Dispatch from Danielle Trussoni - May 2024
Hello from the Writing Cave, where I have been hiding out trying to avoid the extreme heat. It is an unusually steamy May here in San Miguel de Allende. May is often very hot– there isn’t the rain that comes in June, July and August–but this year it’s been in the 90s for weeks. I’m up and writing early, hoping to get as much done before lunch.
As you may know, I have a new novel coming in October. It’s called THE PUZZLE BOX and it is set in Japan.
What you may not know is that the origin of this novel is personal. The seed of the novel took root in my twenties, when I lived in Japan for two years as a high school English teacher in a village called Yoshii-machi in Fukuoka prefectures in Kyushu, on the southern-most island Japan. I applied for a job teaching English through the JET program, a program run by the Japanese government that placed native English speakers in Japanese schools so that students would have a chance to hear English on a regular basis. Teachers were placed everywhere in Japan, and I found myself in an extremely rural area. I was assigned ‘teachers housing,’ a small apartment in a building next to a rice paddy.
My village had a grocery store, an onsen public bath (which I used all the time because my apartment had no hot running water), a small tea shop, a pachinko parlor, and a few small restaurants. It was 45 minutes by bus to the nearest medium-sized town.
I’d never been to Japan before, and I loved it the minute I arrived. I was twenty-four years old and struggling to transform notebooks filled with fragments of poetry and story ideas into a living breathing novel. My primary job was to interact with Japanese kids, and through them I learned an enormous amount about Japanese culture—the kind that you don’t see in movies or in guidebooks.
I taught classes every morning, which left my afternoons free. I would go up to the library and write longhand in notebooks. Over the course of my first year in Japan, I wrote what would become the pages of my first book Falling Through the Earth. One of the teachers heard that I was interested in learning a martial art, and soon I was studying wa-do, a Japanese martial art in the school dojo every afternoon after school. By the time I left, I’d earned a brown belt. I was learning Japanese calligraphy, Ikebana, Japanese language, but more important, I was learning a way of seeing the world that revolved around community, routine, and education.
These years were transformative not only because I developed a writing routine, and was adopted into a culture I loved, but because in my second year in Japan, my son Alexander was born. By the time I left Japan, I was a writer and a mother.
I’ve wanted to write about Japan for two decades but couldn’t quite find the right vehicle until The Puzzle Box. I felt that it was the perfect way to incorporate what I’d learned in Japan with a propulsive, panoramic story. It also allowed me to incorporate elements of Japanese culture and history that I’d discovered while living in Japan—Shinto religion, the Onna-Bugeisha female samurai, and the Imperial family’s drama of succession. All of these elements, and many more, became part of The Puzzle Box.
This novel means a lot to me, and I would appreciate it if you would add it to your Goodreads shelf or, better yet, preorder it here
TruReader of the Month
As a continuation of a newer feature in the newsletter, here is the next installment of Reader of the Month. Each month I’ll feature one of my extraordinary readers. If you’d like to be featured, reach out to me at dtrussoniassistant@gmail.com.
Please say hello to Hope!
Hope lives in the US, in Philadelphia, PA where she works as a healthcare manager. It’s a stressful and demanding career, and she love to balance that with the escapism of reading immersive fiction and non-fiction.
Q) What are your favorite kinds of books to read?
A) I tend towards historical fiction, thrillers, and literary fiction. I also love reading non-fiction in science, nature, and memoirs.
Q) What are some of your hobbies and passions?
A) My daughter and granddaughter live with me and I’ve got a reading challenge on with my 8 yr old grandgirl to see who can read more books through to this December. (No fair hers are much shorter). I enjoy taking walks, especially here in the spring when there’s so much nature blooming after a grey city winter.
I like to read outside if there’s a quiet spot and it isn’t too hot, but usually I read in my bedroom, since it’s where my library wall is.
Q) Why do you love to read?
A) I’m looking forward to Danielle’s next book The Puzzle box - I believe I am going to read that on NetGalley before it’s published. I like to do reviews on my bookstagram page, @Phillybookfairy when not reading and interact with the bookish community. I’ve recently decided that I don’t want to be in a book club but I do enjoy doing a buddy read - discussing a book while still reading it with a friend who’s also reading it or having a group discussion online after reading a book. I find that reading really opens my mind, relaxes me, teaches me things like another point of view, empathy for a people or situation, even fictionalization of historical events can teach beyond the event to the feelings and impacts on the lives of those involved.
Thanks for joining us this month!
Q&A
Finally, I opened the floor to my friends on social media again this month to take any questions about my new books or the writing/reading/publishing world at large. If you have a question you want me to answer, send an email to dtrussoniassistant@gmail.com.
Q) Does writing get lonely sometimes? Or do you have other writers you confide in?
This is the very first time I’ve ever been asked if writing is lonely! I love the question because one would think that spending hours alone at a desk writing would be terribly boring and (yes) lonely. But I’ve never been bored once. In fact, writing is one of my favorite times of the day, a time when I can shut out everything and be alone with my imagination.
What can get lonely is the fact that, as a writer, you work for yourself, on your own schedule, and there’s nobody with whom you can talk about problems or deadlines or ideas. Over the years, I’ve made writer friends who are open to talking about work– both creative and the business side of things. This has been enormously gratifying and makes me feel less alone in such a solitary profession.
Thank you for spending your time with me. For updates, join me on my website, and across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Yours,
Danielle
