F. Scott Fitzgerald
Edna Ferber
Raymond Carver
Sara Gruen
Tillie Olson
Richard Ford
Favorite Books
Tender is the Night
A Thousand Acres
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Sportswriter
The Red and the Black
Madame Bovary
Favorite Authors
A highlight of my life was the week I spent with Raymond Carver at Centrum.
While I was working, I regularly attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and was fortunate to meet both fiction (Richard Ford; Sandra Scofield; Amy Tan; Louis B. Jones, who's edited both my novels; Mark Childress; and many many others). In poetry I studied, among others, with Brenda Hillman, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Robert Hass.
I volunteer as the Kidney Foundation Luncheon and have helped one-on-one with the book signings for Khaled Hosseini, Amy Tan, Michael Chabon, and Tobias Wolfe; great fun.
It would be hard to underestimate the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald in my life and my work. His publishing experience (unfortunately it sometimes seemed that the better he wrote the poorer he sold) gave me an deep-seated mistrust of 'literary success.' I loved Edna Ferber's Giant--I'd like to do half the job she did with Texas in my own back yard, Silicon Valley.
What I'm Reading
Recently I was very taken by Janice Y. K. Lee's THE PIANO TEACHER, which is reminiscent of my ex-wife's fine novel, THE DISTANT LAND OF MY FATHER. Both include scenes before, during, and after China's occupation by the Japanese.
I particularly enjoyed the careful way Lee describes the grief of a man who'd been complicit in the death of a lover, an emotion I explore in THE SURENESS OF HORSES.
