Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
March 1 LITM: Mako Yoshikawa
Mako Yoshikawa’s first novel, One Hundred and One Ways, was a national bestseller; it was translated into six languages. Her second novel, Once Removed, has also been translated. The novels have received critical acclaim and coverage in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Detroit News, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Time Out, among other publications. Awards for Mako’s writing include a Bunting Fellowship and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant. As a literary critic, she has published articles that explore the relationship between incest and race in twentieth-century American fiction. After her father’s death in 2010, Mako began writing about him and their relationship: essays which have appeared in the Missouri Review, Southern Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Story, Lit Hub, Longreads, and Best American Essays. These essays became the basis for her new memoir, Secrets of the Sun. Mako is a professor of creative writing and the director of the MFA program at Emerson College. She lives with her husband and two unruly cats in Boston and Baltimore.
The Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Mako Yoshikawa: The cure to writer’s block? Lower your expectations.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Yoshikawa: Secrets of the Sun is a memoir that focuses on my relationship with my father, a brilliant Princeton University physicist and a renowned fusion energy researcher.
For much of my life, he was a riddle to me. He grew up fabulously wealthy in prewar Japan and inherited millions, but chose to live in squalor. He was a proper Japanese man who cross-dressed. He was severely bipolar, and in the privacy of home, violent and often cruel: a man I adored as a child, hated and feared as a teen, and foreswore as an adult.
After his death in 2010, I embarked on a quest to try to understand him. Secrets tracks this journey. I think of it as a book about how difficult it is to truly know someone, even or maybe especially those who are closest to us—which means, of course, that my quest failed. What I hope readers come away with is that by accepting that I couldn’t solve the riddle of my father, I found peace.
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Yoshikawa: My grandmother used to send me Japanese cookies. One day the package got stuck at the very back of the mailbox and while trying to yank it out, I got my hand stuck in the mailbox and sprained three fingers. My mother had to fish out the package at the end and it turned out to contain not my cookies but my older sister’s manga. True story.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Yoshikawa: I love the Rumpus author interviews and use many of them in handouts in my graduate workshops and lit classes at Emerson. The Rumpus Book Club interview of Carmen Maria Machado was fun as well as enlightening, and so was Maggie Cooper’s interview of Lesley Nneka Arimah. Best of all was Alden Jones’s fantastic interview of Jerald Walker. They both teach at Emerson; I’m lucky to have such smart, insightful colleagues.
March 15 LITM: Corey Sobel
Our second letter in the mail comes from writer Corey Sobel.
Corey Sobel’s debut novel, The Redshirt, was published by the New Poetry & Prose Series at the University Press of Kentucky on October 13, 2020. The Redshirt was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and one of NPR’s Favorite Books of 2020. Sobel has non-fiction published by or forthcoming from The Wall Street Journal’s book section, Esquire, Largehearted Boy, and HuffPost, and he edits the column “Music for Desks” at Epiphany Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their dog and cat.
