Last month, City University's English department invited American writer Robert Olen Butler to speak in Hong Kong. Butler won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his collection of short stories A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.
The Florida State University professor took the stage at CityU's Wei Hing Theatre dressed all in black. He was holding what appeared at first to be a black leather folder. I imagined that it held a stack of papers, but it contained an iPad.
He gave a reading from his forthcoming novel, his 12th, A Small Hotel. The story is set in New Orleans, and is a meditation on love, miscommunication and misunderstanding. It features a couple, Kelly and Michael, in the middle of a divorce, and recalls the major emotional events of their 20-year relationship.
Butler held the iPad in one hand and gestured theatrically with the other - he had been a theatre major at Northwestern University, where he first focused on acting before switching to playwriting. 'I was a terrible playwright because all of my most impassioned writing was going into the stage directions,' he joked. Still, he earned a master's degree in playwriting from the University of Iowa.
He then read a short story, Salem, told from the first-person point of view of a former Viet Cong soldier. Salem was written while he was on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Vietnam.
When the reading was done, he began to talk about writing, and his belief that it comes from the place of dreams. 'Plot is yearning challenged and thwarted,' he said. Members of the audience nodded and took notes; it felt as if we were sitting in on a writing master class. 'The universal yearning is for self.' He revealed that he writes every day, and sets a goal of 400 words minimum.