Matt Rees's Blog, page 18

Doctor knows life and death: Abraham Verghese’s Writing Life interview

If you were a book editor who wanted to create the perfect writer for a best-selling epic novel of an African-born doctor forced to take refuge in the U.S., you might pick someone from Ethiopia. Make him of Christian Indian parentage. Educate him in medicine and send him to the Iowa Writing Program. Make him work in top medical jobs with HIV patients who’d force him to examine his own prejudices. Get him to write a pair of acclaimed medical memoirs. Just to keep him on his toes, give him a demanding job as a professor at Stanford University Medical School. Name him Abraham Verghese, and you’d have one of the most compelling writers in world fiction these days, with an ability to bring big, societal issues into close personal focus. Oh, wait, somebody already created this guy. Here he is:

You’ve had a career in medicine that most doctors would envy and success as a writer that few memoirists or novelists attain. How do you manage both careers so well?

I think there is no separation between the two. My identity, beyond that of being a father, a son, a citizen and so on is completely that of being a physician, of having the privilege, the honor, the calling to serve. I am old-fashioned in that sense, and get much satisfaction from this sense of serving the profession, honoring its ideals, celebrating its grand history (in novels or memoirs), and in repeatedly professing my faith in the “Samaritan function” of being a physician (to use the late physician Robert Loeb's term). I resist the definition of the writer as somehow separate and divorced from my day job, as if it were akin to leaving work and performing burlesque after hours. I do subscribe to the notion as a form of research, exploring the truth. Having said that, I feel that the writing (no different than, say, the music if you are a musician, or the bump and grind if you do burlesque) has to stand on its own, has to work by the standards of the discerning literate reader for whom I write. He or she cares little, I suspect, what degree I have behind my name (and I don’t put M.D. behind my name on my books). Writing has to work by the standards by which writing works.

How long did it take you to get your first memoir published?

It was my fictional story, Lilacs, in the New Yorker in 1991 that led to my getting a contract to write, My Own Country. It came right after my five years at a small hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee, where, in a town of just 50,000 people, as an internist and infectious diseases specialist we were looking after nearly a hundred people with HIV infection, an unexpected number for that population. It turned out there was an explanation for that mystery, and I wanted to tell it. I go the contract to write it in 1991, just after graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop. I actually wrote the book while working full time in El Paso at the teaching hospital at Texas Tech. I wrote it in my nights and weekends and it took four years.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

So many good ones. A new addition is Francine Prose’s Reading like a Writer: A Guide for People who Love Books. John Gardner's books, The Art of Fiction and Becoming a Novelist are still so precious, as is Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings. But truly the most important thing to do is keep reading and keep writing. It is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

What’s a typical writing day?

Given my day job all these years (which I love and which is who I am), writing for a set amount of time every day is not going to happen. Something that really helps is that I have a secret second office, without even a sign on the door, where I escape a few half days a week to write. It is a great source of peace and gives me time to be reflective and write. Of course, I also do a lot of writing at nights, early mornings and over the weekend, and sometimes that is hard on my family.

“Cutting for Stone” is an epic of two orphaned Ethiopian brothers. How would you describe its themes?

I think the themes are epic themes – of love and loss, success and failure, life and death. And how medicine and a career in it can save you or destroy you. And how love redeems us and seems to be the only thing that lasts.

Where did the idea for the novel come from?

All I had at the outset was an image of a beautiful Indian nun giving birth in a mission hospital in Africa, a place redolent with Dettol and carbolic acid scents, a place so basic, so unadorned, that nothing separates doctor and patient. You know what I mean: no layers of paperwork, cubicles, computers and forms--just a line of patients stretching out the door. That is all I had. I did not know the whole plot or how it ended.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Book publicity: the full set

In the Royal Navy, there’s only one kind of facial hair allowed. British Tars are either clean shaven or they sport a beard, known in the service as a “full set.” The antipathy to the mustache is no doubt because of its predominance among the rival landlubber officer class (although it could’ve later been its association with a different kind of “sailor.”)

Book authors now fall into similar categories. There are those who do nothing online and those for whom each book must be accompanied by the full set.

Those who do nothing are usually writers who were already well-known before the web became so important. They don’t need to be online, so they aren’t. Or they’re too old to get into a new kind of writing. Me, I have the internet full set. Here’s what I’ve got going on already for my new book, which is out in two weeks in the UK:

First there’s the updated website, www.mattrees.net. The website is, of course, the equivalent of facial stubble. Everyone’s doing it, even those who don’t get around to growing a full set. Some of them are pretty rotten and look like they’d itch… You can tell that the writer only sports the stubble because he thinks he has to – a fashion necessity. He’d get rid of it in a moment if the fashion changed.

I’m very involved in the design of my site. I put lots of Extra Features in it. You can hear much of the music from MOZART’S LAST ARIA, my new book. (It’s a historical thriller in which Mozart’s sister tries to uncover the secrets of the great composer’s death.) I have a couple of brief essays about how I came to write the book; how I researched it; how I structured it to mirror my favorite Mozart piano sonata. A photo tour of all the real locations featured in the novel, and images of many of the real characters from the book.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

From Romance to Corpses: Tess Gerritsen’s Writing Life

Tess Gerritsen started with romance, but soon realized that dead bodies were where it’s at. At least, dead bodies handled deftly by the two most compelling female series characters in thriller fiction, Detective Jane Rizzoli and Dr. Maura Isles. Her first books were romance novels, but after writing eight of them she switched to medical thrillers. The 25 million books she has sold prove that this was one plot twist she very much got right. The first of many, in fact. Tess is an absolute master at a particular kind of twist which does more than simply surprise the reader. Her plotting and pacing genius is such that each new element seems to set the actual book racing as fast as the reader’s pulse. I saw her at work in this way at a recent book festival in Dubai. At a social barbeque for the writers attending, we were chatting about an anecdotal incident from another writer’s student days. Tess took what had been a moderately disturbing moment for the writer and instantly rattled off enough nimble plot twists to structure the first quarter of a fast-paced thriller—so that those of us chatting around the roasted chickens were gasping and wishing for her to tell us how the story would end. That’s part of Tess Gerritsen’s tremendous gift. But once she has that idea, how does she proceed? Here’s what she has to say about her Writing Life:

You had a career in medicine before you published. But for how long
before you became a professional writer were you interested in writing?

I knew I was a writer at age seven. I wanted to apply to journalism school as a teen, but my father -- a very practical Chinese-American parent -- warned me that writing was no way to make a secure living. As an obedient Chinese daughter, I followed his advice and went to medical school instead. But a few years into being a doctor those old writing impulses reasserted themselves and while I was home on maternity leave with my sons, I wrote my first novels. A few years later, I realized that I really could make a living as a writer – and I've been one ever since.

How long did it take you to get published?

I wrote two practice manuscripts before my third was accepted. That was CALL AFTER MIDNIGHT, a romantic thriller that was published by Harlequin/Mira books. I wrote romances, and then wrote a thriller HARVEST, which was my first really big bestseller. I've stuck with thrillers since then.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

TELLING LIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT by Lawrence Block is my favorite advice book about the craft of writing. It's funny, it's snappy, and it's spot-on.

What’s a typical writing day?

Breakfast, coffee, exercise, and then four first-draft pages. Only when I've written those four pages do I call it a day. It usually takes me all day to produce those four pages.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Taking Refuge

Some people are always expecting or hoping for a war. They’re even working towards that end. When you live in the Middle East, you come to such a realization eventually.

Most people are like me, however. The wars sneak up on them. They notice the signs, then they bury them because they think they’re being unduly negative. Or they’re simply afraid to see what’s in front of them.

There might even be a war going on a short drive from where you live and it can more or less escape your attention. For example, over the weekend there were 120 rockets fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army killed 19 Palestinians. I could’ve been down there in 45 minutes drive. But I was eating chocolate muffins with my son.

I can feel the war coming, just as you might sense someone creeping up behind you. Without hearing or seeing anything. Like an icy hand touching your back.

When a bomb went off in Jerusalem a couple of weeks ago, killing a British tourist, the icy hand had a grip on my guts. This was different to the intifada of the first half of the last decade. Then I was a journalist; I had to be here and I buried whatever trauma I felt under a thick layer of professionalism or duty. Now I’m a writer and a father, and I could be anywhere I want.

I’m still here in Jerusalem. It’ll be 15 years in six weeks. I keep trying to think of somewhere else to go. Somewhere less hostile and aggressive. I haven’t figured it out yet.

For a while, I’ve thought it might end the way it started—with someone else more or less deciding for me. In 1996, I came here because I met a woman who had taken a job here. That got me out of a job in New York I hated but was unable to bring myself to leave.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Getting Inside Your Head: Virtual Reality guru Jeremy Bailenson's Writing Life

Move over cards, cocaine, and nicotine, Virtual Reality is the new addiction. It isn’t restricted to the realms of academe or science fiction. Whether you know it or not, it’s going to change your life. It already may have done so. Stanford University Professor Jeremy Bailenson is co-author of a new book, Infinite Reality, which explains how our world is being altered by…a world that isn’t really there. A compelling thinker and one of the foremost young experts on VR, Bailenson’s book (on the shelves April 11) is sure to change the way you look at all aspects of the future and its intersection with rapidly developing technologies. With the arrival of “avatars” of ourselves, it might even change how you look at yourself. Here’s what he told me about his work and the new book:

Before we get to writing, here’s a virtual reality question. How soon will governments and corporations be able to control our behavior with virtual reality? And how?

Children play video games for more time per day than they watch movies and read books combined. Video games are becoming more “immersive,” that is, closer and closer to virtual reality, each year. Whether or not governments will use the medium to “control” us is up for debate, but there is little doubt that the next generation of lawmakers will look to virtual reality first and other media second when shaping laws, creating entertainment, and conducting commerce.

How long did it take you to get this book published?

From start—phone call from an agent suggesting I write a book—to finish—book available in stores--the process was about three years.

What’s a typical writing day?

I wake up early, drink coffee, and get my best writing done between 7am and 10am, and typically put in another few hours in the afternoon. Some days are longer days on which I pound the prose for double digit hours but those are the exception, not the rule. It’s a marathon, not a sprint…

Plug “Infinite Reality.” How would you describe what it’s about? And of course why’s it so great?

Infinite Reality is a survival guide for anyone seeking to understand how the virtual revolution is changing life as we know it—for example psychology, religion, education, entertainment, relationships, and business. For the past fifteen years, Blascovich and I have been running experiments to understand what happens to the mind inside virtual reality, with the idea that “someday” the technology would be a part of the average person’s daily life. It turns out “someday” has arrived. Children between the ages of 6 and 16 spend over 8 hours per day using digital media, and Internet addiction is quickly becoming a rival to substance abuse and gambling. Infinite Reality gives readers the tools to understand what Virtual Reality is and how it will affect their lives.

What’s it like to co-write a book?

The great part is being able to bounce ideas off one another and to have another person who is a highly invested editor. In our penultimate edit, Jim and I sat side by side and read OUT LOUD every single word of the book, and then argued over prose, grammar, and content. We averaged about thirty minutes per page. Needless to say it was a grueling month.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions”. In the late seventies when William Gibson is setting the stage for the virtual revolution we are experiencing today, he really captured the essence of virtual reality. Today there are many people who prefer their “hallucinations” to the physical world.

You’re a fan of Gibson’s “Neuromancer.” Some people say his sci-fi fiction “invented” the internet and cyberspace. Is that true? Did fiction-writing actually lead to all these subsequent scientific developments?

Neuromancer was without a doubt what inspired me to become a scholar of avatars. Gibson’s unprecedented vision of cyberspace redefines what it means to be human—mortality is optional, people can transform their gender, age, and identity at the drop of a hat, and the notions of pleasure and pain move beyond the flesh. Indeed these themes are pervasive throughout my research and throughout our book Infinite Reality. I first read it in high school, and like many Stanford students I force to read it in my courses, I didn’t really “get it”. It’s a challenging read on the first try, and some of the big ideas take a few reads before they grab hold. I didn’t pick the book up again for about a decade, in my fifth year of graduate school, where I was floundering without direction in my research, running cognitive psychology experiments and then designing computer programs that mimicked thought. But before dropping out of academia altogether, one job advertisement in particular resonated with what I had read in Neuromancer, and I decided to give university life one more try. I took a research position at UCSB studying avatars. Since then, Neuromancer has been my crutch. Large government grants have been awarded to me for building and testing Gibson’s ideas. Academic papers are improved by Gibson quotes that sum up the big ideas of the research. PhD students walk out of my office with a copy when searching for dissertation topics. Undergraduates who can’t imagine the world without the “cyberspace” Gibson predicted (or perhaps facilitated) grumble about using it as a textbook in my lecture classes.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

A Voice for her People: Susan Abulhawa’s Writing Life interview

Susan Abulhawa is a unique voice in contemporary fiction. She’s a Palestinian, born in Kuwait to a refugee family. She spent some years in an orphanage in East Jerusalem, her ancestral city, before university education in the US and she now lives near Philadelphia. She’s the founder of a wonderful charity, Playgrounds for Palestine, which aims to bring merry-go-rounds, slides and see-saws to the children of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as to refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon. As you’ll see from this interview, Susan’s writing life revolves around a leap she made at which many would balk. So that she could write her wonderful novel Mornings in Jenin , she mortgaged her house, went to a war zone, and returned with a passionate drive to write. What she wrote is a wrenching portrayal of a Palestinian family from 1948 – the foundation of Israel, which Palestinians call the “nakba,” the catastrophe – on through the civil war in Beirut and the second intifada. Mornings in Jenin is a bestseller whose poetic prose carries the resonance of the best Arabic fiction (writing which, due to the relative paucity of translation into English, we rarely get to enjoy; Susan wrote her novel in English). This many-faceted book has at its heart the most profound and tragic love-story imaginable. As a depiction of a violent history and of the bonds between lovers and siblings, Abulhawa’s novel gives a human voice to a people so often cast as a stereotype. How does she do it? Here’s what she has to say:

How long did it take you to get published?

It felt like forever. There was an 8 years span from the time I started writing Mornings in Jenin until it was finally published in 2010.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

I’ve never read a book on writing. I’m told that I should and I probably will one of these days. When I was writing Mornings in Jenin, I did get one as a gift. But I didn’t get beyond the first chapter. I don’t think my hesitation had anything to do with the book’s merits though. I just put it down when it talked about developing an outline or sketch of the story. I knew that I would never do that – write an outline or think ahead. So I just didn’t invest any more time in something that was going to lead me in a direction that my brain would not appreciate. I’m not a planner by nature. I follow my heart, usually into disasters and heartaches. But sometimes it takes me into miracles. Regardless, I’m just not very good at following instructions. The book I got was more or less that, or at least that’s how I perceived it and that’s why I put it down. That said, I just read Tony Parson’s answer to this exact question and he mentioned writing at least 1000 words a day. Apparently he got that advice from a book and I’m taking it from him. It’s a good bit of advice and has served me well for the past few days since I read it.

I’m sure Tony will be glad to hear it. What’s a typical writing day?

I would get up at 5am, make coffee, and sit at my keyboard and write straight through until it was time to wake my daughter up for school at 8am [she was in elementary at the time; now she’s up at 6 so that timing doesn’t work as well]. Then I’d start again from 9:30 until noon. The rest of the day I spent helping out at my daughter’s school, running or yoga, and a million other things single moms do.

That was then, when I had mortgaged my house for its full value so I could afford not to work and concentrate on writing. Now I’m paying off that mortgage and have to work a full time job as a medical writer, putting those biology degrees to some use. So I write when I can. Usually in the wee hours of the morning, in rare moments of blissful quiet and solitude, on trains, or when I’m depressed and therefore don’t care if everything else piles up.

How would you describe what “Mornings in Jenin” is about? And of course tell us why’s it so great?

It’s a story of love, and how that love is shaped by violence and persistent oppression – Love between a farmer and his land; between siblings; between a man and a woman; a mother and her children; a father and his children; love between friends. I think it’s up to readers to decide if it’s great or not. I’ll say that I put my heart into it. That ultimately my intentions in writing this story distilled to a single purpose – to be true to the characters by telling their stories with honestly, authenticity, and humanity.

Read the rest of this post on my blog

Meditating the next novel

I’ve written here in the past about how I use meditation techniques to get into the zone for writing every day. But now meditation seems to have helped me come up with the idea for my next novel.

Last week I was in a rotten mood. My son woke up too early. I hadn’t slept well. The boy was whiny and tossing his Cocoa Crispies on the floor. The crema on my espresso was too thin. Oh, blah blah blah. I packed Cai off to kindergarten and lay down to meditate, as I do before I begin work every day (I used to meditate after I finished work, but I often just fell asleep, so now I do it earlier).

I focused on creativity and positivity as I meditated. I started to get ideas about… well, I’m not going to tell you what the novel’s about before I write it. Let’s just say the idea of happiness and brain function – the very things behind successful meditation – led me into a historical thriller plot that I will start researching as soon as my current project, a novel about the Italian artist Caravaggio, is completed.

What neuroscience tells us about meditation (and any neuroscientist – she knows who I mean – reading this ought to refrain from writing comments about how dumb I’ve made this sound) is that positivity rewires the brain to be yet more positive. My meditation in question proves that in a small way. I was far from positive until I began the meditation. Suddenly I was as positive as I can be – coming up with a new novel isn’t something that happens every day.

Well, actually it does happen quite frequently (for example, just now I’m thinking, “What about a mystery novel set in the Swinging Sixties in which Benny Hill is the detective”…). But those ideas don’t carry the same element of certainty that this would be the novel for me to write. I had been juggling at least five ideas for my next book. None of them had struck me as absolutely right on a deep level. Dare I say it in these cynical times, on a spiritual level. They all had something logically right about them, but they didn’t feel right.

To an extent, I owe this idea of positivity to some recent chats with Tony Buzan, author of The Mind Map Book and other volumes. We spent time together at a recent book festival in Dubai. Tony’s main point is that we only use a tiny fraction of our brain’s capacity. About 1 percent. His work is designed to enable us to increase that percentage.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

The Heart to the Rest of the World: the Writing Life with Tony Parsons

When you ask writers what underpins the greatest books, they may talk about structure, style, character-building. The best of them identify the novelist’s emotional understanding of himself and his ability to translate it to the page. That’s what strikes readers – perhaps without their even knowing it – and gives them an immediate connection to the work. At this, Tony Parsons is the master. An enfant terrible of rock journalism who’s still a high-profile columnist in British magazines and newspapers, his first big success was the wonderful MAN AND BOY, which was a big word-of-mouth hit around the turn of the millennium. Since then, he has written a series of other books, mostly focusing on the tribulations of relationships. What it takes to maintain a relationship or the love born by bringing a child into the world, for example. He’s done all this with a broad appeal, a lack of pretention, and an understanding of the craft of writing that makes him unique in the London literary world. Here he talks about how he lives his Writing Life:

You were a music writer who mixed with the great British punk bands, before you wrote novels. How did the transition to novels change your writing and the way you think about writing?

The transition between journalism and novels is always the same – it is the difference between running 100 metres and running the marathon. If I wrote a review of the Clash or the Sex Pistols, or if I write a column for GQ or a newspaper today, then I can do it in a few hours. With a novel, you live with it for a year or more – you have doubts, you take wrong turnings, you plough on. It is just much more of a slog. And you have to dig deeper – to keep that big picture in your head, to get the book in your brain down on 400 sheets of paper – writing a novel is much more of an act of will. You keep going, even when you lose heart. If you are writing a column – my columns are 2000 words for GQ, and 1229 for the Daily Mirror – you don’t really have the time to get tired, or to let self-doubt creep in.


Would you recommend any books on writing?

There are many great books about writing – I would recommend you read all of them. “Story” by Robert McKee is aimed at screenplay writers, and filmmakers, but the lessons about story structure are just as applicable to novelists. One of my favourite books on writing is Ernest Hemingway on Writing – it is an anthology of thoughts by Hemingway on his craft, rather than a book that he wrote about writing, but it contains some of my favourite advice. For example, Hemingway suggests that if you get stuck then you should write, “One true line.” I have always loved that. Elmore Leonard’s “10 Rules of Writing” is very good, and will take you about 15 minutes to read. I have just discovered “Becoming A Writer” by Dorothea Brande, which came out 80 years ago and has just been discovered – you never stop learning your craft, and so any writer should devour all the good advice he or she can find.


What’s a typical writing day?

A typical day is that I walk my 8-year-old daughter to school, come home and start. I work non-stop until lunch – aim for 1,000 words but keep going if it is going well. Knock off for lunch and do anything and everything else in the afternoon, including thinking about tomorrow’s work. It is always good to have some idea of where you are starting the next day. Hemingway said you should always, “Leave some water in the well.” So – 1000 words a day, before lunch. But there will be weeks when I am editing a book, and then you move at a different pace. Or obviously you don’t start off with 1000 words – the brooding period, when you are trying to see the book in your head. But when the ocean liner is out at sea, I will try to hit that 1000 word mark day after day.


Novels need perhaps to make a greater emotional connection with a reader than journalism. Before I was two paragraphs into “Man and Boy,” I was in tears, though you hadn’t written anything overtly tear-jerking. The same was true when I heard you speaking to an audience about your father—you were very measured and matter-of-fact, yet it was somehow deeply touching. How do you do it?

I think you just have to be emotionally honest – with yourself and everyone else. If you are writing or talking. Just try to say what is in your head and your heart without worrying too much about how it makes you look. So I just try to be straight with the world and myself, and I find that you can’t go far wrong. I think we spend a lot of our lives trying to look more cool or clever or uncaring than we really are – I think a writer has to get over that, and find the connection from his heart to the rest of the world.


What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

“It was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on, and the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.” From Great Expectations, Charles Dickens. I don’t think Dickens gets the credit he deserves for being a beautiful writer. We revere him for his characters and his stories of course, but there is a beautiful evocative simplicity about his prose. He really was just such an incredible all-round writer – that passage haunts me. An editor would tell you that you shouldn’t use “now” twice in the same sentence, and I wonder if it was deliberate or not. I think it was – because it is just such a perfect and incredible sentence.


What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

I am rereading My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, about an upper class English family running off to Corfu in the 1930s, and I love the way Durrell writes – this is one of my favourite parts, where he compares the new day to a child’s transfer. “Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Every day had a tranquillity, a timelessness about it, so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us, glossy and colourful as a child’s transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.”

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns,/a>

Married to Mohammad:Marguerite van Geldermalsen’s Writing Life interview

In the southern desert of Jordan, the ancient Nabateans carved their city, Petra, out of the red-rose rock. Later the caves were home to tribes of Bedouin. And to a young backpacker from New Zealand who fell in love with a Bedouin man. Marguerite van Geldermalsen met Mohammad in the late-Seventies and for the initial seven years of their marriage they lived inside the rock and had two of their three children. The Jordanian government later moved the tribes to a new village nearby, where Marguerite still lives (She has a souvenir shop inside Petra). Though Mohammad died almost a decade ago, Marguerite’s book “Married to a Bedouin” is a touching testament to the character of the man who changed her life and the profound love found by two people from such different backgrounds. It’s Marguerite’s first book and it’s written with a clarity of thinking and of style that’s striking. She has given us the most insightful description of Bedouin life you’ll read and also a unique love story sparkling with the attraction between Marguerite and Mohammad. For my series of interviews with authors, I’m delighted to chat with a writer who came to publish by such an unusual path.

How long did it take you to get published?
Considering the number of people who had told me I should write a book (memoir) I was surprised that I had any trouble at all. But now I know that I was rejected by the first two publishers just so that I could get published by the wonderful Lennie Goodings at Virago Press (no less)!

Would you recommend any books on writing?
I took a class with Patti Miller in Sydney and we used her ‘Writing Your Life’ (Allen & Unwin). I learned to write with it and I recommend it to people who haven’t done any writing before.

What’s a typical writing day?
I started with 3 pages of hand writing ‘morning pages’ from Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’ and I felt so inspired that I didn’t dare stop till my book was published. (Actually I still write them most days) I wrote the book on the computer though, and worked as a nurse and looked after my 3 children so it was whenever I felt the impulse and could.

Plug your book. How would you describe what it’s about? And of course why’s it so great?
Married to a Bedouin is set in Petra, Jordan where I have lived since 1978. When I first came and married ‘the Bedouin’ Mohammad’s tribe still inhabited the caves and set up their tents around the valley and by the time we were resettled to a nearby village in 1985 I was part of the tribe. I started writing the book in 1997, when I realized just how much the life had changed and how special my stories were, to capture that recent history of the site and to show the world that people are pretty much the same everywhere.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
I seem to find a new good one in each book I read, for the moment I like: ‘He paused in the strong evening wind, took a comb from the top pocket of his tweed jacket, and tried to tame the strands of white hair with which he covered his baldness.’ Which made me think; ‘this writer knows his subject’.

Well, it’s certainly kind of you to choose a sentence from one of my books. But for the next question feel free to pick someone else: What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
So many good ones, but for you Matt let’s have Bruce Chatwin in What Am I Doing Here: 'Oh! Wales. I DO know Wales. Little grey houses... covered in roses... in the rain’

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Writing on the wall

I lifted the spray can and wrote a big, blue P. The letter bled and blurred. "Oh, I messed it up," I said. “Spray closer to the wall, Matt,” my friend Walid told me. No problem. I just moved onto the next section of concrete. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of wall.

Miles and miles of it, in fact, winding as far as I could see. It ran down the hill from where I stood among the rubble and trash at the edge of Aida Refugee Camp, past an Israeli guard tower to the main checkpoint into Bethlehem. As I always do when I wander these militarized hinterlands, I wondered if there was a soldier with his gun trained on me. I sprayed the rest of my graffiti: “Playgrounds for Palestine."

It’s the one act of “vandalism” that none of my nice bourgeois friends would click their tongues and frown over. In fact, it’d raise a grin and even boost my street cred. So much street cred that you’ll probably want me to do it on your behalf (read to the end of this post to find out why…) I was spraying the name of a US charity which brings swings and slides and merry-go-rounds to Palestinian children. Spraying it on the 40-foot-high concrete barrier that Israel built in the last decade around many Palestinian towns; in this case the birthplace of Jesus.

I didn’t go to Bethlehem this week just to spray the name of this group, worthy though that would’ve been. (If you want to know how worthy, check out their site and see the work they’ve done for kids in the West Bank, Gaza, and refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.) I had decided to make a short video telling the story of some of the kids who’ve enjoyed Playgrounds for Palestine’s Bethlehem facilities.

It was in Bethlehem, in a school called Dar el-Kalima which stands on the ridge above Dehaisha Refugee Camp (home to Omar Yussef, the detective character in my Palestinian crime novels), where the group’s first playground was built. The project started a decade ago when Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American writer, brought her little daughter to visit Palestine and discovered an almost total lack of facilities for children’s play.

Since then Abulhawa, who lives near Philadelphia, has published an international bestseller, “Mornings in Jenin,” an emotionally wrenching saga about the tragedy of a Palestinian family which she turns into a love story that will stay with you forever. With the help of Playgrounds for Palestine’s volunteers, she has also managed to construct 15 playgrounds for Palestinian children.

How important is this? Well, the Bethlehem area is home to 180,000 people. There are two public playgrounds. Neither of them is very big. In fact, you wouldn’t look twice at them in an American or British park. Both are mobbed on weekends and aren’t in easy walking distance of places like Aida Camp which, I should add, abounds in children.

Other Palestinian towns are even worse off.

Read the rest of this post on my blog