My Writing Process ~ The Blog Tour

My Writing Process ~ The Blog Tour 

With a student, facing the blank page

Thank you to journalist Barbara Beckwith for inviting me to the Writing Process Blog Tour that features posts by writers of all kinds. We have each responded to the four questions below.  Follow the tour at #writingprocessblogtour

 What Am I Working On?

I’m doing revisions of a young adult novel currently called, RABBIT IN THE MOON - about a New Hampshire fisherman’s daughter. When the daughter, Sofie, falls in love with a soldier, she’s pulled into the truth of a story she’s spent her life denying – that she is also a daughter of Cambodia.  Her Cambodian mother has not been in her life and the novel is an exploration of family and openings to human connection. Carolrhoda Lab will publish the book in fall, 2015. 

 How Does My Work Differ from Others of its Genre?

I’m interested in stories of people who have found haven in the U.S. after displacement from their home country due to war or extreme poverty.  I’m also very interested in stories of the home countries of new Americans, both as a reader and a writer.

 Why Do I Write What I Do?

My first job out of college was working for the American Red Cross in Vietnam during the war, and I’ve found that that experience opened me to life-long curiosity, research, and writing about war and refugees and immigrants to the U.S.  I have often written across cultures. I am compelled to try to step into the shoes of people unlike myself; trying to imagine other lives is the  reason I write. Barbara Beckwith’s work in the field of white privilege, explorations of racial identity in the U.S., and institutional racism has offered me perspective on questions of race.  I think this is a life-long process of discovery.

 How Does My Writing Process Work?

Right now I’m in the beginning steps of entering a new novel.  I’ve spent the last several years rewriting two novels that took different forms. One was THE GOOD BRAIDER, the story of a girl from South Sudan; the second is RABBIT IN THE MOON.  I have never been able to let a book go. I need to stay with it as it struggles to find out what it is.  Now, I’m with brand new material. I have tons of books I pour through. I’m also working with my mother’s teen-age journals.  I’m beginning with scenes. I write the scenes as a poem or a short story or entries in my journal.  I have a journal that is devoted to this new novel.  My way into the novel seems to be almost like a process of collecting small jewels which eventually I’ll try to arrange into a pattern.

Next on this blog tour, please meet nonfiction and memoir writer Kenyi Aruna, poet Susan Roney-O’ Brien and novelist and short story writer, John Mort.

Kenyi Aruna’s first book, a memoir of his life as a child during the war in Sudan, is called BETWEEN TWO RIVERS.  Kenyi also wrote a short memoir, “The Photograph” collected in the book, I REMEMBER WARM RAIN: 15 TEENAGERS, 15 COMING OF AGE STORIES. The book is published by The Telling Room in Portland, Maine and is a book I have taken into classrooms whenever I do writing workshops with students.  It’s a beautifully done, honest book.  Kenyi is a new graduate of the University of Maine, Farmington and has launched a nonprofit, The Sudanese School Lunch Program, to aid children in his home village to receive food during the days they are at school. 

Susan Roney O’Brien documents her life – and human life – with poems, from discoveries of motherhood, to painful losses, to journeys of many kinds.  Her collections include Farmwife and Earth and her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner and the Christian Science Monitor to name only a few. Her awards are numerous including being named the New England Association of Teachers of English “Poet of the Year.” 

John Mort has steadily contributed works to the canon of literature of the Vietnam war.  His books include Tanks, Soldier in Paradise, and The Illegal.  He studied at the University of Iowa and reviewed books for The American Library Association’s journal, Booklist.  He might be most proud, though, of his field of peach trees at his farm in Missouri.