In March, after my talk on the ethics of biography at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference in Tampa, Florida, a Chinese writer named Dai Fan, who directs the creative writing program at Sun-Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, China, came up to me and invited to be part of a writing residency there this fall. It’s taken a while for the paperwork to be done but I can announce now that I will be joining writers from seven other countries for four weeks of writing, lectures and readings this October and November.
We’ll have two weeks free for writing in the beautiful autonomous region of Guilin (pictured here), a week of talks and readings in Guangzhou, and a final week of writing in the cultural capital of Meizhou.
I’ll give more details, including the names of the other writers and the countries they’re from, in a future post.
The creative writing program at Sun Yat-sen University is the only one of its kind in English in China. Students from the program will be our interpreters while we’re there. I anticipate many interesting conversations with them, as well as the other writers and the program faculty.
