Describe your latest book.
The Island Dwellers is a collection of interlinked stories, set half in the US and half in Japan. It’s a book about nomads, travelers, people caught between the known and the deeply unfamiliar — in their relationships, their geographies, and their identities.
I wrote some of the stories while I was living in Japan, and some after I’d returned to the US and was in a limbo state, sleeping on friends’ couches and reassembling a life here. When you live in a different country, you meet a lot of people who radiate the palpable fact of running from something. You, yourself, begin to radiate that fact.
For me, these stories are about intimacy first and foremost...