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James D. Houston is the author of eight novels, including Bird of Another
Heaven and Snow Mountain Passage. His non-fiction works include
Farewell to Manzanar, co-authored with his
wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston - a true account of her family's experience during
and after the World War Two internment, it is in a 67th printing from Bantam
Books and a standard work in schools and colleges across the country.
He was born in San Francisco, where his parents settled after migrating west
from Texas during the Depression of the l930s. At San Jose State College he
studied drama and met Jeanne, whose parents had reached California from the
opposite direction, crossing the ocean from Japan. In his writings, as in his
personal life, these histories have intermingled. From his coastal vantage
point, he has been able to look both ways, eastward across the continent, and
farther west, toward the shores and islands of the Asia/Pacific region.
Jim and Jeanne were married in Honolulu in 1957, and from there moved to
England while he served for three years as Information Officer with a Tactical
Fighter-Bomber Wing. In 1959 his first published story appeared in the London
literary journal, Gemini. Another early effort won that year's U.S. Air Force
Short Story Contest.
After traveling extensively in Europe - to Belgium, France, Germany, Spain,
Scotland, Scandinavia, and the Soviet Union - he returned home to pursue an M.A.
in American Literature at Stanford. He studied with Wallace Stegner, critic
Irving Howe, editor Malcolm Cowley, and the Irish short story master, Frank
O'Connor. Four years later he returned to Stanford as a Stegner Writing Fellow.
While there he sold his first novel and completed his second,
Gig, which won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for Fiction.
Since 1962 he and Jeanne have lived in Santa Cruz, within view of Monterey
Bay, where they raised their three children, Corinne, Joshua and Gabrielle. For
several years he made his living as a musician, teaching classical and folk
guitar, and playing acoustic bass in a piano bar and in a bluegrass band. In
l969, after teaching for a year at Stanford, he began teaching writing part-time
at the University of California's Santa Cruz campus, an arrangement that
continued for over twenty years, interspersed with visits to such campuses as
the University of Hawai'i, the University of Oregon, the University of Michigan,
and George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. In spring 2006 he returned to
his alma mater, now San Jose State University, to hold the prestigious Lurie
Chair, as Distinguished Visiting Professor in Creative Writing.
A frequent visitor to Hawai'i, he has traveled widely in the Pacific Basin. In 1993 he was invited to Okinawa to lecture at the University of the Ryukyus. In 1998 he served as a Smithsonian Lecturer for the Cunard Lines' South
Pacific Cruise to the Marquesas, Fakarava, Tahiti, Tonga and Fiji. His often
anthologized stories and essays have appeared in such publications as The New
York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, GQ and Ploughshares.
He died in April 2009 at his home in Santa Cruz, California. The cause was complications of lymphoma, said his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. He was 75.
Partial Bibliography
Novels
Nonfiction
James Houston's website
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(below this interview is an earlier interview in which Houston discusses Snow Mountain Passage)
For the second time, you've written a novel that reaches in to the past .
What relevance does historical fiction have for contemporary readers?
Reading historical fiction doesn't necessarily mean you have to leave the
modern world. The story itself may be set a hundred or two hundred years ago,
yet still have a contemporary resonance. I think it's a matter of perspective,
the authorial perspective that is brought to the telling. In Bird of Another
Heaven the narrator, Sheridan Brody, is a Bay Area talk show host and one-time
student of anthropology. He is in his 30s before he discovers a previously
unknown branch of his family tree, discovers an ethnic background his parents
never talked about, discovers he's the great-grandson of a woman who was half
California Indian and half Hawaiian. Seeking out the truth of her life puts
Sheridan's own life to the test. At the same time this quest brings the late
19th century into the late 20th century.
It's another example of something I find in a lot of narratives, whether
short or long: in order to get the story told, you have to tell two stories. The
second ...
H.W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. A New York Times bestselling author, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American and Traitor to... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Bird of Another Heaven
Try:
The Age of Gold
by H.W. Brands
Alan Brennert is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. He was born in 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey, to Herbert E. Brennert, an aviation writer, and Almyra E. Brennert, an apartment rentals manager. He has lived since ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Bird of Another Heaven
Try:
Moloka'i
by Alan Brennert
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