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TI: Well, as you started writing and took these workshops, was it, was it pretty evident that you had a lot of skill at it? I mean, did the instructors start --

JO: I was funny. I mean, what I wrote was, people would never, you'd never know it from reading my book, but I, people would laugh. And so I had this certain comic sensibility which people seemed to respond to. And I had a nice turn of phrase. The style is very different. I think the style in my first book is very sort of clipped and short. But I think the style in my comic stories is just more digressive and just completely different. But I think my writing was -- I mean, I, I did well and I enjoyed it, and it just seemed to come. And then because I was older -- I thought I was older, now it seems young -- but when I was thirty-two, I thought, well, maybe I should up the ante and apply to graduate school, and so I did. I applied to Columbia and they took me on the basis of my comic stories. So I still hadn't really written about the war at that point. But then I look back at some of the exercises that I did when I was taking just the, the more casual writing workshops, and even then, there was sort of, I could see that, sort of glimmers of what I was about to write about in years later, about the war, they would come up, just very sort of indirectly. But it's not stuff, the war was not stuff that I was thinking about consciously. I never thought, "I want to write a book about the internment someday."

TI: But the whole writing, was it, did you get that same passion for writing that you had for, say, painting and art?

JO: Yeah, you know, I think I did. I think whatever I do, I do obsessively. And I did, and yet, it wasn't so fraught with -- I mean, just the idea that I could fail and, I mean, now I feel like I could fail, but back then it was more, it was something I really just enjoyed. And, and yeah, I think I do love, I mean, I do... I think that the medium of language for me is just, maybe it's 'cause we learn, we speak from the age of what, two, whereas you don't paint from the age of two. It just came to me pretty easily, and yet it was challenging enough to keep my mind in that state of flow, which I think, you need a task that's just difficult enough to do, but not too difficult. And I think writing is it for me. I think painting for me was a little too difficult. Or maybe if I'd honed my skills, it wouldn't have been. I don't know.

TI: Well, I'm curious, as you were growing up through school, I mean, were you always a pretty good writer? Did teachers always say, "Oh, Julie, you're such a good writer"?

JO: Yeah, they did, but I never really thought, that didn't mean oh, I want, didn't mean I wanted to be a writer. And I just thought, you know, the things that sort of come easily, you don't really give a second thought to. I chose the thing that was really hard, which was painting, rather than writing.

TI: But at what point did you start thinking of yourself as a writer? Was it during, when you were in graduate school? At what point did you start calling yourself a writer?

JO: Not until the book came out. No, I was an aspiring writer, I think, for years, but when people asked me what I did, I think, I said, well, I'm writing, but I would never say I was a writer. It seemed, I don't know, it was a loaded word, and I just felt like I didn't know what was going to happen with me and my writing. I really had no idea.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.