the love we share without knowing
Big congratulations to writing pal Chris Barzak for the publication of his new novel The Love We Share Without Knowing. He recently contributed a short essay for "The Big Idea," a regular feature on John Scalzi's blog Whatever, about living in Japan and how the experience shaped his fiction and way of viewing the world:
The fact that I had graduated with an MA in English/Creative Writing and was living in the Rustbelt City of Youngstown, Ohio where there were very few opportunities for a person with a graduate degree in English, though, aided me in making a decision to leave my home and live in a country to which I had no strong connection or desire to visit. Times were hard. Bush was president (I already speak of this in the past tense, probably unwisely). The tenor of America was harsh, unkind, divided by our own ideas of ourselves. Why not live elsewhere for a while, I figured?
So I arrived in Japan without much expectation, other than I was about to enter a strange land. What I discovered, though, on the other side, was a place where I was suddenly free of all the cultural conflicts of America. Japan certainly has its own problems, but I was now a free agent. Being a foreigner comes with many benefits. One of those benefits is a sort of freedom from participating in both one’s host culture as well as being free of the rules and regulations of one’s home culture. If you have never experienced this before, I highly recommend it.
I recommend it as well. Link to the full entry.
Barzak will be reading with Alaya Dawn Johnson at KGB Fantastic Fiction on 17 December, and you can bet I'll be picking up a copy that night. But you can get your own now from IndieBound, Powells, Amazon, and elsewhere.