" Teaching creative writing actually is the teaching of creative reading-- showing students how to pay close attention and learn from great writers."

-Jess Row

Jess Row never realized just how interested in China he was until he applied for a fellowship in Hong Kong at the end of his college career. He became attracted to Asian culture and language, and developed a long-term goal to translate Chinese literature while he was a Yale-China teaching fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1997-99.

Row, who received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan, said that fellowship became the source of a short story collection that will hit bookstores next year.

Row's fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, Harvard Review and Threepenny Review. His short story, "The Secrets of Bats," garnered a Pushcart Prize and is included in The Pushcart Prize XXVI as well as in The Best American Short Stories 2001. Another story, "Heaven Lake," will appear in the 2003 edition when it comes out next month.

In addition to teaching creative writing, literature and composition, Row is spending his first month on campus getting a sense of his students' interests and needs, and where they are coming from as a group in terms of experience in creative writing.

Q. What will you bring to the University's creative writing program?
A. I consider myself lucky to be at Montclair State. In addition to its proximity to New York, there's a large English Department with a growing creative program and an enthusiastic faculty with exciting opportunities for developing new classes. There are so many students concentrating in creative writing and in teacher-training programs, so one of my long-term goals is to find out if we can help them develop creative writing classes and approaches for high school and middle school. It would be great for them to go out as teachers and offer creative writing classes. I don't know if that involves developing a class specifically for that purpose or simply having conversations with students about looking for ways to integrate what they're learning in their creative writing classes into their teacher training.

Q. Tell us about your upcoming book of short stories.
A. It's a collection of fiction set in Hong Kong based on my experiences there, and attempts to capture the different facets of the experience of living in Hong Kong. Some of the stories are about expatriates and Western people living there, and about people just passing through, while others are about locals and people who immigrated to Hong Kong from China. The common thread is that Hong Kong is a city that is extremely international and extremely local--Chinese. It's a city known for being glitzy and for the financial center of Asia, but at a human level, it's a place where a lot of people meet and interact. Because it's a place where cultures come into friction, interesting things happen. So the basis of the stories is what happens when cultures collide.

Q. What are you writing now?
A. I'm working on a novel that is set in both Laos and the United States during the Vietnam War. I've conducted research in Laos and I hope to return to do more. Other stories I'm working on are loosely in reaction to Sept. 11. These new stories are on a global level. They have to do with the condition of the world we live in, the intersections of violence and religious faith, and fundamentalism and clashing world views we have in our own society. I'm also looking at terrorism from the perspective of the perpetrator of the crime.

Q. Tell us about your writing process.
A. I'm not somebody who produces a lot of drafts quickly. I tend to write slow and methodically so that when I'm done with a complete draft it's close to being finished, which is not a process I recommend to my students. I personally find that I think my way through a story by writing, so if I go too fast I might not think carefully enough about what I'm doing. That's how I've always written. It's what works for me.

Q. What have you found to be an effective method of teaching creative writing?
A. By connecting it to the study of literature. Teaching creative writing actually is the teaching of creative reading--showing students how to pay close attention and learn from great writers. What I would like to do in my creative writing classes, especially at the higher level, is integrate focused reading of literature and creative projects with themes, like a class on global literature with a creative writing component, or classes in translation, which is a form of creative writing. I also would like to utilize my experience as a practical writer and my background in the study of narrative to teach upper-level creative writing classes that examine the theory of fiction and narrative.

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