Seeing your name in print

Back when I was doing my master's degree in creative writing — which was somewhere around either the late Noughties or the early 1650s — me and a handful of other students in the programme got together our own little writers' circle, which I obnoxiously suggested we call Write Club. (I have never read Palahniuk.)

We had a few changes in personnel over the years, but all told, Write Club in its various guises continued across seven years and two cities. Between us we've published seven books and dozens of short stories and essays, we've done readings and conference panels together, and several of us still work in writing-adjacent jobs (including the National Spelling Bee). One of us has been so fantastically successful (not me, cough) that her job is just... being a novelist.

All this says more about the kinds of people who join extracurricular writing groups, I think, than it does about any particular special mojo that Write Club had. But it's still nice feeling like you're a part of something bigger, even if that something is just a slightly exclusive group of people who are successful at doing something you care about.

On the closest shelf to my desk, I keep copies of everything I've ever published, along with everything Write Club has ever published. It's for inspiration rather than narcissism; a reminder that, hey, this shit is possible. People I know do it all the time. To be honest it takes some of the pressure off, too. I can look at that shelf and feel better about having published my last novel eleven years ago, because the rest of them have been picking up the slack in the meantime.

At the end of last year, though, an especially satisfying book got added to the shelf: Where Every Ghost Has A Name, by Kim Liao. I've known Kim for coming up on twenty years, marginally longer even than I've known my wife. Where Every Ghost I've probably known for almost as long too, because Kim started bringing her first rough pages of it to Write Club pretty early on.

The book, now, is a two-stranded story of Kim's grandfather Thomas — who led Taiwan's pro-independence movement back in the 1950s — and Kim's own story of travelling to Taiwan to learn more about her family history. But back when she first started toying around with it in Write Club, she hadn't yet been to Taiwan or even learned to speak the language, and she hadn't yet discovered the extent of her grandfather's influence or even her grandmother's true identity. All she had was a few stray facts she'd heard over the years and an assignment due in a class we were both taking. (Incidentally that's also more or less how my novel came to be.)

Anyway, over the last decade I've literally kept up with Kim as she went to Taiwan as a Fulbright scholar, as she toiled to finish the book between multiple other jobs, as she despaired — as we all do — over whether the damn thing would ever be finished and whether she'd ever find anyone to publish it. I've read bits and pieces of it, some chapters multiple times, even after I'd moved back to London and Write Club had officially disbanded. And finally, in November, a finished copy landed in my mailbox. Finally I got to read the whole thing, start to finish – and find out how it ended!

I'm not going to sit here and review it, because that's not what I do here and besides, after that preamble, I doubt anybody would expect my opinion to be objective. (It is fascinating though, and you should buy a copy.) For me, though, there's the added personal satisfaction of reading the acknowledgments and seeing Write Club in there. Because now, whenever I look at this latest book on the shelf, I know that, whether or not my own name's been on a new cover in the last ten years, I've still helped someone else get theirs in print. I've still helped advance the world of letters. In some ways, that's almost as nice a feeling.