In just a few days, I’ll be flying off for a month in China, to take part in Sun Yat-sen University’s first International Writers’ Residency. I’ve been preparing for months, reading book after book of Chinese fiction, and nonfiction books on Chinese history and culture. This residency will be the first of its kind in contemporary China, and will be a gathering of fourteen writers and two documentary filmmakers, hailing from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Egypt, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Mexico, Canada, China and the U.S.

I couldn’t be more excited, especially since I’ve also been reading extraordinary work by some of my fellow residency participants: so far, the poetry of George Szirtes and Ricardo de Ungria, the fiction of Khaled Khamissi and Madeleine Thien, and the nonfiction of Patricia Foster and Lieve Joris. I’m looking forward to discovering the work of the other writers as well.

This residency is sponsored by the Creative Writing in English program at Sun Yat-sen University (the only such program in mainland China), in the city of Guangzhou. My many thanks to Dai Fan, the program’s director, for the invitation!

We won’t be spending that much time in Guangzhou, though. Most of the residency’s month will be devoted to giving us all a place to write in two idyllic settings. First, we’ll be ensconced for two weeks in the almost fairy tale-like landscape of the karst mountains of Yangshuo.

After that, we’ll spend nine days near the hot springs of Jiangmen for more writing time. Basically, this international residency will be like a McDowell Artists’ Colony residency on steroids.

Besides all this writing time (I’ll be wrapping up the last nagging revisions of my novel, Invisible Country), we’ll also spend a few days of our residency by each giving a reading, a lecture, and leading a short writing workshop. We’ll meet with Chinese writers, and with translators who will be reading through our work with an eye toward translating it into Chinese. My head spins. Bless the Writing Gods who sent this adventure my way.

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I’m back! Curious how this residency played out? You can find out here.

And here you can find a Ninth Letter special web issue featuring the work of all my fellow residency writers, “Opening the River Up to the Sky,” which I had the great pleasure of curating and editing.

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October 12th, 2015 by admin