Christopher as an editor at Epiphany conducted an interview with Sameer Pandya to feature and spotlight Pandya’s story “M-O-T-H-E-R” from the Epiphany archives. That early story was included in Pandya’s book, The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella, the cover of which is the accompanying image here. Read the interview, and visit Sameer Pandya’s website to learn more about his work.
Christopher conducted an interview with Peter Ho Davies about his new multigenerational novel, THE FORTUNES, and the Chinese-American experience, Hollywood’s first Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong and her trip to China in protest of role casting discrimination, the injustice of the 1980s Vincent Chin case in Detroit, writing, research, travel to China, amalgams of fact and fiction, and many other fascinating topics.
Peter Ho Davies is the author of two novels, The Fortunes and The Welsh Girl (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and two short story collections, The Ugliest House in the World (winner of the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize) and Equal Love (A New York Times Notable Book).
Praise for THE FORTUNES:
“Panoramic in scope yet intimate in detail, The Fortunes might be the most honest, unflinching, cathartically biting novel I’ve read about the Chinese American experience. It asks the big questions about identity and history that every American needs to ask in the 21st century.”
—Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
Christopher’s story “Messages from a Storm” wins the 2016 Writers @ Work Fellowship Competition. His story appears in Quarterly West, and he participated in the 2016 W@W June conference in Utah as this year’s Fiction Fellow. The other 2016 winners are Samatha Deal (Creative Non-Fiction), and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth (Poetry).
“Messages from a Storm” is about an airplane mechanic in Mobile, AL, and his life and events surrounding a lightweight aircraft crash during a hurricane-like storm. The story is available online at Quarterly West, here.
Also see Christopher’s interview on the Writers @ Work website.
The author Peter Ho Davies was the fiction judge of this year’s fellowship competition. He is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl (2007) and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World (1997) and Equal Love (2000). He wrote this about Christopher’s story:
“Messages from a Storm” is written in a crisp, laconic prose well suited to its steely, feeling protagonist. There’s a great feel for community and place here, for the distinctive details of work, and most of all for character. The main character is exactingly evoked, but secondary figures are also attended to with care, a hallmark of good fiction. And from these characters, understood with such keen emotional intelligence, plot arises with an affecting inevitability.
Writers @ Work, a nationally-known independent writer’s organization, has successfully promoted and supported a creative writing community – locally, regionally and nationally – for thirty one years. While attending W@W events writers can hone their skills and meet to discuss their work with fellow writers, agents, editors and publishers. Learn more about Writers @ Work.
Christopher X. Shade