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Meet Judith Turner-Yamamoto

Today we’d like to introduce you to Judith Turner-Yamamoto.

Judith Turner-Yamamoto

Hi Judith, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today. 
I was born and raised in central North Carolina in the Appalachian diaspora, where people worked the land or they left the land to work the mills. I belong to the first generation of my family in over ten that did not grow up with an intimate connection to family land, and I was the first, the only, in my father’s family to attend college. I may have traveled the world as a journalist and lived the majority of my life working as an art historian and publicist in the arts communities of Washington, DC, and Cincinnati, and be married to a Japanese, but still, the fictional stories that present themselves to me as worth telling are those connected to that place and those people. 

We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Though I was a passionate reader growing up, the idea of writing fiction was out of reach, something that someone from somewhere else had permission to do. I was a college junior when an art history professor told me I should become an art critic; I wrote so well about art. I had no idea what an art critic was, but no one had ever said I should be anything. I added art history as an additional major and charted a path to graduate school. 

An original multi-hyphenate career woman, I worked in galleries, cultural nonprofits, and museums, all while writing art reviews and features. I broke into major papers and national magazines – Art and Antiques, Elle, The Boston Globe, Travel+ Leisure – expanding into writing about dance, music, books, interiors, travel, and food. I met a famous psychic when I was a young mother, and he told me he saw a golden hand with a pen in it, surrounded by passports and suitcases. That is exactly how my freelance career unfolded. Assignments took me all over the world and into conversation with such luminaries as Frank Gehry, Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders, Annie Leibovitz, and Alison Krauss. 

But novel publication proved to be a path fraught with lessons and bruises. I thought I was on my way when I won my first prize in 1989, and I was picked up by a New York literary agent. But two more agents, three more manuscripts, a screenplay, prizes and fellowships, and published short stories followed, but no book deal. 

A decade later, I began a twenty-year period where I fit my fiction writing around a new career in public relations. I discovered an unrealized gift for telling clients’ stories. I could imagine their different realities and outcomes just as I had done with my characters, making it all actionable in real-time. 

Abandoning my own storytelling was a heavy, nagging death I carried. A psychic—yes, another one– chided that my books were sitting on a shelf, waiting for me to pay attention, to step forward into my true self. Four years ago, a cascade of life changes, including the death of my last parent, freed me to bring my full focus back to book publication, a goal driven by the regret of omission. 

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
In a word, I communicate. In this particular chapter of my life, I’m finally a debut novelist. In Loving the Dead and Gone, a freak car crash in 1960s rural North Carolina puts in motion moments of grace that bring redemption to two generations of women and the lives they touch. 

I’ve been astounded and validated by Reviewers’ and Readers’ embrace of the book. Publishers Weekly called this intergenerational story of love, loss, grief, and grace “a bittersweet fantastical debut.” Foreword Reviews said, “Loving the Dead and Gone is a moving, insightful novel about growing through tragedy.” A Mariel Hemingway Book Club pick, the book won the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Southern Regional Fiction. Loving the Dead and Gone was shortlisted for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Awards Grand Prize, where it also won honorable mention in General Fiction and was finalist for the First Horizon Award for Debut Fiction. The North Carolina Society of Historians 2023 Historical Novel Award recognized its lyric strength and deep and empathic understanding of working-class daily life in rural and small-town 20th-century American South. I’m particularly proud of this last win and contributing to my home state’s history, its enduring literary tradition, and to recording the bittersweet family heritage that inspired my novel. 

There absolutely couldn’t be a better moment to have this experience. I can see now that every single road from there led to here. As one of my high school classmates put it: “I had to live my entire life to write this story.” And, in a way, I did, with five rewrites of Loving the Dead and Gone over three decades. This was a story that refused to be abandoned, a story written for the sake of getting something important right. 

After decades as a writer, I’ve been humbled by this path. Being a writer is about understanding what happens to us all and being that voice. What can my work show the reader about how to live, how to be human? It’s a deep and hard-won privilege to connect with readers and other authors, to speak to groups, and learn that my words and my journey speak to them. What I’m hearing is this emotional intergenerational story about the legacy of grief and secrets is moving readers and resonating with their lives. You can’t put a price on those moments when someone says, “This book touched me,” or “I feel like I was meant to read this book.” 

Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out.
If you want to write, green-light yourself — no one else can inspire you to begin. Read other authors with an eye to learning the “how” of writing. Find your tribe: a writing center or university extension course, a writers’ conference. 

There, you will be asked the questions that call out your unique stories, build the toolbox that will help you tell them. 

Keep what novelist Richard Ford calls a “book of the book,” recording observations and insights from your real life that breathe life into your characters, from the cadence of an overheard conversation to the shape of a summer cloud. 

Practice counts. Commit to a routine — a place, time of day or night, where you write and do nothing else. Accept the risk of revealing yourself and overcome that fear. 

Use your unique voice: embrace the power of storytelling and explore the depths of your own experiences. Dive into the fractures, the complexities, the untold stories 

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