Matthew Salesses is the author of "The Hundred-Year Flood." He was adopted from Korea and has written about race and adoption for NPR's Code Switch, the New York Times Motherlode, Salon, and The Rumpus, among others. He received a PhD candidate in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Houston. His previous books include Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity (essays) and I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (a novel). Follow him @salesses.
Mary Miller talks about her first novel, The Last Days of California, the musicality and rhythm of sentences, how to avoid authorial intrusion, and when it's better to back away from the revision process.
I was never able to have that moment, which I realized other kids had, where the character seemed to be me. I was always aware that I was reading about other people.
My senior year in Chapel Hill, I finally got up the courage to take a course in Asian American literature. Stupidly, I treated it as a little experiment. As an…