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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.
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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.
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