by Clifford Garstang
Some days I envy the young writers who,
right out of college, sit down to write their first novel and never stop
writing. How much they could accomplish over a career of forty or fifty years!
If only I had been able to do that!
But most days, when I’m being rational,
I accept that I’ve taken the journey I had to take. I’m the person I am
today—the writer I am—because of the non-writing work I’ve done and because of
the places I’ve seen. If my lifetime writing output is smaller as a result,
sobeit.
Like many writers, I was first a
voracious reader. The Hardy Boys. Chip Hilton. Those are the books I collected
and that stand out in my memory, although there must have been others. In high
school I discovered books that made me think. I was one of those kids whose
mind was blown by Hermann Hesse: Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf. Even required
reading in school got me excited: The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead, Heart of Darkness. Another title comes back to me now
that was influential at the time: Stranger in a Strange Land.
I was taken by the universal questions
these works asked, and I came to admire the writers who had created them. I
wanted to be one of them.
In college I majored in Philosophy, not
because I knew anything about the subject but because of those questions my
favorite writers were asking. If I were going to write like them, I needed to
know how to think and also how to ask questions.
It should be noted that I wasn’t doing
much writing of my own during this period. I did take a couple of creative
writing classes in college, but I didn’t take it seriously. As graduation
approached, I realized that majoring in Philosophy had limited my reading in
literature, reading that a writer ought to have done, so I applied for graduate
school in English. (I hadn’t heard about MFA programs back then; if I had, I
might have tried to get into one.) I wasn’t writing, but at least I was
preparing to write. It was just what I wanted and I was able to read widely,
from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Paley, and Cheever.
I was happy with the choice I’d made,
but I was in need of a break from school, so I made a decision that turned out
to be momentous: I joined the Peace Corps. I served for two years in South
Korea, and while the job was difficult and living conditions harsh, the
immersion in an unfamiliar environment—culture, food, language—opened my eyes
and took me in an unexpected direction. I still wanted to write, but I also
wanted an international career.
I returned to grad school, finished
that MA in English, and then, because academia didn’t appeal to me as a long-term
proposition, I went to law school, aiming to pursue international law, to live
and work abroad. And that’s what happened. After graduation I was offered a job
with a large, prestigious law firm, and within two years was sent to one of
their offices in Asia. Exactly what I wanted, except that writing remained on
the backburner.
Time passed. My work was not always
exciting, but I traveled all over Asia and saw more of life than I would have
if I’d remained in Chicago, which was its own reward. Eventually, though, I grew
disenchanted. I had the idea that I wanted to be involved in international
development and poverty alleviation, a holdover from my Peace Corps years. My
law firm wasn’t going to get into that work, because it didn’t pay enough, so I
explored other options. I quit the firm and went to graduate school again, this
time to study international development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government, with a goal of working for one of the multilateral development
banks. First, though, I took a job as a legal reform consultant in Kazakhstan.
No, really!
I lived in Kazakhstan for the better
part of a year and found myself with time on my hands, so at long last I began
to write. The story I wanted to tell was set against the political landscape of
Southeast Asia, a romantic thriller mixed with Eastern Philosophy. I kept
working on that project when I came back to the US and eventually finished a
massive draft. I even took a class at the Writer’s Center in Washington DC,
realizing that I might have a few things to learn about writing.
With no income, though, I began to
worry about money. I had not learned the trick of cobbling together teaching
and fee-lance work in order to get by, nor was I yet qualified to do any of
that. So I began to look for a job, ideally one that would allow me to spend at
least some time writing. Finally, I got the job I wanted: Senior Counsel for
East Asia at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (aka The
World Bank). It was a demanding job with a lot of
Asian travel (I flew over a million miles in five years), and I was unable to
do much more than tinker with my novel manuscript, but I loved it. I felt I was
making a real contribution to global poverty alleviation, and adding to my
store of experiences at the same time.
But then: the new millennium loomed. It
seemed like a propitious time to take the leap and finally pursue my writing
dream.
I’ve been writing more or less fulltime
ever since. I picked up an MFA in Fiction along the way. I’ve attended
countless writers’ conferences and workshops. I’ve written and re-written
dozens of stories, most of which found homes in literary magazines and two
small-press collections. I’ve done some teaching, some editing, a little
free-lancing. But mostly I write. In addition to that first novel I wrote long
ago and may someday resurrect, I’ve written two as-yet-unpublished novels and
am close to finishing another, with ideas for several more. I’ve got lots to
say.
It’s been a circuitous route to Planet Write,
but I don’t regret a single step.
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