Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

I’ll be doing two readings in New York City. Please tell us a little about your upcoming Asian-American Writers Workshop reading. Then I would sit down and try to write when I was free.

But I also had work to do! So I did a lot of drafting in my head while I pushed a swing in the playground. I had a small child and wanted to be his primary caretaker. My subject-partly the tsunami in Japan-concerned recent history, and I felt a lot of internal pressure to get my work done. I had no publisher, and thus no deadline, but my own internal and impatient clock. I had only published some short stories when I started working on my novel. My nonfiction book was written under completely different circumstances than my novel. How did your nonfiction writing process differ from your fiction writing process? Your debut book was a novel, while Where The Dead Pause is a memoir. But they do serve a practical purpose for writers in that they can train us to work faster and with varied settings and characters. As an art form, short stories are, of course, wonderful. The benefit of working on short stories is that you learn how to shape, polish, and finish a piece of writing-and then move on. But there is no agent-and no book-without strong writing. My first agent read all my short stories, which worked together as a collection, and loved them. I did have a few instances where agents saw my work in literary magazines and contacted me. I think that publishing shorter works helped me to become a better writer, which led me to finding an agent. How did publishing shorter works help you land a literary agent? Congratulations to our winner, Satia! Thank you to all who participated! She lives in San Francisco.ĬONTEST: Leave a comment by January 30, and you’ll be entered to win a copy of her new book, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey! U.S. Her first novel, Picking Bones from Ash, was shortlisted for the 2010 Saroyan Prize and was a finalist for the Paterson Prize.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey, was published by Norton in January 2015. In our Interview With An Author series, Writer’s Relief asks professional writers to share their tried-and-true secrets for publishing success.

Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett