Craft Books by Asian Americans
As a writer, I’ve read my share of books on craft. As a memoirist, I’m always in search of craft books written by fellow Asian Americans. I sometimes find myself wanting more, or at least some guidance that acknowledges that specific situations faced by many emerging Asian American authors.
Here are some titles that I’ve found useful and hope you will, too.
Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, by Gish Jen (Harvard University Press, 2013) Reading this slim volume feels like having a conversation with a friend, if you friend is the incredibly accomplished and insightful novelist Gish Jen. That’s because this book was based on a series of lectures Jen delivered at Harvard. The three-chapter collection is predicated not on Jen’s own writing, but on her father’s memoirs, a baffling 32-page exposition that doesn’t even acknowledge his own birth until a quarter of the way through. What follows is less of a how-to manual, but an exploration of “why”. Why does Chinese (and likely other East Asian) storytelling tend to place the subject in a context of a family or community, rather than the Western iconoclastic hero model?
A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing, by David Mura (University of Georgia Press, 2018) I discovered this book after attending a Voices of Our Nation (VONA) summer writing…
