Mori's Writing example essay topic

Biography A Japanese American poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer, Mori was raised in Kobe, Japan, and inspired by her mother and grandfather, began to write in both Japanese and English at an early age. These two people in my family gave her the idea that writing was something we did everyday or even every week with enjoyment. As a young girl, she learned numerous ways to be creative, including drawing, sewing, and writing, from her mother and her mother's family. From those family members, Mori says "I came to understand the magic of transformation, a limitless possibility of turning nothing into something". (Mori). At age 12, Mori's life changed completely, she was devastated when her mother committed suicide.

Her father remarried one year later, but the household was not a happy one, and Mori looked for ways to stay away from home. Eventually, she moved to the United States to attend college, receiving her bachelor's degree from Rockford College and a master's and Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin. Mori's writing grows out of her personal experiences, but she doesn't always write exactly what happens in her own life. "I think that the best thing about being a writer is that we get to moke up things and tell the truth at the same time", she says (Mori). Since she received her doctoral degree, in 1984, Mori has taught creative writing and has published fiction, poetry, and essays. Much of what she write is based on the things she knows.

For example, she wrote about growing up in Japan, being a runner or a gardener, certain feelings she had as a teenager about wanting to be honest and wanting to be liked. But my novels are more about what could, might or even should have happened, not about what did happen in my real life. All the characters are reflections of some aspect of herself, but none of the characters are strictly herself. She thinks that the best thing about being a writer is that they get to make up things and tell the truth at the same time. She did not write about my experience of growing up in Japan until she was in graduate school. There, she first wrote a story about an old woman, someone like her grandmother, having a birthday after her husband and some of her children had died.

She wanted to find out, through writing, what it might be like to be she grandmother or someone like her, how an old woman might find moments of joy even in her otherwise lonely life. That story became the seed of what later developed into Shizuko's Daughter. She saw the novel at first as a collection of short stories about three women -- a daughter, a mother, and a grandmother -- in a particular family somewhat like my own. She did not write the stories in a chronological manner. She first wrote a story about the grandmother, which turned out to be the last chapter, then a few stories about the daughter, a story about the mother, and then some more about the grandmother. A few years later, she filled in the gaps, developed the characters more consistently, and turned the collection into a novel.

Her first novel for young adults, Shizuko's Daughter (1993), was followed by a collection of poetry, Fallout (1994). In Mori's well-received memoir The Dream of Water (1995), she travels back to Kobe to make peace with her mother's suicide and to visit the family she left behind. That same year she published her second young adult novel, One Bird (1995). Polite Lies, essays about her life as a Japanese American woman in the Midwest, was published in 1998. Stone Field, True Arrow (2000) marks her first book of adult fiction and relates the story a middle-aged woman's awakening after her father dies in Japan.

Mori is currently a Briggs-Copeland lecturer in Creative Writing at Harvard University.