Authors Electric

  Few authors venture to write in a language that is not their mother tongue.  It’s hard enough to write. Why make it any more difficult by adapting a new vocabulary, grammar and syntax? Some might even call it a betrayal of country, home, blood. The Chinese Typewriter My grandfather wrote in English. Born and bred in Shanghai, he spoke to his four children in the local dialect but wrote to them all in English. He typed each letter, keeping a carbon copy for his own records while leaving space open to insert by hand Chinese names and proverbs. Maybe he wrote in English because typewriters for Chinese characters were beyond the reach of mere mortals. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times Chinese typewriters look something like a cross between a deli-meat slicer and a small printing press. There are no keys, just thousands of little metal characters arranged in a grid system. Because Chinese has no alphabet and no alphabetical order, the operator ...

migrant ˈmʌɪɡr(ə)nt noun a person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions I am a migrant. I moved from the United States to the Netherlands because my husband got the job of his dreams in Amsterdam. My parents are migrants, too, leaving China for America for education (in the case of my mother) or to flee the Communists (in the case of my father). I’m an imaginary migrant. In my writing, I complete my parents’ journey by returning to my father’s birthplace in my Shanghai Quartet . Britta Marakatt-Labba, Historja. Photo credit: Karen Kao   Migrant writing comes from that place between homes. But where is home? It may be the place you were born, through no choice of your own. Or, it’s where you happen to live now. I write my best inside that halfway house between cultures and languages, too. In this one respect, it’s not such a bad thing to be a migrant. We writers are gifted with an embarrassment...

We all fear rejection. To be the last kid picked for the kickball team or the only wallflower at the school dance. We long to be popular, wildly so, or at least to seem that way. This human desire predates likes and followers , obsession with crowd sizes or the invention of money as a measure of success. We are social animals. To survive, we need to be liked. the wall   And yet writers are rejected all the time. You might say we seek it out. Every time we set pen to paper, there’s a near perfect probability of rejection, sooner or later. By the writer herself, the editor of a literary journal, an agent, a publisher, the readers at large. Sometimes you’re told in the most painful terms possible why you’ve been rejected. Usually, though, it’s silence that greets the writer every morning and lays down with her in bed each night. The silence that says: you’re a failure. Still, we write. If writing cannot satisfy our most basic human need, why do we do i...

Nonfiction isn’t high on my reading list. I’ll read it when I have to do research for my Shanghai Quartet. Or when my sons decide there’s something I need to know. But I prefer fiction that transports me to someplace I don’t know. Like Nigeria during the Biafran War or 1980s India . But now I’ve discovered creative nonfiction. It’s a big tent for all kinds of circus animals: journalism, essays, research papers, memoir. Even this blog post is creative nonfiction, at least, that’s what I hope to achieve. So what exactly is creative nonfiction? true stories, well told To start with, the term has been in use for several decades now. This is odd because most people who write creative nonfiction hate the term. Dinty Moore thinks it should be up to the reader to decide whether a work is creative or not. And the term nonfiction is an attempt to define the genre by what it is not . Quite a number of alternatives have already bitten the dust. Literary nonfiction (too pre...