Today we are speaking with author George Bishop, Jr. George graduated with degrees in English Literature and Communications from Loyola University in New Orleans before moving to Los Angeles to become an actor. After eight years of commercials, stage plays, guest starring roles in TV sitcoms, and the lead in a vampire B-movie, he traveled overseas as a volunteer English teacher to Czechoslovakia.
He enjoyed the ex-pat life so much that he stayed on, living and teaching in Turkey and Indonesia before returning to the US to earn his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, where he won the department’s Award of Excellence for a collection of stories.
After teaching for several years at UNCW, he moved back overseas, first on a fellowship with the Open Society Institute in Azerbaijan, then with the US State Department’s Office of English Language Programs in India. Most recently he taught with a University of Montana program in Tokyo.
His stories and essays have appeared in publications such as The Oxford American, The Third Coast, Press, American Writing, The Turkish Daily News, The Caspian Business News and Vorm (in Dutch). Letter to My Daughter (Ballantine Books, Spring 2010) is his first published novel. We'll talk to George about his writing, his first novel, and what the future looks like.
CCM: Welcome, George. We are excited to have you here. Can you please tell our readers a bit about yourself?
GB: Thanks. I’m glad to be here. I’m answering these questions from New Orleans. I recently moved back to Louisiana after spending most of the last two decades living overseas, and it’s good to be back. Mardi Gras season is in full swing now, and I can hear the parades passing on St. Charles Avenue a few blocks away.
Right now I’m looking forward to the release of my first novel, Letter to My Daughter (Ballantine Books, February 16th). I feel like this book has been a long time coming. It’s actually the fifth novel I’ve written, but the first to be published. I’m also hard at work on my next novel. So it’s a busy, exciting time for me.
CCM: How long have you been writing?
GB: I started relatively late for a writer. After I finished college, I worked as an actor for eight years in Los Angeles. I wrote plays and songs during that time, but it was only when I moved overseas in 1992 that I began to seriously work on writing stories.
CCM: Are you a morning or an evening writer?
GB: I prefer to write in the mornings—get it out of the way, you know. Letter to My Daughter, though, was written in the evenings while I was studying for an MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I went to classes during the day and then worked on this novel at night.
CCM: Tell us about your latest book. What is it about and what inspired you to write it?
GB: Letter to My Daughter is a novel in the form of a long letter that a mother writes to her runaway teenage daughter. In her letter, the mother reveals secrets about her own troubled adolescence—why her parents sent her away to a Catholic boarding school, about her affair with a boy who went to fight in Vietnam, and the meaning of a tattoo she still wears below her right hip. It’s set in south Louisiana in the present day, with flashbacks to the early seventies.
It may sound strange, but this novel came to me in a dream. In the summer of 2007 I had just finished a teaching fellowship in India, and for a holiday, I went on a camel safari in Rajasthan. I was actually working on another book at the time. But I went to sleep in my tent in the desert, and when I woke up the next morning, I knew the whole story, beginning to end. I jotted down notes in my journal, and that became the basis of this novel, which I worked on over the next year and a half.
