Photo: Belle Yang ©John Orr. Many thanks! Art Direction: The Magazine of Yoga

Ten Breaths of Inspiration for the Writing Life

BY MAGAZINE COLUMNIST CORINNA BARSAN

Belle Yang, subject of the PBS documentary My Name is Belle, writes and illustrates for children, adults and anyone in between.

Her latest book is a graphic memoir Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale, published by WW Norton and Company. Her recent picture book is Foo the Flying Frog, published in 2009 by Candlewick Press.

Author website www.belleyang.com

The Magazine of Yoga On The Lit Mat Interview

one

Who or what was your greatest influence in picking up the pen?

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a
king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.
~ Hamlet

During a time of trauma in my mid-twenties when a lover turned violent stalker, I had no options but to return to the protection and confines of my childhood home.

I could no longer walk my favorite beach or even visit the grocery aisles unless under my father’s protection. But I became a queen of infinite space.

I took my bad dreams and used them to frame the story of my father’s childhood in Manchuria during and after WWII. In the third book of my Manchurian trilogy, I used the graphic novel format to take revenge for my great grandfather against time and forgetting.

After a lifetime of work, rising from an apprentice at a grain brokerage, he had become a wealthy businessman and philanthropist. When the Communists arrived, they evicted him from his estate to wander a beggar.

My nutshell became my best teacher. The external danger forced me to face myself, meet my life’s work head on. I acquired magic powers to travel back and forth in time, across oceans and continents. The three books would take me twenty years to complete.

two

In what ways do you make room for the creative process in your
day-to-day?

The creative process is my life.

I try to make it my every breath (I am not saying I am successful at this, but I certainly try.)

Moments ago, it was pouring and I saw the lovely silhouette of my mother against the rain-splattered sliding glass door. So I grabbed my camera. Even when I am hiking in the folds and along the ridges of the Santa Lucia Range, I have my little digital camera with me. Sometimes I take a sketchbook.

Through the lens I concentrate on form, textures, and color of sky and fungi. When I drive from Carmel to San Francisco, I note the permutations of the season: the fog, the emergence of winter grass. The hue of the golden hills now wearing whiskers of green.

I am in love with the topography of my particular habitat and of our Earth.

three

Which one word, image, sound, feeling, or memory defines the act of writing for you?

The word persimmon. It conjures the honey sweetness of the hachiya or the crunch of the fuyu. Shizi in Chinese. (It is native to my ancestral land.) Kaki in Japanese.

When it isn’t quite ripe, it has an astringency (love this word which can only be applied to this edible). It tastes “furry” when not ripe—just as I think teenagers are “furry.” She is the word for astringency in Chinese. Shibui in Japanese.

Shibui also indicates the elegance of muted colors. Its genus Diospyros, meaning fruit of the gods. Diospyros is a contender for the lotus mentioned in The Odyssey: it was so luscious that those who ate it forgot about going home.

And the very word persimmon, conjures the richness of autumn harvest. In 1986, when I fled to China from my stalker, I spent my first week of freedom picking hachiya persimmons and watched them ripen on my windowsill. Far Eastern cultures have incorporated the fruit in its sumi-e paintings.

four

How do you find inspiration when the well runs dry?

The well has never run dry. I have work to do. My problem is figuring out the order in which I should work on my life projects.

I have wanted to jump into my own graphic memoir before working my mother’s. I am indeed working on mom’s now, so I tell myself be patient.

I will bide my time and ripen like the persimmon for a luscious book in my old age.

five

Is there a tidbit of writing advice that has stayed with you over the years?

Let the blank page teach you to write. This was the best advise from Annie Dillard.

People often come to me asking how they should begin writing their book. I think if you have to ask, you don’t want to write bad enough.

Also, Anton Chekhov recommended we take the first half of a manuscript, divide it in half and begin the book with the latter half.

six

What is something you know now about writing that you didn’t know when you were just starting out?

That writing can make you crazy and then it goes on to make you whole.

It can give you backbone. It can make you more courageous in the world, because your words can cause emperors on their thrones to tremble.

seven

Whether you do yoga or another form of physical or spiritual practice, how does it affect your work?

My spiritual practice I consider to be a form of walking meditation.

Our coastal ranges are great full-day hikes (a little beyond 3,000 ft). When I climb above the Pacific Coast Highway, I understand why human beings thought the gods existed in the mountains. I leave my greedy carcass at sea-level and attain see-level. I feel the twinge in my lungs and the thud of my heart wanting to beat its way out of my chest.

When I am straining for the altitudes, I am aware that I am fully alive and that my soul occupies my body in just the right way.

eight

What is your most favorite guilty pleasure?

Reading histories on Western civilization. I’ve purchased Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven-volume set The Story of Civilization. It has very little to do with Chinese history, which I should study more fervently. And history does not inspire my prose writing and the making of better plots. But it’s one of my greatest pleasures to tuck myself in bed and read about how we became who we are today.

I have also learned to worry less about politics—not that I don’t care and will remain sitting on my haunches—because I see that the wealthy and the have-nots have been pushing against one another long before history had been formally set down.

I experience “aha” moments when I study history. Connecting the dots is the ultimate reward for my half-century of endurance on Earth.

nine

If you had to pick one book to recommend as a must-read,
which would it be?

Only one book? Okay, I’ll say the Complete Short Stories of Anton Chekhov.

ten

What is on your nightstand now?

Will Durant’s volume three: The Greeks. Also the Jerusalem Bible and The Bible as Literature.

You can find Corinna’s musings and discoveries on her blog at
www.shinywhitepage.blogspot.com

© 2011, The Magazine of Yoga, LLC.