1946 was my freshman year at Adolph Leuzinger High School in Lawndale, California. It was one year after the end of World War II, and the high school was bulging with returning servicemen – not to get their high school diplomas, but to begin college on our campus. There was no provision yet for all the veterans who wanted to take advantage of the GI Bill, and the crush of veterans eager to leave war behind and move forward in their lives was so intense that the school district was willing to split the high school in two: days for high schoolers, afternoons and evenings for veterans.

Everyone in school had a story about war to tell; mine was about Uncle Morrie, a bombardier lost on a bombing flight somewhere over the Pacific, neither plane, nor crew, nor Uncle Morrie ever found. I remember Uncle Morrie as thin, his eyes the same cherry brown as my mother’s. We saw him off at Union Station in Los Angeles, handsome in his uniform, kissing my mother goodbye, patting me on the head, smiling at everyone. Lost over the Pacific. Disappeared as cleanly as if he had never gotten on that train in Union Station and headed to meet that airplane, that crew, that death.

Concentration camps, Nuremburg trials, Holocaust newsreels, lost relatives in Poland, atom bombs, radiation sickness were for adults to ponder. Teenagers aren’t good at tragedy. We were sunk in the business of sock hops and who was going to win the talent show. We felt a little crowded by the veterans, many of whom showed up early for their classes and jammed the halls, and there were pairings between students and veterans, the inevitable result of off-kilter fraternization, but for the most part we were getting back to normal.

The school was built on Japanese farm land. When people wanted to disparage where we lived, they’d say we lived out in the bean fields, although there had been no bean fields since 1942 when the Japanese were interned. I don’t remember paying much attention to where all those Japanese farmers went, except for hearing references to places like “Manzanar” and “Tule Lake” on the radio. I’d like to think I thought about where they had gone, had even examined the rightness or wrongness of their going, but I didn’t. No one I knew did. All during the war we were exposed to news stories and photographs depicting all Japanese as grinning, barbarous, murderous sneaks with protruding teeth and bottle-thick eyeglasses.

I’d also like to think that that image was erased when the first Japanese boy showed up in one of my classes in mid-1946. His teeth didn’t protrude and he didn’t wear glasses and he showed no fear. He raised his hand in class and twirled his pencil with the nonchalance of the innately brave. No one knew what to do, what to say, he was so alien, so out of place, so associated with everything bad we had ever read or heard about the Japanese. I remember thinking that maybe one of his relatives had shot Uncle Morrie’s airplane out of the sky. I was embarrassed for him, wondered how he could come to class every day knowing that everyone was thinking that he shouldn’t be there.

No Japanese farmers returned to the bean fields until years later, and no other Japanese student returned to school except this one. Propaganda images faded, the war receded, but he stayed, came to class, made friends, won us over. The stubborn courage of his presence was for us the real end of the war.

Copyright Nina Vida 2009

Political writing at its best highlights the unexpected changes in parts of our world that are hidden to us. That’s true of writing about the corridors of power in our own capital cities, but it’s even more of a factor for a writer like Adam Lebor whose work – fiction and nonfiction – has captured the dynamism and double-dealing of Central Europe, in particular. Because I live in the Middle East while he lives in Budapest, Lebor first came to my attention with his wonderful “biography” of Jaffa, the ancient port city on the Mediterranean coast, “City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa.” It was a masterful stroke to profile this town, rather than Jerusalem or even Tel Aviv, which tend to attract the attention of writers more readily than a historic city that’s now a slum filling with liberal yuppies. It shouldn’t have surprised me, then, that Lebor’s new novel The Budapest Protocol, which I reviewed recently, would take an issue that many think of as boring and bureaucratic – the expansion of the European Union – and make it immediate and vital, linking it to the demons of Europe’s past through Nazism and genocide. The novel is firmly in the tradition of great British writers like Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John LeCarre. Like them, Lebor knows that Central Europe’s cultured side comes with an accompanying harshness that makes for great drama.

How long did it take you to get published?

My first non-fiction book, ‘A Heart Turned East’, about Muslim minorities in Europe and the United States, was published in 1998 by Little, Brown, UK. It was commissioned so was published a few months after I wrote it. That was a fairly straightforward process. Since then I have written another five non-fiction books, all of which were commissioned.

Fiction, however, was a very different story. I first started writing the book that would become The Budapest Protocol in Paris in the winter of 1997. It was rejected by numerous publishers before I finally found one, Reportage Press, that would actually spend the time to tell me how to fix it. I always knew I needed the attention of a good editor, but apparently most publishers nowadays expect a perfectly formed novel to land on their desks, which is ridiculous.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

A search on amazon.co.uk for ‘writing a novel’ brings up 20,625 results. Most of the authors of these books are not well know novelists, because successful novelists are writing novels, not books about how to. That said, I have found ‘The First Five Pages’, by Noah Lukeman, very useful. Lukeman is a well-known American agent, and the book is full of good advice, from a commercial viewpoint. I would recommend it for anyone who is serious about getting published. I also like ‘Writing A Novel’ by John Osborne, which is enjoyably cantankerous but full of good advice.

What’s a typical writing day?

Breakfast with the Today programme on my Evoke internet radio, invaluable for keeping in touch when you live abroad - I am based in Budapest. Spend morning probably doing journalism or admin. Usually the muse arrives after lunch, and a good writing session will go from about 3pm to nine or ten at night. If it’s really flowing I will wake up in the morning with a plot solved or idea for a chapter plan that somehow my subconscious has sorted out while I am asleep and then I am straight back in the book.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

The Budapest Protocol is a conspiracy thriller that was inspired by a real American intelligence document from 1944. The document, known as the Red House Report, is an account of a secret meeting of Nazi industrialists in the Maison Rouge hotel, Strasbourg, where they planned for the Fourth Reich, which would be an economic imperium not a military one. That was the inspiration - I then used my twenty years reporting experience in eastern Europe to work out how that might actually happen. There is also a love story with several sexy, difficult girls and atmospheric scene setting in present day Budapest.

How much of what you do is formula dictated by the genre within which you write?

Thrillers are to some extent quite formulaic. The hero needs inner conflict to drive his outer battle with larger sinister forces. He needs to face and overcome repeated obstacles, each time getting in more and more danger. The trick is use the formula to make the structure work while making the setting, atmosphere and narrative drive powerful enough. Alan Furst, the master, gave me some advice: “Start with a murder and make sure the boy gets the girl” which was very useful.

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

“Heshel was watching him through the window of the car and smiled thinly as their eyes met. Here is the world, said the smile, and here we are in it.” A line from my favorite book, Dark Star, by Alan Furst. Dark Star is an espionage thriller set in late 1930s Europe. That sentence is subtle, telling, and somehow opens a world of the imagination.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

Alan Furst. Less is more.

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?

David Ignatius, author of Body of Lies and The Increment. I would also add Stieg Larson, who sadly is not writing any more.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

The Budapest Protocol did not demand any specific research as I have covered this region for twenty years. My non-fiction books, like ‘City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa’ about Jewish and Arab families in the ancient port demanded many weeks of research, hours of interviews and gaining the trust of the families.

Where’d you get the idea for your main character?

The fact that he is a foreign correspondent, who lives in Budapest, who is obsessed with sinister conspiracies and who is entangled with beguiling but unsuitable women and whose first name is four letters beginning with ‘A’ is entirely coincidental.

What’s your experience with being translated?

Fine. I have been translated into eight languages, but I don’t really check what they have done to the book, even in languages I know.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?

Now, yes. But that is combined with journalism for big papers like The Times, Economist etc. I think it would be very difficult just to live off books, and I like the change of pace with journalism. I value my connection with The Times, it opens doors and my assignments give me ideas for books and characters.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

I suppose it’s probably not that strange and happens to other authors but I was amazed that after two sell out events at the Edinburgh book festival with about 180 people in the room I only sold a handful of books. Why pay eight pounds to watch the author when you can buy the book for that?

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

I cannot reveal that as it’s such a good idea it may yet hit the shelves one day!

This weekend I was the guest of Munther Fahmi, who runs the excellent bookshop at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, for a reading from my newest Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET. Munther and I have been scheming for some time to organize an event, so it was great to finally get it together.

I knew it’d be an interesting crowd at the Colony, which manages to be something like neutral ground (although many Israelis might dispute that) in Jerusalem. There were foreign journalists and diplomats, Israelis and Palestinians among the sizeable crowd, including some old friends I haven’t seen for some time. Oh, and tourists, too — a rare species since the intifada, but I signed for visitors from Berlin and Seattle, Ireland and Serbia.

I was also delighted that one of the people on whom I based the character of a World Bank worker in THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET happened to be staying at the Colony this weekend. I was able to give him the news that I’d turned him into a woman and changed his employer. He seemed pleased with both alterations, and I hope he enjoys the book.

I’ve edited the photos so that you can’t see how hot it became in the room. By the time I was signing the books at the end I was rather inelegantly dripping with sweat. The alternative, of course, was the honking of passing Arab wedding convoys and, as antiglobalization activist Naomi Klein discovered when the windows were opened to let in some air for her reading immediately after mine, the evening call to prayers by the muezzin at the mosque next door. (It’s the Mosque of Sheikh Jarrah, named after Saladin’s doctor, whose tomb it houses.)

To get on Munther’s mailing list for future readings at his excellent bookshop, write to him at bookshopat@gmail.com.

Exiles Elliot Krieger. Soho, $24 (352p) ISBN 978-1-56947-589-8

O. Henry prize–winner Krieger follows in his compelling debut an American college student and Vietnam War dissenter who absconds to Sweden for asylum. Arriving in war-neutral Uppsala, Lenny Spiegel is welcomed into the American Resisters Movement, a group of spirited draft dodgers, AWOL soldiers and antiviolence protesters led by dynamic U.S. Army defector Aaronson, who looks so much like Spiegel that Spiegel was picked up in the states for a crime Aaronson committed. Now, reunited in northern Europe, Spiegel gets deeper into trouble after loaning Aaronson his passport to assist other defectors through Denmark. Stuck in Uppsala with no identification, Spiegel panics when he learns that Aaronson had other plans all along and is now in West Germany with no plans to return. Suspicions mount, friends emerge as duplicitous allies, and Spiegel yearns to return home to America while accusations of espionage and abdication surface against the exile leader. The plot is jumpy at the onset, but once Krieger kicks the narrative into high gear, a remarkable character study emerges of Spiegel and his quest for identity and deliverance. (Aug.)

A new book examines the lives of Palestinian poets
By Matt Beynon Rees - on GlobalPost

JERUSALEM — Whenever Palestinian and Israeli artists get together for public “dialogues,” it always seems to end with the Israelis saying, “We’re sorry,” and the Palestinians responding, “Screw you anyway.”

That was how it went at a literary conference in the Jerusalem monastery at Tantur where I moderated a couple such discussions two years ago.

Except for the opening session.

The day began with a reading by Taha Muhammad Ali, a poet who lives in Nazareth, and his translator Peter Cole, a native of New Jersey and now a Jerusalem resident. Taha, who was then 75 years old, recited several of his poems, which Cole read in English.

Taha was avuncular and bumbling, endearing him to the audience of international publishers. But his poetry was deceptively incisive and personal, transcending the sense of victimization that would color the panel discussions for the rest of the day. Somehow he seemed to be the only one that day who had anything real to say.

“Don’t aim your rifles / at my happiness, / which isn’t worth / the price of a bullet,” Taha read. “My happiness bears / no relation to happiness.”

The warmth and intelligence of Taha’s readings drove Adina Hoffman, a Jerusalem-based writer and wife of translator Cole, to plan a biography of the poet (“My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century,” Yale University Press). Only then did she discover that, despite all the ink spilled on the Palestinian issue over the years, no one had ever written a biography of any Palestinian poet.

So she expanded the book. Using Taha as the central figure, she constructed the intersecting life stories of writers as diverse as Mahmoud Darwish, the “national” poet whose death last year prompted weepy editorials around the world, and Rashid Hussein, the most original and tortured of them, who died alone and drunk in New York 30 years ago.

Hoffman’s book is a way for readers to get around the usual stereotypes of the Palestinians as they’re portrayed in the cliches of their political struggle. She looks at the fascinating day-to-day, emotional history of this troubled people as told through their dynamic poetic culture.

“One can get a different idea of Palestinians as people through the history of their poets,” Hoffman told GlobalPost. “Poetry and poets occupy such an essential role in Palestinian society: Throughout much of the last century, poetry has served as one of the most important means of political and social expression for the Palestinian people — and the poets who’ve given voice to that impulse are central to the culture.”

Their poetry forms a gap in our knowledge of the Palestinians because of the way reporters cover their story — focusing on the violence and pyrotechnics and screaming, rather than on what people actually feel beneath it all.

“So much of the news coverage of the Palestinian story winds up treating them as a faceless group — whether a group of terrorists or a group of downtrodden victims,” Hoffman said. “I wanted to offer a view of Palestinian life that depicted as precisely and deeply as possible the full human range of feeling and complexity that exist in that culture.”

Hoffman uses Taha’s story as the framework for an alternative telling of Palestinian history, eschewing the slogans of political leaders and focusing on the soul-searching of young poets and writers.

You might think that would draw you away from reality into the realms of fantasy. But, as I’ve discovered in writing a series of Palestinian crime novels based on real stories I’ve reported, it’s only when a writer examines the underlying emotions of his subject that he uncovers the truth.

“The truest poetry is the most feigning,” Shakespeare wrote. Journalists, from whom we’re accustomed to getting our information about the Palestinians, aren’t supposed to be “feigning” at all. The result: no poetry and, often, no truth.

Hoffman’s telling of Taha’s story is particularly important because his life encompasses almost every element of the Palestinian experience. Born in 1931 in the village of Saffuriya, his family was expelled during the 1948 war which founded Israel. They fled to Lebanon, snuck back to Nazareth, and became refugees within Israel. He saw the devastation of war, too, on a visit to Lebanon in search of his childhood sweetheart.

Taha supported his family by running a souvenir shop for tourists visiting the town where Jesus grew up. He slowly developed a literary style that was at odds with traditional, highly formulaic Arab verse. Neither did he follow the incantatory public style of Darwish and the best known Palestinian poets.

Hoffman observes that Taha’s largely free verse (which many Palestinians rejected as simple prose chopped up into lines) is based around a classical Arabic concept of “a difficult, elusive, or even inscrutable simplicity.”

That simplicity is embodied in the poet’s peasant background, which Hoffman tells in vivid detail. Much of the book’s early chapters are devoted to life in Saffuriya, before the village was replaced with an Israeli community.

But it isn’t yet another regurgitating of Palestinian suffering. Her portrait of the village illustrates the richness of life there, showing how the memory of Saffuriya was part of “the world that surrounded these poets and that inspired them to write,” as she said.

It’s the remembrance of that world that dominates Taha’s poetry even six decades after Saffuriya ceased to exist. Hoffman’s account preserves the memory by recounting it and by introducing readers to the poetry that grew out of it.

I’m taking a break of a couple of weeks between drafts of my latest novel. To clear my head and to allow my body to accustom itself to a step up in desert heat here in Jerusalem (it’s hard to concentrate the first day the temperature hits 35 degrees, particularly when you write standing up as I do). So it’s good to have reminders of how my novels are establishing themselves on the international thriller and mystery scene.

In the post yesterday, I received some copies of the small-format UK version of my third Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET from my editor at Atlantic, the delightful Sarah Norman. The large format edition, published in January, was green. The new one, which’ll be published on July 1, is brown. I like it because it’s slightly larger (B format in publishing parlance) than the tiny A-format versions of my first two novels, released in the UK as THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS and THE SALADIN MURDERS.

Over at my agent’s office, I also picked up copies of my first novel in the French pocketbook version. LE COLLABORATEUR DE BETHLEEM (as THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM is known to thin, well-coutured ladies and men who shrug a lot when they say “Boff!”) has been nominated for the Prix des Lecteurs des Livres de Poche.

Before I tracked across my agent’s courtyard with my pile of French pocket books, I signed a contract for the publication of my first novel in Greek. I’ll be with Kastaniotis Editions in Athens. Thus my shelf of foreign-language books will now test my language abilities with one which will be “all Greek to me” and, as my second book came out this month in Holland, “double Dutch.”

Maybe the heat’s getting to me. With wordplay like that, I ought to get back to the next draft of my novel….

I bet you didn’t know there was an underground scene in Jerusalem (at least not an underground music scene; you’ve probably heard of some other undergrounds that operate here). Here’s a little bit of Middle East insider poop for you: what’s the most obscure underground band in Jerusalem?

Answer: Dolly Weinstein.

A fivesome (formerly a sixsome, sometimes foursome) of folk rock and rock standards, featuring yours truly on bass.

Other writers are notable for playing in not very good rock bands — Stephen King, Amy Tan, and Dave Barry, for example, in the Rock Bottom Remainders (too many people on stage, always makes me think of Live Aid and horrible things like that — not very “underground” at all). But which of them can say they’ve played in a basement bar under a dreary 1970s tower block in the center of Jerusalem? Or that they’ll be the opening act at a Woodstock tribute concert in a football stadium in Jerusalem on August 6?

So here’s Dolly Weinstein in action. A 56-second clip on Youtube.

There it is. Fifty-six seconds of underground Jerusalem. That’s about what it’s worth.

Foreign correspondents are always more enthusiastic about Beirut than about Amman. Just like critics prefer “literary” fiction to crime novels.

It seems to me they’re both wrong, and for the same reasons.

Visiting reporters always rave about Beirut. Mainly because there’s a very un-Middle Eastern nightlife there. Zinc bars. Beautiful girls in spaghetti-strap tops beside the zinc bars. Booze, dance clubs, DJs.

They’re not really interested in the broken-down refugee camps or the ride up into the Shouf Mountains or the remnants of wars, bulletholes dug into the walls of buildings both inhabited and abandoned. It’s the zinc bars, that’s all. The things that are just like home.

But Amman. It’s “boring,” because despite its size it’s somehow still a big Bedouin encampment. Slow and formal.

Foreign, in fact.

Turns out, foreign correspondents aren’t so interested in “foreign” places. That’s why they like the bars, zinc or otherwise, at their hotels.

Amman has an astonishing history. It was one of the 10 Roman cities of the region – the original Philadelphia, according to its ancient name. The oldest parts of town down in the valley between the hills where the wealthier people live aren’t picturesque in the way central Damascus is. But they’re teeming with life and with conflicts and with striving – Palestinian refugees, Iraqi refugees, Syrian migrant workers.

No nightlife, though. When old King Hussein was dieing, hundreds of foreign correspondents were forced to endure nights at the Hard Rock Café (since closed) where the highlight was the Village People’s “YMCA”, danced by a staff which was not always familiar with the moves. Probably they didn’t read the Western alphabet, so they had no idea why two arms in the air had to go along with “Y” or why you had to dip to the side to make a “C.”

Having lived away from the country of my birth my entire adult life, I don’t see how anyone can say that any foreign city is boring. The culture will always be different to the one you’re familiar with. Understanding how people think in a world different to your own is the most fascinating thing.

But people prefer the zinc bar, and that’s often true of books, too.

Some genre fiction is not “foreign” enough. I don’t mean that the location has to be overseas, as in my Palestinian crime series. I mean that the subject it tackles or the way of examining the actions of the characters needs to have the challenging, uncomfortable quality of an alien culture.

A book ought to be like a visit to a foreign place, even if it’s set in your own town. Genre doesn’t matter. The way a writer answers this challenge is what makes a book good or bad.

There are cheap ways of engaging readers on this level, and then there are genuine ways.

You might think at first that so-called “genre” fiction would be less foreign, because of the apparent comfort of formula. (For a “formula is cosy and therefore any idiot can read it” appraisal, see The New Yorker’s article this week on Nora Roberts.) But it’s not so.

Take my Palestinian crime novels. Everything that’s written about Palestinians makes me cringe or toss it aside in boredom. Because “literary” authors like Robert Stone (“Damascus Gate”) find themselves writing about a false construct, an image of the Palestinians or of Jerusalem. They see the people and places of the region only in ways that others have seen them before.

I took the real Palestinians and stories I’d covered as a journalist, shook them out of the stable formula in which they usually appeared in the newspapers, and made them strange, which in turn made them visible in a new way. (For those lit. crit. fans out there, I cite Viktor Shklovsky, Russian formalist, “ostranenie,” art brings about the perception of a thing, rather than creating the thing itself.)

So visit Amman, instead of Beirut. And on the way over, read my Palestinian novels.

My second Palestinian crime novel A Grave in Gaza (UK title: The Saladin Murders) is just now published in Holland. The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant asked me to contribute a list of my five favorite books, or at least those which’ve had the biggest impact on me as a writer. Here’s what I wrote:

Let It Come Down – Paul Bowles

Writers look for resonance. You might say Bowles has us with his title alone, which resonates with doom even before he writes his first sentence. (It’s drawn from “MacBeth.” When the murderers come upon Banquo, he says that it looks like there’ll be rain. The murderer lifts his knife and says: “Let it come down.” Then he kills him.) But with this novel about Morocco, as in his more famous Algerian novel “The Sheltering Sky”, Bowles was even more resonant. When writing, he would often travel through North Africa. Each day, he would incorporate something into his writing that had actually happened during the previous day’s journey. Working in the Middle East, I often follow that technique, adding details from yesterday’s stroll through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem or a refugee camp in Bethlehem.

The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler

This is the novel that Chandler labored over longest and thought his best. He was right. It exposes a deep emotional side to his great detective creation Philip Marlowe. Chandler was the greatest stylist of Twentieth Century American fiction. Try this image, when a beautiful woman has just walked into a bar full of men and everyone falls silent to look at her: “It was like just after the conductor taps on his music stand and raises his arms and holds them poised.” Chandler inspires me to make every image in my book as good as that.

The King Must Die – Mary Renault

I was heading for Jordan to cover the dieing days of King Hussein a decade ago. I happened to pick up a used copy of this book — the title seemed appropriate. But as I waited in a rainy Amman winter for the poor old monarch to die, I discovered that Renault had a capacity to describe the classical world as though she had lived through that era. Her novels are the best portrayal of homosexual love and of the great values of Greece in literature anywhere.

The Cold Six Thousand – James Ellroy

I love to see real characters from Hollywood and Washington turn up in Ellroy’s terse, hip, hardboiled poetic fiction. This story of CIA/FBI renegades in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination is perfect. I saw Ellroy read years ago in New York and he blew me away. If you can find a better opening paragraph to a chapter than this one, let me know: “Heat. Bugs. Bullshit.” Dig it.

The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene

Greene went to Mexico to research a travel book, but he showed that journalistic research can turn into literature of great spirituality with this story of a drunken priest on the run. I try to remember that as I flick through my old reporter’s notebooks for new ideas for my novels. Greene’s is such a powerful examination of the loss of belief that it captivates even a non-Catholic, non-believer like me. The scene where the priest steals a hunk of meat from a stray dog is astonishing. The priest starts to beat the dog: “She just had to endure, her eyes yellow and scared and malevolent shining back at him between the blows.” Like Mexico under dictatorship. Like the priest before a disapproving God.

The publishing world is in a muddle. Celebrities write “fiction” and get hefty advances while good books go unpublished and editorial staffs are pared and the phone doesn’t ring in agents’ offices.

“Are you still writing?” friends ask me.

“Of course,” I reply.

I wasn’t published until I was 50. I had been writing and rewriting and rewriting for four years. Every year at Thanksgiving my brother-in-law would ask me when I thought I’d get a book published.

“Soon,” I’d reply.

“If you were going to get published, you’d have been published by now,” he’d bite back. “Know what I think? You’re too old.”

Old at fifty. The new demographic: an army of fifty-year-olds languishing in old folks’ homes, winding macramé into pot holders, talking back to the television, putting their dentures in glasses before they go to bed, waiting for the kids to call, waiting for the grandkids to thank them for Christmas presents they don’t like. Waiting. On hold. Watching the calendar. Preparing to die.

“That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” my uncle said when he turned up with the cancer in his ear and stopped doing everything he liked to do. “Can’t fight reality.”

In the six years it took my uncle to die, he could have done lots of things. He could have taken that longed-for trip to China, could have bicycled around Italy, could have dug out his old cornet and given a concert for his fellow Shriners.

Cancer didn’t get him. Age didn’t get him. It was his mistaken notion of what reality is that sucked the life out of him.

So while the publishers whimper and moan and have no idea what to do about their shrinking units, I’m writing a new book. Title: The Queen of Annam’s Daughter.

Excerpt: “Good luck is in the air, so fat and juicy Anh can almost reach out and grab it and stuff it in her purse. No joke. Didn’t the fortune teller on Friday say good luck was waiting for Anh around the corner? Didn’t she say go buy Lotto tickets on Tuesday, Tuesday’s the day your luck is going to come and sit in your lap? Didn’t she? She even picked the store for Anh to go to to buy the Lotto tickets. The mini mart on Bolsa and Magnolia – not the one with the blue sign behind the doughnut shop – that one’s bad luck, she said – the one in the corner facing the noodle shop – and get there early, she said, so someone else’s good luck doesn’t swallow yours up.”

Copyright Nina Vida 2009
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Nina Vida on Writing and ninavida.com.