In a previous blog, I announced to everyone that my novel Seiji was finished. It was. Problem was it had not yet been given to an editor (though it had been shared with friends, whose responses were quite a bit less than, erm, "enthused" about it. After giving it to my editor here in Sapporo, Derek Chamberlain, I discovered that I had (and have) a lot of work to do to make Seiji the great story I want it to be. Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favorite poets and novelists. Here is what she has t...

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Sex, sexuality and sexual explicitness have long been controversial in the United States, where the attitude has traditionally been repressive and deeply laden with sexual guilt. Prior to the mid-1960s, sexually explicit books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were banned, copies confiscated, and booksellers intimidated for selling them even after the ban was lifted in 1961. It wasn’t until 1964 that the US Supreme Court declared Miller’s book not to be obscene and its sale protected...

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The other day while waiting for the bus on a beautiful, cold, sunny afternoon, snowflakes began to fall. I composed this little poem in my head, then wrote it down in my notebook afar taking my seat. Poems often come to me this way.


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This poem was inspired by a heart-rending, inspiring photo someone posted the other day on my Facebook page. My wife and I watched the tsunami as it washed over Japan's northeastern seaboard. Though unspeakably tragic, there is both poignancy and heroism in its aftermath. This is just one of them.  

 

Mother, Son

They found her 

in the ruins of her house,

buried 

under a mountain of debris.

Lying semi-face down,

one leg slightly cocked,

one arm stretched out,

her rescuers

hoped she might st...

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What makes a story a short story?

The most effective -- and creepiest -- short story I have ever read was a page and a half long in a paperback “pocket” book that I read back in 1954 or 55. I don’t recall the author’s name, but I do recall the story in every chilling detail. Set in the parking lot of a hospital at the end of her 3 - 11 shift, a nurse was getting into her car when a criminally insane patient she knew came up to her, killed her and ... well, you can imagine how the r...

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“What are you doing, son?” the American soldier with the Japanese face asks.

“Drawing.” Seiji holds up a scrap of cardboard on which he has drawn a picture of his old neighborhood before Tokyo was firebombed and his neighborhood erased.

“Nice work!” the soldier says in Japanese. He squats down to have a closer look. “Is that all you have to draw on?”

“Mmmm, I found it over there.” He aims a charcoal-begrimed finger at a nearby trash heap next to the concrete remains of wha...

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This is one of my Grandfather stories, but without the Raven. It was inspired by a wildlife incident, recorded on NHK, the Japanese public television network, about a young female deer that had fallen through the ice on a Hokkaido lake. She was being harassed by a flock of hungry crows who were trying to knock her down. She lifted herself up onto the shore and went into the forest. In my story she appears at a farm owned by Grandfather Ueda. The story begins from there. 

Grandfather and the D...

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The Grocery Thief

 

 

I don't think there's a human being alive who is familiar with crows and ravens who doesn't think of them as thieves.

They rummage through garbage, steal crops from farmers, steal eggs from the nests of other birds, and kill their young.

Ask most anyone what their opinion is of ravens and crows and they respond reflexively “They're noisy, and they're all thieves and robbers.”

Then, with...

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Since it was a beautiful, sunny day, grandfather decided to walk along the Motsukisamu River, which was near the condominium where he and grandmother lived.

As he was leaving, grandmother said: “Now, you be careful of those dogs that run around there, because they bark, and they've been known to bite, especially one of them. That little monster is a vicious little gray devil with very sharp teeth, who has b...

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The next day when grandfather went out for a walk, the raven didn't appear until he was a good fifteen minutes into his walk and had stopped to admire a little league baseball game that was going on in a nearby park. As he stood there, he heard the sound of a creaking hinge coming from a nearby bush. Turning his head toward the sound, he saw a large raven sitting atop the bush, looking at him.

 “Is that you?” he as...

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Over the next few weeks or so I'm going to dropping some of the stories in my book Grandfather and the Raven. This is the first story one. The book, which is available in paperback and Kindle, is published by Night Publishing (UK). I think you will enjoy the stories.

One morning while grandfather was out walking, a big raven flew down and lit in front of him, stopping him in his tracks. “Kaaaaaa! ” the raven said. Then,...

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Pavlov's man was my friend. We worked together for several years in an office in Seattle, Washington. In fact, we started there on the same day. He got a big corner office, and I got the office next door. His office came equipped with a large saltwater fish tank in which there were four or five fish. I only recall four of them: Pavlov, a spiny box puffer named Yoda, a small, gray, nondescript fish, and a small red-and-bl...

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I've written and published poetry for years. This is one that came to me shortly after waking up this morning. I've worked on it all day. It was inspired by a song from "Playing for Change" entitled "Don't you worry about a thing". It played in my head all night, and this morning "Celebration" was born. Enjoy.

Grandfather and the Deer

 

One

 

 

          One morning when grandfather and grandmother were visiting his younger brother on the family farm, grandfather looked out the window and said:

          “Look, broth...

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I love to write; I don't always enjoy editing. Writing is creative and fun; editing too often seems like work. It's a matter of you we look at it.

I remember seeing my mother standing in front of her easel with a paintbrush poised, thinking. She'd add a bit of color here, remove something there, change something else. Finally satisfied, she would pronounce the painting finished. To her, "editing" was a part of the creative process. Most of the time I view it the same way. But it isn't always "...
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Call it writer's block or hitting a roadblock, getting there happens to all writers. It happened to me three or four days ago after sailing along smoothly in my novel about Tokyo artist Seiji. Reaching a scene change, I was stuck, up-to-the-hubcaps in mud, dead battery dead. Stared at the blank space and couldn't think of a thing. Nada.

Then this morning I made a startlingly simple discovery: I was trying to remember something I had deleted ... a bit of scenery from the new chapter, but it wou...
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Parking

New writing projects pop into my head fairly often, especially when my brain is in “create” mode. I may be riding along on the subway, eating, talking with my wife or a friend, just waking up (happened this morning), overhear someone talking, or have an idea or image nag away at me until I do something about it. If any of the ideas begi...

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Last year I wrote a short story about a fictional Tokyo artist named Seiji Matsuda. The story finished and published ("A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories", edited by Mohammad A. Quayum), I turned to other writing projects. Seiji, however, wasn't through with me. So I set the other projects aside and began working on expanding his story into a novel about his life. It is now about half finished, and what a challenge it has been.

A short story is one thing; a novel is something else again....
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Writing, for me, is a love affair. Rewriting is what makes the love affair with a writing project blossom. To a painter, rewriting is like looking at a painting and adding a bit of color here, additional brush strokes there, sometimes adding something in ... or removing something that doesn't fit. I saw my mother, who was a painter, standing in front of her easel with a brush in one hand, looking at the painting she was working on, making the necessary changes.

But rewriting isn't always fun. ...
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For me, the characters are what create stories, plots appear as the story moves along. I know that's backwards for many writers, and I know I'm not the only one who writes the way I do. Teresa Geering, author of the popular The Eye of Erasmus writes the way I do, beginning with character.

If I lose sight of the character (who he or she is), then I lose sight of the story, and it stops. I've recently had that experience and had to take a break from the story until I caught a clear vision of who...
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What struck me most reading George Polley’s books, Grandfather and the Raven and The Old Man and the Monkey are their ability to relocate the reader geographically without dislocating him culturally or intellectually. The place is maybe Japan but the moral of the stories are to be applied everywhere, and on everyone.

My children read both books and enjoyed them immensely. They appreciated the sense of adventure, readability and the uniqueness of the style. I appreciated their subtle moral...

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I wrote this poem after having watched the salesman on the news one evening. His presentation still sends chills running up and down my spine. Ramzy Baroud, the editor of The Palestine Chronicle kindly published it in the September 15th 2010 issue of his online newspaper. The poem is reprinted below in its original format, with the last two stanzas revised.

The Salesman

A manufacturer's rep at a cluster bomb trade show
explains on camera how these weapons are designed
to avoid civilian targets an...
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Okay, so I'm an old fogey, a lover of books made of paper that I can hold in my hand. But I'm not a died-in-the-wool fogey of the fossil variety, I'm open-minded enough to learn what a huge presence e-books are becoming, and that people do read books on their iPhones.

If you've been on my home page, you've already learned that all of my books are available as e-books, and that two of them --"The Old Man and the Monkey" and "Grandfather and the Raven" are available in paperback editions. This k...
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If you've been reading my blog, you know I attach a lot of importance to characters and character development to telling a good story. Click on the following link to read a wonderful article by MG Harris, author of the acclaimed series "The Joshua Files". If you're a writer, you'll want this one for your library.

http://www.mgharris.net/2010/04/24/motivating-your-characters-the-key-to-success-zero-moment-blog-tour-7/

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... it will replenish itself if you relax and don't panic.

I recently hit a "flat" place while working on chapter 5 in my novel about Seiji, the Asakusa Tokyo artist. He had just arrived in Princeton, New Jersey to visit old friends David and Noriko Sakamoto, and I got stuck. I felt tired,deleted, and wanted nothing so much as to go to sleep.

"Hmmm," I said; "wonder if we're both suffering a little jet lag and culture shock?" We were (at least I was, culture shock that is). He'd never visited t...
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I have several books that I keep by my desk; these are my "working" books, books I dip into for pleasure and inspiration as I write. Freya Manfred's poetry collection Swimming With a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle is one of them. Each time I pick it up, I find something new, some new depth of vision that I had missed before that makes me sit back and wonder "How did I not see this? How could I possibly have missed it?"

What is exciting about this slim volume of poems is that each time I visi...
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Where do stories, poems and novels come from? Do they come from an outline and a plan? Sometimes, and for some writers, most or all of the time. When you begin a project, should you stay with it (a novel, say) before moving on to something else? Again, this seems to depend on the writer and the way his or her imagination works. Haruki Murakami, for instance, shifts from writing a novel to writing short stories to writing another novel, then back again.

For me the process is somewhat diffe...

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As I said in a previous post, I came to writing poetry mostly by accident, when a key flew off my typewriter in the midst of a writing project. For most writing, I am typing-dependent,which meant that I pushed the project I was working on aside and wrote the following poem after coming in from a walk in my Minneapolis neighborhood.

A Song

to be sung softly in the morning or before going

to bed, to the accompaniment of a flute and an

ancient stringed instrument.

Night-coming son

moon r...

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A simple answer is that I find them everywhere: birds, monkeys, people I meet, communities and even huge cities which, at first glance, seems impossible but in my experience, isn't. To me, “character” has first to do with meeting, then seeing the whole. One definition of character is: “The inherent complex of attributes that determine a persons moral and ethical actions and reactions” (source: WordWeb thesaurus/dictionary), which is what happens when you really get to know someone, w...

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This morning I received the following quotation in an email from Don Hill, an acquaintance in the UK. Here it is, by British storyteller Anthony Nason. 

"The storyteller who wants to make a difference faces the challenge to make their own journey of transformation. Through travelling the otherworld of stories, experiencing other cultures, places, creatures, and seeking sources of wisdom beyond their own ego, they may serve, in some ways like a shaman, as a bridge for their audiences between...
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“Words are a writer’s power tools,” says Welsh novelist Mari Strachan, “and it’s crucial to be able to use them effectively.” I couldn't possibly agree more.

When I read I have always paid attention to words – the way they sound, the way they're strung together in lines, phrases and sentences, their emotion and the images and emotions they arouse. Here is an example, from Sherman Alexie's fine novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: “My dad was trying to comfo...

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Why compassion? It boils down to this: Without compassion writing, like all human communication, devolves into dismissiveness, attack and put-down, all of which are disconnecting, and ultimately dehumanizing. I do not like writing that treats human beings and the world they live in, as things to be manipulated, played with and destroyed. Psychologically speaking, a person who does that is called a sociopath, a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of m...

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When a friend asked me the other day what role humility plays in creating art, I responded that I think it plays an important role. But when I looked the word up in several dictionaries, I found the definitions less than satisfying: “The defining characteristic of an unpretentious and modest person, someone who does not think that he or she is better or more important than others.” Others are: “Modesty, lacking pretense, not believing that you are superior to others,” and “Shifting...

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The simplest answer is to begin and never stop, because it's in writing that we develop our skills. The problem with many "wannabees" is quitting the minute discouragement arrives, and just like the next hour and the next day, it will arrive.

What's the best way to guard against being defeated by discouragement? Read books by great writers. And read about them. In the early days, I read everything I could lay my hands on about well-known writers and their experience. I bought every single issu...
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Kokopelli has always been one of my favorite images. He celebrates, he dances, he is playful, and he gets me to seeing and exploring things I wouldn't ordinarily see and explore. Whenever I hear his whistle, I've learned to follow it.

This image is from a painting by my good friend Paul Bauck, and I treasure it. Paul was kind enough to gift me with a digital image of it before we left Seattle for Sapporo, Japan a little less than a year ago.



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This ahuehuete tree is one of my "muses". It represents great age (it is over 1,000 years old), myth, shamanic reality, struggle, history, creation itself. The first time I saw it, I was stopped in my tracks, stunned by its immense size, looking like a mountain in an ancient Chinese painting. The Aztec king, Moctezuma (misspelled "Montezuma" in American English) played at its feet when he was a boy. Ahuehuete trees (Mexican cypress) grow to immense size and age. The one in Tulun, in the squar...
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This is where I talk about writing, how I do it, where I get my ideas, what inspires me, why I write, and who my favorite writers and poets are. I post whenever I have something I want to write about, so sometimes you may find a whole string of posts, and sometimes you won't find anything for a week or more. Feel free to leave comments and ask for a response; I do respond, especially to people who are new at this writing craft. It takes time and patience, so keep at it. Believe me, it's the o...
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