John Wisniewski interviewed me at length about my novels and short fiction, as well as about life in Asia and pop cultural influences for Punk Noir Magazine.
1.When and how did you become interested in writing, Tom?
Several different experiences pushed me to become a writer, starting years before I considered writing a serious career option. In school in Germany, I edited the students’ paper. At some point the magazine got together with a bunch of other school magazines to produce an issue on political issues that teenagers were interested in in the early 80s – the US presence on German soil, nuclear power and weapons, a new runway at Frankfurt Airport. My school reacted very badly to this. They stopped us selling on the school grounds and then impounded a pile of magazines. One of my teachers made us burn those copies. He took us into the forest and we set all those magazines on fire. To this day, I don’t understand how a school could have done something like this in 80s Germany. I was a powerless teenager, but I did learn something about the power of the written word which informs my professional writing life years later…
Read the full Punk Noir Magazine interview here.
