All I need: green tea, GF donut, riveting book. What a lame blogger I’ve become! This is literally my only post for the year. But I had my reasons, chief of which was a breast cancer diagnosis this spring that proceeded to derail the entire year. I hope ...
Chateau de Fontainebleau On the morning of Friday, July 7, the Moscow-Paris Express pulled into Gare de l’Est, and the long train journey that had begun in Vladivostok eleven days before was over. Pretty Parisian courtyard. We were on the 6th floo ...
Writing on train. (Photo by Chris)[/caption]
It’s Sunday, July 2, as I begin this new entry, and my friend Chris and I are back on the Trans-Siberian Railway, having traveled from Vladivostok to Irkutsk and spent a day and a half in the town of Listvyanka on the shores of Lake Baikal.
It seems like we’ve been traveling for days, yet we’re not even halfway between Vladivostok and Moscow. We’ll pass that milestone sometime this afternoon.
Akiko didn’t write that many poems about her train trip from Vladivostok to Moscow. But we do know about her Trans-Siberian journey from her account Pari made [パリまで、To Paris], which was published in four installments in the Asahi shimbun newspaper.*
And I’m really struck by the differences between our two journeys. ... 
Sea of Japan at dawn, seen from ferry window[/caption]
I’ve started composing this installment of my travel report aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, late at night, someplace between Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.
I hope in a few days to be able to post something entertaining about this train trip, but tonight I’m going to tell you about the two-day/two-night ferry trip between Japan and Russia. This was the segment that occasioned the most anxiety for me before I set off from landlocked Davis, California. ... 
Ill: N. Elmehed. © Nobel Media 2016[/caption]
When the Swedish Academy announced this morning that Bob Dylan was their choice for this year’s Literature Prize, people went crazy in exactly the ways you'd expect: his die-hard fans were jubilant; many writers and literature-lovers expressed open dismay; and others jumped into the fray to defend the award and call out the naysayers for snobbery and narrow-mindedness.
I think one can be nonplussed or even disappointed by this decision and remain innocent of elitism or parochialism or of suggesting Dylan is anything less than awesome. Sure, song lyrics are poetry, which makes it literature. Still, I don’t think the expectation that the award go to people who’ve spent their lives making, you know, books, as their principal occupation, is necessarily misplaced or snobby. ... 
Writering it up, One Story Debutante Ball, May 2016 (Photo Dan Fuchs)[/caption]
See the end of this post for details about the Landfalls audiobook giveaway. It ends July 14, 2016.
[This giveaway has ended. Congratulations to Sandra G. of Woodland, CA, for winning an audiobook!]
Before my book came out, I was a writer who spent a lot of time writing. Now I’m a published author, and I spend a lot of time doing things connected to writing or to my life as a writer but that don’t involve actual writing. If I wanted to, I could easily spend all of my time doing writerly stuff instead of writing. I call it “writering.” ... 
Am I the only writer out there who regularly falls asleep over her keyboard? Please tell me I'm not.
It goes like this: I've carved out a precious hour or two to write, but as soon as I hit a point where I need to stop and think for a moment, which is often very early on because I'm an incredibly painstaking writer and slow thinker, I start nodding off. I may stave off the drowsiness for a while, but eventually I flop face-down on my bed or couch and conk out. ... 
Here’s a question that’s come up pretty often at my book events: “How many of the places described in your book have you actually been to in person?”
Answer: One.
... 
Blackout poem in progress[/caption]
My novel Landfalls came out in North America yesterday (!!!), and I want to share a quirky project I’ve been working on in anticipation of its launch.
The idea came from Austin Kleon’s newspaper blackout poems. Kleon’s technique entails “finding” short poems in a newspaper page and inking out everything else. They’re really cool. Here's one example:
[caption id="attachment_2071" align="alignright" width="300"]
Austin Kleon newspaper blackout poetry[/caption]
I first stumbled across Kleon’s work four or five years ago. I was teaching at Sacramento City College and looking for an engaging and approachable in-class writing exercise for the poetry unit of my Intro to Creative Writing class. Many of my students had signed up to write short stories or personal essays. The prospect of writing a poem daunted them. Indeed, their instructor had not written a poem in many years and wasn’t undaunted herself. ... 
Shields Library, UC Davis[/caption]
When I was working on Landfalls, my novel about the Lapérouse expedition, I used to joke that the whole endeavor was just an excuse to go to the library—but I wasn’t always sure I was joking.
One of the reasons the project took so long—besides my painfully slow writing and the demands of grad school and work and, you know, family—was the time I spent researching. There was always one more book to read, one more lead to chase down, one more link to click, one more intriguing footnote I had to follow up on.
It could be a problem. ...