• Memoir

    Midsummer – Year of the Fire Rooster

    After seven years of teaching in China, I’m glad to return to America–for the time being–and enjoy some good old fashioned reverse culture shock. There’s music on the car radio I haven’t heard in years. Weekly trips to matinees showing current/uncensored films that do not require government issue IMAX 3D glasses. There’s fresh air and blue sky and green lawns. Even all the mass delusion here in the wilds of Make America Great Again seems quaint to me. And right now there is much to do. Books to read. Trails to hike. Old friends to visit. An action-comedy script in the works. And finally, it goes without saying that I must…

  • Creative Metanonfiction,  Memoir,  MFA,  Satire

    A Report on the Ontological Status of Somebody’s Acting Head

    Subject: Update Concerning Somebody’s Acting Head Classification: Ultra Secret – For University MFA Eyes Only As none of you may know, I am a self-appointed detective investigating the current ongoing fiasco occurring in Hong Kong. But now I am depressed because I have discovered the truth about the Acting Head, my nemesis. My greatest fear was manifesting. Could I have been unwittingly wormholed into a Thomas Pynchon novel? When praying to the deities, Jesus, Peter Hessler, and Kim Kardashian didn’t work, I decided to take matters into my own hands and improvise a voodoo doll out of unwashed socks, a moldering potato, and my emergency sewing kit. Still nothing. Then…

  • Memoir

    Stop Renting White Guys!

    Chengdu made it on VICE on HBO, but not in a good way. When I first moved to the Hibiscus City a teaching company pimped me out to a snake-oil salesman. It was the ultimate gig. Approximately $1,000 for about two hours of work, which amounted to wearing a suit and white lab coat and some shit talk. All I had to do was read from a PPT to a room full of elderly Chinese people. This is when I was my most penniless. Ramen noodles, rent and Renminbi occupied my mind then. Friends invited me to dinner, and passed on second-hand laowai survival gear. Even the local dumpling peddlers…

  • Craft,  Memoir

    The Art of Juxtaposition: Visual Storytelling with Stephan Eirik Clark

    In a recent lecture at City University of Hong Kong MFA Program, Sweetness #9 author, Stephan Eirik Clark described how writers can borrow cinematic visual storytelling methods to enhance their prose. He illustrated his thesis, using scripts from two films from the year 1985, Witness with Harrison Ford and Rambo II with Sylvester Stallone. By using the later as a counterpoint, Clark showed the difference between image-driven storytelling and Tweedledee and Tweedledumb driven pulp: Co: How you get into this? Rambo: It’s a long story. Co: Long ride. Rambo: Well… after I left Special Forces, I… moved around a lot. A hollow tale requiring noise and flurry to mesmerize the…

  • Memoir,  Traveling

    On Muses

    Be patient with your muse, I was recently told. Maybe my mentor sensed my feeling of being time crunched and frustrated. Since working on my second creative portfolio I have bumped into too many false starts. And since I am the author of two forthcoming novels, Year of the Wood Horse and The Chimerican, due out 2016 and 2017 respectively, she may have detected my sense of urgency. While I do know patience is a virtue, I feel that I am running out of patience as I have been patient all my life it seems. So I work hard, studying the body of Alice Munro, hoping the nuts and bolts…

  • Book Review,  Memoir

    Returning to Sardinia

    This October I will return to Sardinia.   According to legend, the island was founded by Sardus, a son of Heracles. But who is Grazia Deledda? That is what I’d rather know more about as I read her 1913 novel, Reeds in the Wind.   Just beginning her novel, I am struck by its beauty–not that endorphin generating kind when one happens upon random aesthetically pleasing objects–but rather the kind that is a craft sublime, the prose seemingly aligned for our times, the kind Keats reminded us of his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”   Grazia Deledda speaks to us a one hundred and one years later: “Yes, man’s working…