During my childhood and early teens, I used to write stories in little notebooks that I would share with no one. When I began university, my attention got sucked away from creative writing and redirected toward the academic study of literature. After doing a Ph.D. at Brown in American Literary Modernism, I taught for a brief while at a liberal arts college in Nova Scotia, but it soon became apparent that the professorial life was not for me. A particularly rough year left me isolated, depressed and on the verge of breakdown. It was during this time that I returned to my childhood love of creative writing; those early sketches turned into the basis for my memoir The Reading List.  Some of the family secrets I unearthed through writing that first book provided inspiration for my debut novel After the Bloom, which delves deeper into the Japanese internment my ancestors experienced and its turbulent aftermath on subsequent generations.

Sometimes writing is a means of processing difficult events in my life.  Other times it’s a heady leap into the imagination. I don’t exactly know why I write. What I do know is that if I don’t do it, I feel terrible – physically, psychologically, emotionally.

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