![]() ![]() LIGHTBOURNE: I am a voracious reader of expatriate literature. ![]() SAEED: If you don’t mind me asking, who are your biggest literary influences? Are they from the world of fiction or travel writing or some other genre? ![]() After living amongst the Kurds, albeit briefly, I wanted to generate compassion and understanding for these brave, generous people. During my decades as a corporate writer and professor, this dream remained strong. Reading Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People propelled me into anthropology, and gave me a lifelong dream of doing something similar, namely conveying the cross-cultural experience with a heartfelt story that could be easily accessed by the general public. ![]() LIGHTBOURNE: My training in, and fascination with, cultural anthropology has been central to all of my endeavors. Were you someone who always wrote creatively from a young age and so the experiences of teaching English in Iraqi Kurdistan were just further grist to the mill? Or, did these experiences somehow help propel you into writing a first novel? In addition, I wondered did your background in anthropology affect how you viewed your task as a writer – as presumably, you knew all about the ethnographic theories and difficulties of being a participant observer of different cultures? I know that you studied Anthropology (University of California Santa Cruz) as an undergraduate and then took an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature (University of Washington). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |