Night of Many Dreams
by Gail Tsukiyama
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 275
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0312199406
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Gail Tsukiyama is the author of the best-selling novels Women of the
Silk and The Samurai’s Garden. Born to a Chinese mother and
a Japanese father, she grew up in San Francisco and now lives in El Cerrito,
CA. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English with a concentration
in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. With an understanding
of her heritage, Tsukiyama has explored the sights, sounds and feelings
of China and Japan in her two previous novels. In Night of Many Dreams,
she continues to write vividly and passionately about subjects close to
her heart.
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Q: How did you start writing?
A: As a teenager, I wrote mostly poetry. However, I did not start
to think about writing as a career until college. I then got my master’s
in writing.
Q: Which authors do you
love to read?
A: I like to read writers I can learn from. I often read Louise Erdrich,
Michael Dorris, and Kaye Gibbons, to name a few. Recently I have been
enjoying Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, Louis De Bernieres’ Corelli’s
Mandolin, and E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News.
Q: In Night of Many Dreams,
Joan is fascinated by the illusions created by film and acting. Are you
personally interested in film? Does Joan’s creative passion reflect your
own at all?
A
:
Although my creative impulse is much different from Joan’s, I was interested
in film in college....Like Joan, I used to watch many old movies in my
spare time, and I had thought of going into filmmaking. However, when
I took a screenwriting course, I realized that I was much more interested
in writing rather than filmmaking.
Q: Are any of the characters
in Night of Many Dreams based on anyone in your own life?
A: I tend to borrow from the lives of different people I know. I’ve
always made a conscious choice not to put a real person from my life into
a book. There are too many consequences and responsibilities that go along
with it. It’s much more interesting to build a character around some specific
aspect of a person, such as a particular kind of laugh or a gesture, a
way of moving or thinking.
Q: How has the culture
you were raised in shaped your identity?
A: I’m both Chinese and Japanese, yet born in San Francisco and in
many ways as American as apple pie. And yet being raised in the Chinese
culture, I still adhere to many of the traditions and superstitions. When
Chinese New Year comes along I’m still very careful about not saying anything
negative, because it sets the mood for the whole year. All these Chinese
traditions from my mother’s side of the family are within me, and have
somehow found expression through my books.
Q: I know you enjoy traveling.
Do your travels influence your writing?
A:Various landscapes have definitely given me a lot of material for
my writing. In my three novels, I have explored Asia as the background
for my narratives. My childhood experiences of visiting Hong Kong play
a large factor in my subconscious, and thus, it comes out in my writing.
I would like to write a novel set in Europe, as I have been spending more
and more time there.
Excerpted from Night of Many Dreams © Copyright 2008 by Gail Tsukiyama. Reprinted with permission by St. Martin's Griffin. All rights reserved.
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