An essay on my complicated travel issues appears in the April 2009 TRAVEL + LEISURE (Southeast Asia). It was surprisingly funny to brood on my curious anxieties about leaving the house. In the process of writing this essay, I figured out that I love the learning and seeing bits of travel even more than my consuming fear of the unknown.
My T+L editors were Chris Kucway, Paul Ehrlich & Matt Leppard.
I recently spoke to the enthusiastic Classes of 2009 and 2010 at ASIJ about being a writer and visited Ms. Karen Noll’s AP English seminars. The seminar students were reading Mrs. Dalloway (I read this in my early 30s), and they were an impressive group. Later, I spoke with two lower school students about how writers make a living. I hope I wasn’t too sobering an influence. The best part was spending the day with my favorite librarian Lin Hayakawa and cataloguer extraordinaire Kirby Yoshii who have been friends since they were girls in Connecticut and now work together in a library in Tokyo.
M.J.L.
I was fortunate enough to eat at the sublime Ryugin restaurant in Tokyo, and my essay of the delicious experience appears in the September issue of FOOD & WINE.
“Six days a week, my parents sold Mexican silver earrings to street peddlers for $1.50 at their cramped wholesale jewelry store in Manhattan. Every night, my mother rushed home to Queens to fix delicious Korean suppers from the meat and produce on sale at the Elmhurst Key Food supermarket. Then, in 1981, about five years after we immigrated, my father decided that knowing how to butter bread properly should be as much a part of his children’s education as algebra and spelling. He allowed me, a precocious 12-year-old, to select one fancy restaurant to study each year. On the appointed day, the Lee family would waltz into the likes of Lutèce or Le Cirque.”
For more, the link follows: Food & Wine Magazine
I was recently asked to write an essay on Biblical Illiteracy by ABCNEWS.com:
“Biblical Illiteracy or Reading the Bestseller: Writers Often Agree That the Bible Is a Good Book” for ABC News. It begins:
“There has been a great deal of froth lately about how “God Is Not Great” and how religions have made a rot of peace. The argument is fizzy yet hardly new: The world is a mess, and it has become so through those who believe in God. Well, fine.
No doubt God can take this notion on the chin and move on if He is indeed God. If there is a God, and for me, a confirmed Presbyterian, there is one, He isn’t losing sleep over these polemics.”
Page 1 of 1 pages
filed under: