It’s the second Friday of September.

Back to school month.

For me that means back to the U and my graduate and undergraduate fiction workshops–familiar classes albeit with new faces. But for my fourteen year old son, Owen, it means a whole new school: high school. Fortunately, he seems to be taking it in stride–has pals, likes his teachers (all of whom seem to be the age of my grad students, many of whom babysat Owen when he was younger, which is probably why he feels so at ease with them). I’m probably more anxious about high school than he is, and trying hard to disguise that from him. Certainly, he’s less nervous than I remember feeling at his age facing a similar transition (a source of some envy as well as pride), less nervous in truth than I still feel standing in front of my classrooms of new faces.

Those differences aside, though, we’re both still grappling with the new logistics: an earlier start to the school day, a longer commute. We fumble and grumble our way out of bed, and out the door.

Between me and my wife, I’m the morning person, and I’ve been getting up with Owen, fixing his breakfast and packing his lunch, for years now. Still, I’m struggling a little with this new routine and driving home after drop-off it’s a relief that its Friday, that the weekend beckons. In fact, Fridays, during the semester, are the weekend for me in some sense (my prep work for next week’s classes starts on Saturday).

Fridays, during the semester, also mean a weekly indoor co-ed soccer game with my MFA students–a tradition I started close to 15 years ago. Ever since, it’s been a great, fun way to blow off steam. Writers, of course, are inevitably competitive, and while our community is generally collegial and supportive, MFA soccer is a perfect outlet for that competition: something that doesn’t matter, and that we’re not very good at! To be sure, we’ve had some fine players down the years (readers might know Uwem Akpan from Oprah’s Book Club, or Chigozie Obioma from the Booker Prize short-list, but I’ve always been as dazzled by their footwork as their prose), mostly though our skill level could best be described as…enthusiastic.

On this particular Friday morning, I’m still in “recruitment mode,” nudging new students to join the game, drawing the spurious link between MFA soccer and future writing success. But hey, Kristen Roupenian was a regular before her New Yorker story “Cat Person” broke the internet last year. Coinky-dink? Failing that, I remind wavering students it’s their one weekly chance to kick a faculty member!

This gentle cajoling has been my September ritual for years, but this Friday it’s shot through with a little wistfulness. My son is a high-schooler (and an inch taller than me), my father passed away last spring (he would have turned 85 last week), and I turned 52 a couple of weeks ago. It’s getting increasingly hard to keep up with my students (average age around 25). I used to joke that my only hope was that they were writers and therefore mostly sedentary. I used to joke when one of them blew by me, “You should have seen me at 40!” I used to joke, “I stopped playing defense at 50.” But even the jokes are getting old.

It’s a lunchtime game, and I start to get ready by late morning. My warm-up routine of stretches and yoga poses lasts almost as long as the game, plus I need to wrap my ankles, pop a couple of Advil before I play, to get ahead of the pain. I used to ache until Sunday; last week I was stiff until Tuesday.

As it happens the game goes well–it’s well attended, high spirited, heartening to see new students and old coming together–and I don’t get hurt or hopelessly embarrass myself. And afterwards, at home, after showering, comes the best part of my week. You’ll have noticed there’s been no writing on this day. And in truth there’s not much writing during any semester, outside of email, departmental paperwork, comments on student stories, even as there’s a lot of thinking about writing, and the conditions which nurture it. What there is is the nearly constant gnawing guilt of not-having-written. Nearly constant, because in the exhausted, aching afterglow of soccer, there’s an hour or two when writing would be physically and mentally impossible, when I feel pain, but no guilt. Usually on the couch.

And then…Owen is home from school. I run him to his ukulele lesson, do a super-market-sweep style dash through the grocery store in the 30 minutes it lasts, drive him home, and finally bike to campus for the first student reading of the semester, followed by dinner and drinks with another colleague.

These readings–another, albeit slightly less regular, fixture of my Fridays for almost 20 years–are always slightly awkward affairs. And since they’re typically well organized and professionally run, I have to locate that awkwardness in myself. I’m nervous for my students, of course–for some it’s a first public reading–though I’m always touched by the presence of the family members who often fly in to support them. But I’m also nervous for myself. On the thankfully rare occasions when the reading goes poorly, I feel dismal, as if I’ve failed the student. But even when it goes well I find myself obscurely on edge.

Tonight, sitting in the darkened auditorium, watching a couple of my MFAs, both good soccer players, give even better readings, it comes to me that my nagging feelings of age, of mortality, aren’t only about physical changes, aren’t just about soccer, but also a sense of a younger generation rising up. That’s a cause for celebration, to be sure, but also, I confess, one of some personal unease (it reminds me of that mixture of pride and envy I feel for Owen’s smooth transition to high school). For all that MFA soccer may be a good way of sublimating my students’ competitive urges, maybe its also feeding my anxieties about whether I can still compete with them.

That’s a deeper ache, of course, one that’s going to require some yoga of the soul (and likely a longer essay), but one I massage for now with the consoling thought that writing, thankfully, isn’t a soccer game, and lasts a lot longer.

~

NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What writing advice do you give that you rarely follow?

• “It’s not a competition.” The truth is that while we hope to learn from our mistakes, much of the time I think it’s my students who learn from mine…which means its often too late for me to follow my own advice.

2. What would you change if you were editor of the NYT Book Review?

• My job–asap. I realized a while ago that writing fiction for me is about many things–questioning, understanding, humility–but not judgement. And reviewing, even at its best, eventually results in a verdict.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• My wife observed a few years ago that she knew I’d had a tough writing day when she came home and the house smelled like bacon. Her theory being that I made bacon to cheer myself up. There’s some truth in that, I admit. But she’s lately also found that the house smells of bacon when I’ve had a good writing day, and realized I’m also rewarding myself with bacon…hmm, and I wonder why I’ve lost a step at soccer!

~

By Peter Ho Davies:

BLUE

—Other Writers in the Series—

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

October 1, 2018: Peter Ho Davies

In May, I had lunch with Peter and dinner with Peter. We spent a total of ten hours in the car together and also actually went clothes shopping. (He didn’t get anything.) He’s a super nice guy and fun to be around. And he’s also the author of The Welsh Girl, which a lot of us read back in 2008, its depth and breadth making it hard to believe it was his first novel.

After a 1994-1995 fellowship right here in Provincetown at the Fine Arts Work Center, Peter quickly became master of the short story. Jane Smiley chose “The Ugliest House in the World” for The Best American Short Stories 1995, and the very next year, John Edgar Wideman chose “The Silver Screen” for The Best American Short Stories 1996. Peter’s collection The Ugliest House in the World, published in 1998, was awarded the John Llewelyn Rhys and PEN/Macmillan Prizes. His second book, Equal Love, also a collection, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for both the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2001 Asian American Literary Award. In 2001, Barbara Kingsolver chose “Think of England” for yet another Best American. The icing on his short story cake was that in 2008, the same year The Welsh Girl was published, he received the PEN/Malamud award for excellence in the short story.

So. If you haven’t already, read some of his stories!

Peter was born in England. His father was Welsh and his mother was Chinese, but he didn’t grow up speaking Welsh or Chinese. Now he’s lived in the US for over twenty-five years. All of these factors make his writing rich in the question of identity. Stories about people of mixed race and stories about multi-cultural couples. A white wife and an Indian husband. A Chinese person being mistaken for a Japanese person. There’s the weight of what we’re born with, there’s language and tradition, and there are also the small, telling details that will break your heart. What makes us who we are?

From “The Ugliest House in the World,”

I’m not really Welsh. I don’t speak Welsh. I’ve never lived in Wales. But my father is Welsh…”

In “The Hull Case,” Henry, a black GI, tells his sister he’s planning to marry Helen, a white nurse he met in Tokyo. “‘What for?’ she wanted to know, and when Henry said, ‘For the same reasons anybody gets married,’ she told him no, she didn’t believe it.”

In The Welsh Girl, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Rotheram’s mother tells him they aren’t Jewish; only his father was. But his father’s family treated the two of them as outcasts. “Rotheram wasn’t one of them. Yet in the eyes of the Nazis he was. A mischling, at least: a half-Jew.”

He still wasn’t sure what he could call himself–not German, not Jewish–but serving under the CO, he’d felt for the first time as if he weren’t running from something, but being led somewhere.

Even Rotheram’s name speaks to his not-belonging, to his otherness–R Other Am.

The Fortunes, Peter’s most recent book, published a year ago this month, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was long-listed for the Story Prize. It tells the story of four Chinese Americans, each one based on a real person. It’s divided into four parts entitled Gold, Silver, Jade, and Pearl. From the first section,

Still, Big Uncle pressed, “Gold is in your blood, boy!”

Perhaps, Ling thought, but he’d learned to doubt his blood.

Michael Schaub from NPR writes,

The Fortunes is a stunning look at what it means to be Chinese, what it means to be American, and what it means to be a person navigating the strands of identity, the things that made us who we are, whoever that is.

But with Peter’s writing, it’s more than that, more visceral. Given the circumstances these characters find themselves in, it would be easy for a judgmental sliver to slip in. But there’s no judgment here, just the story and the writing and the details–which allow feeling to rise up in the reader. The Fortunes is a novel that made me feel what it feels like to be that other. My heart kicked in automatically, which for me is huge. And my brain was constantly engaged.

In a recent interview in The Guardian, Peter told Alex Clark,

“I’m not sure of my claim to Welshness,” he elaborates, “so I wrote The Welsh Girl to explore that, to find out what Welshness meant to me. And the same thing motivated me as I wrote The Fortunes. I’m half-Chinese by blood, but probably much less than half-Chinese by culture, so what is my relationship to that? I felt some of the same things to Welshness, partly because I don’t speak the language.”

In that same interview, Alex asked Peter if he now felt like an American writer.

“[T]here’s not an identity that I can lay claim to that I don’t also feel ambiguous or ambivalent about, whether that’s Chineseness, or Welshness, or Britishness. Do I have some hesitation to claim Americanness? Yes. But I feel the same hesitancy to claim any of those identities.”

In the fall of 2013, for an interview for Ploughshares, Peter told Douglas Trevor that he felt “as if I had to come to America to become a writer, I had to get away from Britain, away from a nonwriter version of myself.”

Peter has previously taught at the University of Oregon, Emory University, and Northwestern University. He is currently on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how PETER HO DAVIES spends his days.