“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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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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This is a story about Grandfather and a deer that predates Grandfather's meeting Sir Raven, his big raven friend. Set on the farm of Grandfather's brother, it is a poignant story of compassion and recovery.

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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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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Listening to stories is something we learn as children. To a writer, listening is vital, because stories are are everywhere, free for the taking when we take the time to listen for and to them.

It's amazing to me what I've learned over the years by listening, asking clarifying questions when appropriate, and allowing the person to tell his or her story as I sit and listen. Some years ago I wrote and published “Requiem for Blue”, a story about an ex-convict who had spent 30 years in priso...

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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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