded in reality. In other words, I think of my works as a blend of history and mystery. I like to think of it as Conan Doyle meets Dan Brown.

With a background in the medieval and early Renaissance periods, I’m always seeing various connections that span the centuries. As a result, druids figure prominently in one of my works, The Druid of Death, as does the ogham system of writing, used hundreds of years ago by the Irish.

In another work, I focused on the plique-à-jour style of jewelry-making, and was fortunate that the best example of this technique—The Mérode Cup—happened to be housed in the South Kensington Museum (which became the Victoria and Albert Museum some years later) and shown here.

An article about Fabergé eggs, and the discovery that Consuela Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, had commissioned the Pink Serpent Egg served as the starting point for my novel The Merchant of Menace. Also worth noting is that the Duchess was the first person outside of Russia to own one of these masterpieces.

Sometimes an event sends me scurrying down the research rabbit hole. I was intrigued when I learned that a group of Scottish students had stolen the Stone of Scone on Christmas Day in 1950. They pilfered the artifact in an effort to attract attention to the cause of Home Rule for Scotland. In The Stone of Destiny, I changed things a bit to suit the history of Holmes’s times and had a group of Irish separatists abscond with the stone in order to delay the coronation of King Edward VII.

In my most recent book, The Devil’s Disciples, which is due out later this year, I once again examine the question of Home Rule for Ireland. This time I focus on the Fenian dynamite campaign that plagued London in the mid- and early 1880s. Among the targets was the London Bridge, followed a few weeks later by the Tower of London, the House of Commons, and Westminster Hall—all on the same night!

At that point, Holmes is contacted by Her Majesty’s government and tasked with bringing the bombers to heel. This is a more in-depth look at the question of freedom for Ireland, and I touch on such events as the potato famine; the support for the movement in America, specifically from a group called the Clan na Gael; and one particular individual who shall live in Irish infamy forever.

The challenge in my books is to insert Holmes into these events without disturbing the line that is history. Sometimes, it’s fairly easily accomplished, but at other times it can be a real struggle. And, of course, I also have to find a place for Dr. Watson, so in some instances it is doubly tricky.

If you’d like to check out The Devil’s Disciples, this link will take you to its page on Kickstarter, and you can see part of the cover and check out the various rewards. Right now, we are at 94 backers, if we get to 100, everyone will receive $50 worth of free Holmes ebooks as a bonus.

The Mérode Cup photograph is licensed by CC (view license here).

The Man in the Corduroy Suit by James Wolff

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James Wolff writes a different kind of spy novel, and his new one, The Man in the Corduroy Suit, is no exception. Wolff’s British intelligence agents are renegades. Jonas Worth, whose antics were the subject of the first book in the series, Beside the Syrian Sea, and agent-runner August Drummond from How to Betray Your Country, the second, both found themselves at odds with their bureaucracies. Wolff’s storytelling skills are such that you adopt these oddball characters and want them to succeed, despite the parallel imperative for the system to function. There’s no formula evident in Wolff’s stories; each is a plunge into the unknown.

The protagonist of this story, Leonard Flood, has acquired a reputation: blunt and prickly. If he comes up short on social skills, he’s also a relentless questioner, who through sheer persistence can pry information out of an interviewee. Or an unwilling colleague. In other words, he can be a pain in the neck. Wolff draws Leonard’s—and his other characters’—personalities with an artist’s eye for the telling detail, including the corduroy suit Leonard favors, irrespective of weather.

Reading about Wolff’s bureaucratic misfits, you may be reminded of Mick Herron’s Slough House series. The difference is that, flawed though Herron’s characters are, they do form something of a team. And they can hold it together to resolve a problem. Wolff’s characters skate out onto the thin ice mostly alone, and the problems to be solved are, if not wholly of their own making, specific to them. Like Herron, Wolff has a finely-honed ability to skewer the absurdities of bureaucratic life and the foibles of his oh-so-human characters.

The head of an MI5 unit called Gatekeeping, which covertly investigates the agency’s own personnel, asks Flood to look into the activities of a retired officer, Willa Karlsson, who has been struck down by a mysterious illness. Alarmingly, she seems to have been the victim of some hard-to-detect Russian poison. Karlsson for many years worked in New Recruit Vetting. She is, in fact, the very person who vetted Flood. As the boss is quick to point out, she also vetted intelligence analyst Jonas Worth and agent-runner August Drummond from books one and two. Their wandering off the straight-and-narrow still stings. Worse, how many other dodgy personnel did Karlsson approve? Was she on a deliberate campaign to undermine the agency? To introduce people whose personal weaknesses would make them vulnerable? In short, how many bad apples are in the MI5 barrel?

Flood doesn’t have much time to figure it out, either. Once he thinks he has, the atmosphere of the story darkens, and you can’t be sure whom he should trust or what he can risk taking for granted. When so recently in real life, a young American man let loose into the world a large cache of international intelligence, this book can make you think hard about whether you ever do or can know enough about the people called upon to protect a nation’s closest secrets.

While I won’t go into specifics about the ending, it’s one of those satisfyingly unexpected but well laid out scenarios, much like one the late John le Carré might devise. I thoroughly enjoyed this cerebral book—the quirky personalities, the clever plot, the sly tone. Although even Leonard doesn’t figure out Willa Karlsson’s motive, I suspect you will.

A very, very good read!

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Where Did the Month of May Go?

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Two vacations and a flurry of county book fairs have made the past few weeks fly by without blog posts. Recently, I made a little change to my book cover with a see-through label clearly indicating it’s a thriller (after a book fair visitor kept haranguing me—“It doesn’t signal it’s a thriller!”). The label works like a charm: photo shows how it came out.

Later this month I’m looking forward to a Sisters in Crime reading, a Mystery Writers of America get-together, and next month, the Public Safety Writers Association annual conference. All that hasn’t slowed down my reading. Because I read 40-50 crime/mystery/thriller books each year for CrimeFictionLover.com, a site that focuses on NEW books, and CRIME FICTION, I rarely read books that don’t fit those parameters. But lately, a few exceptions.

Best was Just Mercy, “a story of justice and redemption,” by Bryan Stevenson (one extended story in it became the movie starring Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan, which also was great). Reading it was inspired by our trip to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Very affecting, as you’d expect and highly recommended. Crime yes; fiction, unfortunately, no.

One of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics—Obelists at Sea, C. Daly King, 1932—hit my desk. It’s about a murder during a 1930s transatlantic crossing. A group of psychologists on board ship, each with a different theory about how to identify the perpetrator, tries to help the captain. One by one, their theories fail. There are a few good cracks at the profession, but the comic potential wasn’t fully exploited. And it was slooooow. Some of the characters’ rampant anti-Semitism (and knowing what came afterward in real life, so few years later), made it hard to enjoy. “Obelists,” the author explains, are people who harbor suspicions. That’s a word that should come in pretty handy these days.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, an award-winning literary novel that was a “best book of the year” a decade ago (I’m way behind) is an exploration of the ravages of war, set in Chechnya. In winter. Betrayal, murder, torture, random maiming, privation, inexplicable compassion, and the enduring power of love. A little grim for me. The title comes from a definition of what constitutes “life” found in a medical dictionary. No doubt this could be considered crime fiction on an epic scale.

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.