Creative Spark: How musicians, writers, explorers, and other artists found their inner fire and followed their dreams - Softcover

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Michael Shapiro is the author of A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration. He lives in Petaluma, California.

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Amy Tan

Amy Tan, author of the bestselling novel The Joy Luck Club, swims with sharks. This is not a metaphor for navigating the literary world; while visiting Isla Mujeres off Mexico’s east coast with a conservation group called WildAid, Tan swam with whale sharks, at 30 feet long and 20,000 pounds, the world’s largest fish. “We were in waters where there were quite a number of them. It was like a traffic jam,” Tan told me. Somebody would call out, ‘there’s one coming up behind you.’ You’d turn around, and there would be a huge mouth, five feet wide, coming towards you.”

Swimming with whale sharks was “inspiring, life-changing,” Tan said, but not because it’s perilous. “I think the most dangerous thing is (the possibility of) falling out of the boat and getting hit on the head,” she said. What so moved Tan was that she was able to get eye to eye with the largest fish on Earth and that she felt a sense of communion. “I had a number of them that stayed with me — when I slowed down they slowed down and just looked at me the whole time — they’re very curious.” It’s no wonder that Tan appreciates curiosity: Her books, from her landmark debut, The Joy Luck Club, to her recent novel, The Valley of Amazement, are creative explorations into her roots and the places that have shaped her ancestors and ultimately herself.

Born in Oakland, California, to Chinese immigrants, Tan lives in Marin County just north of San Francisco. She was co-screenwriter and co-producer for the film adaptation of The Joy Luck Club and played herself on an episode of The Simpsons. She’s appeared on NPR’s news quiz, Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me and was a guest on the PBS kids show, Sesame Street.

After visiting San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum for a Shanghai exhibit a few years ago, Tan saw a book in the gift shop about Chinese courtesans in the early 20th century. While leafing through the pages, she came across a photo of ten women, “which stunned me,” Tan said. The caption read: “The Ten Beauties of Shanghai.” They were courtesans who had won a contest in 1910. Five of the young women were dressed in the same clothes her grandmother wore in one of Tan’s favorite photographs of her. This is how Tan learned that her beloved grandmother, the woman she calls her muse, likely worked in a brothel. That led Tan to completely change the course of the novel she’d been working on.

The result is The Valley of Amazement, set at the dawn of the 20th century. Like The Joy Luck Club, it’s the story of a tense and painful relationship between a mother and daughter, and of the clash between East and West. The novel became a New York Times bestseller. Tan recently published a nonfiction book, Where the Past Begins (Ecco, HarperCollins, 2016) “about the mind of the writer, which is basically my mind, and about what’s gone on in my life, (including) the death of my father and brother in the same year.” In the book, she reveals how the events of her life have driven her to create the books she has written.

Though she doesn’t fear sharks, Tan faces another type of fear while writing, “a kind of existential terror, … that I’m going to fail according to my own standards and have that become public and … humiliating. Every writer has that. I’m sure I’m not the only one, and in fact I think I suffer less from that fear than most.” Tan decided to become a writer because otherwise “no one would ever understand who I really was and the thoughts that I had. I was trying to make sense of who I was in this world.”

As inventive as Tan is with words, writing is not her only creative outlet. A capable singer, Tan served as lead rhythm “dominatrix,” backup singer, and second tambourine with the literary garage band, the Rock Bottom Remainders. The group, which formed in the early 1990s, included Stephen King, Mitch Albom and Dave Barry, “retired” some years ago, Tan said. But like many rock bands they occasionally re-group for “reunion” performances, donating ticket proceeds to charities.

Throughout her life Tan has sought a deeper understanding of herself, but unlike many Northern Californians, she has not done so through prolonged psychotherapy. Tan says she sees some overlap between writing and therapy in that “you’re seeking understanding by remembering moments from the past.” But seeing a therapist didn’t work for her. “I’ve only been to a psychiatrist once, for about four months, and during that period fell asleep three times,” she said. “I really didn’t get anything out of it except a motivation to quit therapy. … I’m not paying this guy $200 to fall asleep.”

I spoke to Tan during her book tour for The Valley of Amazement.

How does your writing help you learn more about yourself?

Everything I’m writing about has to do with identity, self-identity. It has to do with the meaning of my life, with who I am and what I’m looking for. The predominant influence would be my mother, and that accounts for why a mother figure appears so often in my books. I cannot seem to get away from it.

Were you concerned about writing about a part of your ancestor’s life that some might see as not virtuous?It was difficult — not simply because of what the family would think. It was hard because my grandmother is my muse and I often feel her in the room with me. By even considering she might have been (a courtesan), I feared I might offend her, especially if it had not been true. And if she had been, I feared that she wouldn’t want people to know. I also feared that mother — she died in 1999 — wouldn’t want people to know. Yet I think that my mother and grandmother were strong believers in truth and that they’d think it (openness) is a good thing. I decided to write about courtesans because I could not stop thinking about that world. It is not a story, however, about my grandmother.

Violet, your central character in The Valley of Amazement, is half white and half Asian.

You have a girl who thinks she’s American and looks down upon the courtesans even though they’re like her sisters. Then she’s flipped into the other world. And she’s become that other half: Chinese. She’s become actually less than that other half — if you’re Eurasian (especially in early 20th-century Shanghai) you don’t belong to either world. So she has really taken a tumble, and she has to remake herself. She has to understand and figure out who she is.You pursue truth through fiction…

I realized later if I could describe what I felt, the complexity of it, the history of it, in a fabricated story of all things which seems paradoxical, that I’d find truth through creating fiction. I found something I’d written when I was 25 that reminded me of things I’ve thought about since I was very young, and that was no one would ever understand who I really was and the thoughts that I had. I was trying to make sense of who I was in this world. I had to capture it for myself and the best way I could do that was in a story.

Every single moment I’ve had is not a lost past, it is completely a continuum of who I am. All of these moments are who I am. Writing fiction is finding the meaning of my life, what I think, what I feel I have to remember, what I know about myself. The thing about writing is not the finished book — that’s the end of the journey. … The most important, most satisfying, part is the writing. It...