I was born in Carmel, California, to a Japanese mother and an American father. I grew up going to Japan a lot with my mother, who made sure I learned her language. This irritated me, because my friends all went to Club Med and Tahoe on holidays, but now I'm grateful because I can still speak Japanese, and I'm comfortable traveling to new places. In fact, I love to travel and seek out new things and to meet new people.
I've always wanted to be a writer--like a lot of people. This is not an easy profession, however! I wrote a lot of very, very bad stuff throughout my teenage years and my twenties. Then around 30, I finally wrote a decent story and poem, and both were published. I like to focus on the intersection between modernity and spirituality a lot of the time--I know this comes in part from having spent so much time in the US and Japan. Both are very rich countries, and yet are so very different from each other. And yet, you can see how people struggle with the same issues, albeit in different ways and with different conclusions.
Some things I'm proud of: my novel, Picking Bones from Ash, which came out from Graywolf in 2009. My essay, "Letter from a Japanese Crematorium" was published by Agni, shortlisted for Best New American and included in the anthology "Creative Nonfiction 3." I went to Bread Loaf as a Bernard O'Keefe Scholar, and had a wonderful time; I was nervous about going, but ended up feeling like Ripton, Vermont was paradise. That conference really makes you feel that writing is the most important thing in the world.
And now, I'm working on lots of new stuff I hope to share with you.
No one has written on Marie Mockett's wall.
No one has written on Marie Mockett's wall.