Books

In her new 'memoir in animals,' Creative Writing professor examines her writing life

Colleen Rich — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 17:46:28 +0000

In her new 'memoir in animals,' Creative Writing professor examines her writing life Colleen Rich Tue, 12/03/2024 - 12:46

George Mason English professor Kyoko Mori writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her latest book, Cat and Bird (Belt Publishing, March 2024), has been called a “memoir in animals” and focuses on the six house cats who defined the major eras of her life as a writer.

Kyoko Mori with her cats. Photo provided

What inspired you to write this book?

I’ve lived my entire adult life with cats and yet my previous books—both fiction and nonfiction—only featured cats in the periphery of the story, as colorful minor characters at best. In truth, getting my first cat at 22 was a life-altering event: that cat saw me through graduate school, my first full-time teaching job, marriage and divorce, and the publication of my first two books. I wouldn’t be the same person I am now if I hadn’t been with him for 18 years. So my first impetus was to finally do justice to him and to his successors.

I wanted to push against the misconception that cats and dogs are opposites—the cliché that cats are selfish and independent while dogs are loving and loyal. For those of us who are devoted to our animal companions, cats and dogs, equally, can be our alter ego or avatar—the core of who we are.

The real contrast is between cats and dogs on one hand and songbirds and other wildlife on the other. Even with birds who come to our window feeder or end up in our care (I worked as a songbird rehabilitator), we can only admire them from a distance or nurse them back to health in order to return them to the wild. We love companion animals by holding on; we love wildlife by letting go. I wanted to explore this contrast.

What surprised you about the process of writing this book?

I knew from the beginning that the book was going to be about the way the two kinds of devotion—to cats and to birds—have sustained my work as a writer and helped me to make a home as a single childless woman who is happy in her solitude and yet fulfilled by her involvement in the community. Having a husband and children is not the only way to engage meaningfully with the world and make a positive impact.

The balance between solitude and community and the joy of making a home alone (with cats) did remain important ideas in the book. But I also realized that a book about living with animal companions and witnessing the dangers that threaten birds, other wildlife, and the whole planet will have to dig deep into grief. The desire to hold on and let go at the same time—as when a beloved animal companion dies or when we watch from the ground as migratory birds navigate the sky full of danger—became the essential aspect of the book’s narrative and investigation.

What are you working on now?

My last nonfiction book before Cat and Bird was a knitting memoir titled Yarn: Remembering the Way Home. Since finishing Cat and Bird, I’ve picked up where Yarn finished and published four personal essays about women and clothes: shopping with my close friends, how we express ourselves with our clothes, etc. At the same time, I continue to be interested in backyard wildlife—birds that were not included in Cat and Bird and squirrels—especially after a squirrel made a nest in the flowerpot on my window ledge, had two babies, and stayed for two weeks before moving her nest to a maple tree in the backyard.

Sei Shōnagon, the 11th-century Japanese writer who appears in Cat and Bird as the embodiment of the book’s spirit, was equally interested in the beauty of nature and of human-made objects. I don’t think clothes and backyard wildlife can fit into the same book for me as they did for her, but for now I’m following the inspiration of her astute observations about both and seeing where my work goes.

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Mason researcher tackles 'The Politics of Innocence' in new book

Colleen Rich — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 19:38:42 +0000

Mason researcher tackles 'The Politics of Innocence' in new book Colleen Rich Fri, 04/05/2024 - 15:38

Since 1989, more than 3,000 people have been exonerated after being wrongly convicted. In his new book, The Politics of Innocence: How Wrongful Convictions Shape Public Opinion (New York University Press, September 2023), Robert J. Norris, associate professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, and his coauthors explore the political dynamics that shape the innocence movement.

Robert J. Norris. Photo provided

What inspired you to write this book?

After exploring how wrongful convictions had become such a prominent advocacy issue in the criminal legal system, I was left with lingering questions about how much the public knew about [wrongful convictions] and how they responded to information about them. Around that same time, one of my coauthors and I were having lunch and discussed the first season of the podcast Serial, which was about a likely wrongful conviction. We were talking about how those sorts of stories made people nervous and wondered how common that feeling was. We began designing our first study and now, seven years later, here we are!

Was there anything that surprised you in the research for this book?

Throughout the book, we show that wrongful convictions can change people’s support for the death penalty and their trust in the criminal justice system generally. However, we were a bit surprised to find that we could not change people’s trust in police, even when explicitly telling people about the role of police in wrongful convictions. Those attitudes appear to be more entrenched and resistant to change than others. Another thing that is perhaps not surprising, but definitely heartening, is that while innocence reform is political, people across the ideological spectrum can be persuaded to support changes that would help improve our legal system. We can cut through some of the ideological noise and appeal to a variety of different people.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently working on a variety of things. Some of these projects are still related to innocence, including work on the racial history of wrongful convictions, the post-release experiences of wrongly convicted people, narrative language in wrongful convictions, and the relationship between the innocence movement and the antideath penalty movement. Other work is more generally tied to public opinion, such as the process that leads people to support punitive practices and the effects of the language we use to discuss incarcerated populations. I’m also beginning to explore some broader conceptual ideas about completely unrelated issues, which is really exciting for me.

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Acclaimed author Tania James balances writing and teaching at Mason

Shayla Brown — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 21:05:06 +0000

Acclaimed author Tania James balances writing and teaching at Mason Shayla Brown Mon, 01/29/2024 - 16:05

Tania James is having an amazing year. Since her novel Loot was released by Knopf in June 2023, the accolades haven’t stopped.

In addition to being named to longlist for the National Book Award, the novel has been included in the Best Books of the Year lists by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. And, in 2024, was selected as a DC Reads book by the DC Public Library and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

I’ve been really surprised and grateful at how this book has been received,” said James, who teaches in ��AV’s Creative Writing Program.

Tania James. Photo by Elliott O'Donovan.

Although the novel is often described as historical fiction, James questions this label.

“For the most part, I didn’t approach this novel any differently than I would a contemporary novel,” said James, an associate professor in the Department of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “To my mind, historical fiction isn’t a genre with clear conventions in the way there are with crime fiction or horror fiction.”

James said the inspiration for Loot began with Tipu’s Tiger, an automaton of a life-size tiger that is mauling the throat of an English soldier. It resides in the Victorian Albert Museum in London and was commissioned by a South Indian ruler the late 1700s.

“Back in the day, you could turn a hand crank and the tiger would grunt and the soldier would groan. It was this darkly comic, sinister object that created a sensation in England. I found it fascinating,” said James.

Loot is set in 18th century India, England, and France, and follows a young woodcarver, Abbas, who is called by the Tipu Sultan to build the tiger, a prize of war, as a gift for his son. It is her fourth novel.

“Loot was the first time I wrote a novel while I was a full-time tenure track professor. I also had two small children, so there were all these new constraints on time, which taught me to be less precious about the conditions in which I can write,” she said.

Writing a novel also requires living with uncertainty for long periods of time, she added. “I was going through old notebooks, and it occurred to me how many different iterations this novel could have taken, some of them terrible and some of them just different.”

At Mason, James teaches fiction writing, and this semester she is focusing on writing novels in ENGH 608 Novel Writing Seminar.

When she came to Mason in 2016, James was mentored by fellow author Courtney Brkic, a professor in Mason’s Creative Writing Program.

Brkic said her mentorship of James was primarily about balancing teaching with her own writing.

“When you come into a new job, there's a tendency to want to tackle it all and volunteer for everything and not take care of your art, but for us in the MFA program, we're not academics. We're working artists,” said Brkic. “Sometimes the balance of serving our department, students, families and serving our art can be a difficult one to strike.”

“Tania is an outstanding teacher,” said Brkic, who invited James to guest lecture one of her classes. “One of the things I've always admired about Tania is that she's so good at seeing nuance in things and helping students to see that nuance. Not telling them, but helping them cultivate that muscle in their heads that helps them to become great writers.”

MFA student Connor Harding in James’s novel writing course echoed that praise of James as an exceptional teacher.

“She engages with people's ideas and asks interesting questions that generate great discussion,” said Harding. “The course definitely has a little bit of something for everybody, especially for people that want to generate writing beyond just understanding it,” Harding said.

“[Courtney] really helped me navigate a world that I wasn't familiar with. I’m constantly learning from her generosity and leadership,” James said.

“In terms of my own work as a writer, one of the beautiful things about being a teacher at Mason has been being in such close proximity to different opportunities that bring great writers to campus like the Visiting Writers Program,” she added.

In the program, faculty bring published writer to campus to do readings as well as run a masterclass. “I oftentimes sit in on those masterclasses for our MFA students because I find them helpful in terms of applying wisdom to my own work and teaching methods,” she said. “I aspire to be the kind of artist who, at some level, will always be a student.”

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Mason researcher looks at the new Chinese way of death

Colleen Rich — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 14:49:33 +0000

Mason researcher looks at the new Chinese way of death Colleen Rich Wed, 06/21/2023 - 10:49

In her new book, Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death (Cornell University Press, January 2023), Mason anthropology professor Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons.

Huwy-min Lucia Liu. Photo by Office of University Branding

What inspired you to write this book?

Before I started my fieldwork, I had assumed that I would be going to witness the rise of new death rituals. Ones that emphasized individuality. Almost paradoxically, I had also assumed that I would see the re-emergence of religious funerals. I had these assumptions because scholars studying the People’s Republic of China have long argued that introducing a market economy has brought about the rise of individuals and religious revival.

I was intrigued to explore the interplay between these two trends in terms of death rites. Whether the revival of religious funerals indicated a rise of individualism or, instead, of forms of community was an additional separate issue to look at. Of course, when I got there, I found things were very different from what my readings of other areas of social life had led me to assume.

Death in urban China had undergone drastic changes under the Chinese Communist Party since 1949 and then again since the beginning of the reform period in the 1980s. We know that the Chinese state nationalized funeral industries (along with all the other industries) and repressed traditional death rituals heavily in the post-1949 period before China adopted the market economy. Beyond this, however, scholars knew very little about death in urban China. Exploring the new Chinese way of death was a way for me to understand the intended and intended consequences of constructing citizenship and subjectivity in contemporary China.

Was there anything that surprised you in the research of this book?

Two things surprised me the most. First, most people living in Shanghai preferred to commemorate the dead with a particular style of funeral called “memorial meetings.” This ritual is a secular civil ritual that uniformly commemorated the dead as model socialist citizens. This finding was surprising because after the introduction of the market economy in the 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party actively discouraged people from performing this ritual. Part of the reason for this is that this ritual was popularized in Shanghai as a postmortem rehabilitation ritual during the Cultural Revolution. As such, publicly commemorating the dead as socialist citizens could be seen as pointing out the state’s mistakes.

What’s even more surprising was that the most common death ritual in Shanghai were “religious versions of this secular socialist civil funeral.” How could it be possible to have a ritual that both denies and recognizes spirits and the afterlife at the same time? In my book, I unpack these puzzles by explaining how ritualized acts created moments of reflexivity to question the taken-for-granted reality, how social conventional acts actually provide the possibility for pluralism, and how the pursuit of sincerity and authenticity diminish people’s capacity to live with difference.

What are you working on now?

I am working on two new projects. Both projects are about governing “nature,” its impact on people, and how such changes in governing nature can tell us something about constructing sovereignty and citizenship. The first project tackles how and why the Chinese government developed an “American national park system with Chinese characteristics.” Our University Libraries’ Fenwick Fellowship is currently supporting my work on parts of this project. The second project explores how Taiwan (Formosan) black bears were transformed from a not-so-well-known subject of conservation activism for biodiversity to a national totem representing Taiwan internally and externally.

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New Book Features Exclusive Interview with Jailed Leader of Mexico’s ‘War on Drugs’

Anonymous — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 16:33:23 +0000

New Book Features Exclusive Interview with Jailed Leader of Mexico’s ‘War on Drugs’ Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/04/2021 - 12:33

In This Story

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera: ‘This book is important because it is the perspective of the Mexican government on how they saw security in Mexico before the declaration of the ‘War on Drugs.’

Little did Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera know in November of 2017 that the high-ranking Mexican government official she was interviewing with for a book on that country’s

“drug war” would three years later be arrested in the U.S. for taking millions of dollars in bribes from the villainous Sinaloa drug cartel.

The dramatic downfall of Mexico’s former secretary of public security is now a new book, Las Cinco Vidas de Genaro García Luna (El Colegio de México), written by Correa-Cabrera, a Schar School assistant professor, and Rice University’s Tony Payan. (The book is available in Spanish only.)

The book traces García Luna’s path leading to his downfall and to the security issues in Mexico today. This work also provides credible insight into just how high the reach of organized crime—the drug cartels—is able to go to the very top of Mexico’s federal authorities.

“He was the strongman of security in Mexico,” Correa-Cabrera said, regarding García Luna. “He was the protagonist in the first stage of the state-sanctioned ‘War on Drugs.’ He was the Secretary of Public Safety and the right-hand man of the Mexican president at the time, Felipe Calderón, and was very close to the DEA and to all the United States’ agencies,” including the CIA and the Department of Justice.

“And he was arrested, at the end of 2019,” she said, “charged in connection to drug trafficking, money laundering, and it was a big scandal because he was the strongman of security.” García Luna is in a New York prison awaiting trial for taking tens of millions in bribes to protect cartels.

Genaro García Luna awaits trial in a New York prison.

Correa-Cabrera interviewed García Luna in 2017, two years before his arrest, over three days at the Center for the United States and Mexico of the Baker Institute at Rice University in Houston, during which time he gave his perspectives on security issues in Mexico—a bitter irony—considering how his tenure came to an end.

“He thought he was untouchable,” she said, reflecting on just how powerful García Luna was at the time of the interview.

“This book is important because it is the perspective of the Mexican government on how they saw security in Mexico before the declaration of the ‘War on Drugs,’” she said.

“What is the drug war? What does that mean? Because of the ‘War on Drugs’ the violence has not been reduced. The situation in Mexico is worse than it was when they declared a war on drugs. The cartels have grown very powerful, very murderous.”

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Schar School News August 2021

Books

In her new 'memoir in animals,' Creative Writing professor examines her writing life

What inspired you to write this book?

What surprised you about the process of writing this book?

What are you working on now?

Discover more from the English Department at George Mason

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Mason researcher tackles 'The Politics of Innocence' in new book

What inspired you to write this book?

Was there anything that surprised you in the research for this book?

What are you working on now?

Investigate Criminology, Law and Society programs at Mason

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Acclaimed author Tania James balances writing and teaching at Mason

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Mason researcher looks at the new Chinese way of death

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New Book Features Exclusive Interview with Jailed Leader of Mexico’s ‘War on Drugs’

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