Amy Tan, "Amazement", new novel. Arts and Lectures Series SF

Amy Tan spoke at the Norse Theater in the Arts and Lectures Series.   She is in conversation with Roy Eisenhardt.   A delight as always; Amy Tan  has such an unaffected delivery.   She says "coincidence" has played a large role in her inspirations for her novels.  She is searching for her identity; she does not want to forget people and events in her life.  She likes to preserve the method of Memory and the Moment.  She has been reading Walt Whitman and likes his search for "the Self".  She captures memory through a photo of her grandmother sitting on her desk and from her mother's stories.

Rachmaninov's third concerto, the first movement in D is her favorite and  and she plays it every moring, before she starts to write.  She repeats one moment continually until she is through a passage in her novel...when she sits down to write, she knows where she is, when she turns on the music. She is concerned more with emotional truth than with factual truth in her novels. She did not even think of herself as a writer when young; she thought writers wrote about clouds beautifully.  Now when she has a deadline, she is told that production, copy editing, etc will all be off schedule if she does not meet her deadline; then she goes to her room, and stays there and her husband delivers her meals to her.  In response to a question about women as "exchange", she says that  sex trade is part of trafficking, and that runaways are very much a part of that process, and America also participates in this...Joy Luck Club was such a wonderful collaboration as a film and production that she would never repeat it.  She is happy in her house writing.   As for fate the opposite is "faith".  She has kept faith in altering her fate. 
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