My Writing Journey
Perhaps it arises from the same thing that prompted my father to join the Navy right out of high school or my great grandparents to immigrate to the United States and then hop from place to place across the United States. Either way, I am constantly searching for home.
Born in Japan and raised in Charleston, South Carolina to parents originally from California and Florida, I maintained a constant yearning to experience cultures other than the one in which I lived. Whether scratching African flags onto my dad’s back from the encyclopedia for him to guess, touting my birth abroad as a badge of pride, or watching kung-fu movies, I was enamored by the outside world. This combination of discontent and curiosity has always been fuel for my creative fire.
It was my mother who instilled my love of reading. Our weekly trips to the library are a tradition I keep up to this day with my own children. As a child I devoured stories of mother-daughter drama, like The Joy Luck Club and mysteries by Agatha Christie and Mary Higgins Clark. In high school and college, I spent my summers on the couch in my dad’s central Kentucky home making my way through the classics–Dracula, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and (the more modern) Interview with the Vampire. Plagued by nightmares as a child, I was always drawn to monsters. When I was even younger my first writings were equally gothic. Poems that always ended in surprise death and the brooding kind written while gazing out the window, raindrops as tears and black roses (something I thought I’d invented) representing death.
But on one endless summer day where the pressure of the waiting world hadn’t yet hit, the overwhelming urge to write my own thoughts came on as something more than just diary entries or poems. In my backyard I stretched on a plastic lounge chair in my bathing suit (remember, Charleston!) and wrote an essay, my reaction to Frankenstein. I don’t remember what it said and I never actually shared it, but I know it was full of teenage angst at the state of humanity (a few short years after 9/11) and poured straight from the heart. The urge to share my point of view, to react to what I had learned, experienced, or connected with was born.
Later, while working toward my undergraduate degree at Furman University, I mashed together all the French I was studying with English to create poem after god-awful poem as a way to play with the languages swirling in my head. Soon I was exploring the world in three languages. While studying abroad in Japan I lived with a host family who spoke no English, and I began to dream in Japanese. During that time, I studied Francophone and English literature while analyzing Japanese history and cinema. And my free time was spent devouring more modern stories in the form of manga and anime. In those years, I felt that spark of creative magic when I was able to draw connections between languages, cultures, or historical movements. And beneath it all, I discovered a connective tissue that would drive my work—an appreciation for the beauty and magic of the quotidian—a trait that appears in Japanese, French, and I believe, Southern culture. Along with a deep reverence for nature and the struggles of being female no matter the place and time, I found my aesthetic. I had moved from monsters and dark dreams into a more realistic world with just as much mystery bubbling beneath the surface.
Just as the books I love include history, mystery, and a dash of magic, my work often includes these elements which I explore through tangled familial relationships full of secrets and outsider characters who struggle to find their place in the world.
After university, in order to spend more time in Japan, I took a job as an English teacher and my teaching fate was sealed. After a stint in the heartland of Kansas City where I taught and worked for a travel company, I returned home to the South. I currently reside in North Carolina with my husband and two children. By day, I teach English as a second language to high school students from around the world.
Only after living away did I come to embrace the part of my identity that is Southern and incorporate it into my work. And the stasis of settling to raise a family and pursue my teaching career once again sparked the discontent that fuels me—I’ve been writing ever since.
I am currently working on my first novel, a Southern family saga (with a dash of mystery) set in a fictional small town in North Carolina. I want readers to share in the experience of what it’s like to be a modern southern woman where the past is alive to taunt or inspire you every day and where loving your family is always more complicated than it seems.