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Joe and Mark are joined by the wonderfully original writer Tom Bradley. 3:AM Magazine describes Tom as “… one of the most criminally underrated authors on the planet.”
Tom explains what it was like to be a six foot, eight-inch tall red-haired American, living in China and Japan and teaching at a number of English-language universities in both countries.
The peripatetic lifestyle allowed Tom to develop his own writing style and tackle subject matter that was not necessarily mainstream. “I think I’ve made about $35 in royalties in fifty years of writing,” Tom jokes.
He’s worked with the artist that has inspired him: Canada’s very own Nick Patterson.
They look at three of the illustrations in Family Romance, one of several books that Nick has worked on with Tom. [see below for the pictures they describe in the podcast]
These illustrations are “breathtaking in a disturbing kind of way” Joe says.
Tom describes the process of working with the artist – Nick created the illustrations and it was Tom’s job to create a narrative linking the images.
They have a deep and entertaining conversation about being an exile, teaching abroad, writing, and where writers find their inspiration.
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When Tom Bradley was a little boy he was given a gazetteer for Christmas. As little boys will, he looked up all the places in the world that start with the F-word. There were two, Fukien in China and Fukuoka in Japan. Little did he suspect that he would one day be exiled to both.
Tom is a former lounge harpist. During his pre-exilic period, he played his own transcriptions of Bach and Debussy in a Salt Lake City synagogue that had been transformed into a pricey watering hole by a nephew of the Shah of Iran.
He taught British and American literature to Chinese graduate students in the years leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was politely invited to leave China after burning a batch of student essays about the democracy movement rather than surrendering them to “the leaders.”
He wound up teaching conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese “imperial university” where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers raw at festive banquets. But his writing somehow sustains him.
You can purchase a copy of Family Romance on his Amazon page, and learn more about him at his website.
Tom Bradley drawing by David Aronson (right)
Illustrations by Nick Patterson. Check out Nick’s website here.
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