Kim Edwards

This morning my daughter called to let me know that people at school were talking about the questions on Jeopardy! last night.  I often watch the show, but missed this one, so I didn’t know that one of my books had appeared in the category Possessive Book Titles, under the $2,000 clue.  It said, ”Kim Edwards:  The ________ _________’s Daughter.”  I have to say, it’s totally thrilling to find myself mentioned on Jeopardy!  You can check it out at the link below.

http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=3808

John Gardner, whose novels and books on writing have been important to me as a writer and a teacher, talks about the need for the writer to enter the ‘fictive dream.’  I think what he means by this is that as writers we must create a world so convincing and compelling that we are able–and our readers will in turn be able–to remove ourselves the from the sensory world we inhabit to dwell for a time in the imagined world, instead. 

Last week was the launch of The Lake of Dreams in paperback, and I traveled to libraries in Louisville and St. Louis to speak.  These were wonderful events, with large audiences of passionate readers.  At the St. Louis County Library, I noticed a group of young people sitting together in the audience.  They were so engaged, and asked wonderful questions after my talk.  Later, I learned that they were high school students, all part of a club called The Literary Guild.  They had read one of my novels, and they had come to my reading with their teacher.  It was very moving to me, and I think to many in the audience, to see so many young people feel so passionately about books and about reading, and I have thought about those students–and their dedicated and inspiring teacher–a great deal in the days since.  It’s impossible not to feel hopeful and excited about the future of books after seeing such a response from a new generation of readers.  Thanks to The Literary Guild for sharing that energy–and wishing you joy in reading always!

Today is the official launch of The Lake of Dreams in paperback. The Penguin cover is beautiful. I love the color, and I love the way the key beneath the water evokes a sense of mystery. Every time I glance at the cover, from across the room or across a bookstore, I find it compelling and mysterious all over again.

The summer after I finished graduate school, I got married, and then my husband and I moved across the world to teach in Kuantan, Malaysia, a small city on the rural east coast.  I remember traveling across the peninsula by car just after we arrived, marveling at the new landscape.  Everything was different from anything I’d experienced before, from the foliage to the language and culture, to the climate and the food.  I wondered, as we drove, how I would ever write in this new place, so far away from the familiar.

Last week I had the pleasure of reading at Cayuga Community College in Auburn, NY, so I was back in the heart of the Finger Lakes.  I graduated from Cayuga before I went on to study at Colgate University, and I was editor of the yearbook in my second year.  It was so interesting to go through and see all the changes that have happened over the years.  People were complaining about the spike in gas prices back then, too-they had just spiked to 61 cents a gallon!

April 1st was the birthday of one of my great-aunts, a very kind woman, very warm.  I only saw her a few times in my life but I felt a deep affection for her.  She was one of my grandfather’s three sisters; his birthday was on June 1st.  The last time I saw her she was well into her 90s, still living alone.  She made us a wonderful gooseberry pie.

It’s interesting how family birthdays sometimes cluster together.  These weeks of early spring have been busy, with family birthdays to celebrate or plan for.  Also, with trying to get the house in order after some rennovation projects we’ve taken on over the past year.  

When I lived in Odawara, Japan, our house was very near the sea, with mountains rising up behind us, scattered with mandarin orange trees; when the fruit ripened, it stood out against the foliage like bright ornaments.  I loved my two years in Japan, where the streets were beautiful and safe, and life had an underlying order.  Every morning people hung their futons outside to air, and came out to sweep their steps and the streets in front of their houses.  We watched a new house being built by neighbors just a few feet away, and a house-blessing ceremony when it was finished.  Our landlord, a man named Yoshitaka Aioki, lived at the bottom of the street, and took us once to hike in the Japanese Alps, an extraordinary trip.  Another time we climbed Mt. Fuji all night, arriving at the summit at dawn.  In between there were shorter hikes, and trips to the hot springs, and stops at the shop which made fresh tofu of every kind, every day.

Here’s the link to a really good feature article about The Lake of Dreams that was published recently in the New Zealand Herald.  It uses a terrific word I’d never heard before:  collywobbles.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10712318

Since I love words, I have an OED, and I looked this one up.  It has an interesting history, but essentially it means something like “butterflies in the stomach,” which I did not have, at least not extensively, while writing The Lake of Dreams.  Happily, I was already immersed in The Lake of Dreams by the time The Memory Keeper’s Daughter was published, so there wasn’t any question of where I’d go when the excitement over my first novel settled down–I was already there.