"Look over my shoulder"

… in the recent past. How do you look at your own situation, a Swiss author living in and writing from America?» – Dr Swati Acharaya, Pune. Thank you for this question, Dr Acharaya. It…Continue Reading: «Homeland and mother tongue have become very fluid terms …

Why would you do that to yourself? Why seek out happy couples – couples that seem happy to you at least – after a painful divorce? Not many of my friends understood. I was not…Continue Reading: The Happy-Couples-Cure for Heartbreak.

Here I was, 21 years old, on a train ride from Paris to Munich where my father was dying in a huge hospital. I distracted myself by writing – the novel I had started on…Continue Reading: The Impostor’s School of Writing, part 2

I was 21 and living in Paris when I first started telling people that I was a writer. Until then I had never said it out loud. Somehow I had met a group of aspiring…Continue Reading: The Impostor’s School of Writing – Part 1

I’ve always liked writing in trains…. Of course, back in Switzerland, the longest train ride I ever took was about three hours. Now I am on the Southwest Chief, Los Angeles to Chigago, 43 hours…Continue Reading: Train Writing.