After I finished my graduate work, I lived in Southeast Asia and Japan for five years, teaching in a wide variety of situations and traveling whenever I had the chance. While “The Way It Felt to be Falling” was the first story I ever wrote (and endlessly revised), many of the stories in The Secrets of a Fire King grew directly or indirectly out of my experiences in Asia.  “Aristotle’s Lantern,” for instance, is set on a beautiful island off the coast of Malaysia where I used to go snorkeling.  “Sky Juice” began when I read a newspaper article about mail order brides and tried to imagine how my own culture might seem to someone in that powerless situation.  “Rat Stories” grew out of a conversation I had over drinks with a group of long-time expatriates.  The framing story I made up entirely, but the rat stories were true--the one about the oven was, anyway, because it happened to me.

I wrote some of these stories once I’d returned to the US, but with a new and more detached perspective, which in many ways I carry with me still.  When an American friend married his Japanese love and moved with her to a small southern town, “Spring, Mountain, Sea” began.  I started thinking about “The Story of My Life” when protestors blocked the driveway of a Midwestern clinic by having small children lie down across the driveway, an action that seemed—and still seems—terribly strange and skewed.  “A Gleaming in the Darkness” grew from my life-long fascination with Marie Curie.  And “Thirst” was that rarest of stories, one that came to me almost fully formed, inexplicably there one day when I’d been swimming and reached for a glass of water.