Please give a warm welcome to Peter Tieryas Liu, author of Watering Heaven! Peter has stopped by the blog today to tell us a little more about himself and his collection of short stories.
First off, thanks for having me on
the site! I’m really excited to share a little about Watering Heaven with Book
Cover Justice readers.
Watering Heaven is a collection of 20 short stories and in many ways, I’m happy it was published in the Year of the Dragon, the year of change. The very first story I wrote in the collection is called “58 Random Deaths and Unrequited Love,” and it was written in 2005. The last story to be written is “Resistance,” written in 2011. Whenever I read through the collection, I see how I’ve evolved, not just as a writer, but in the ways I think about the world. During those 6-7 years, I traveled a whole lot, I fell in love, and I found my voice.
When I approach my stories, I usually start with a theme and an idea I want to explore. The plot details fall into place afterwards. “Beijing Romance” has love as the theme, a love story set in Beijing. A story like “Unreflected” is about identity, as in the case of a girl who loses her reflection. Another story, “Resistance,” came about after a long stream of publications and I wanted to write a more personal story, feeling more confident in my narratives while tackling the social issues behind HIV.
“58 Random Deaths and Unrequited Love” is about desire. Filmmaker Larry Chao wants to share his strange movies with the world but keeps on getting denied. That is, until an ironic, but tragic, set of circumstances bring his films to the forefront in the minds of the public. During the time I wrote “58 Random Deaths,” I was helping out a lot of my friends on their independent films so I was on set a whole lot as a production photographer. Being the production photographer meant I could pretty much go anywhere on set, listen to conversations between anyone, and become like a fly on the wall. I met so many different types of people; scientists, stuntmen, models, architects, engineers, family members of various celebrities, even pornstars trying their hand at independent films. All of them had amazing stories to tell. Bits and pieces of all of those experiences made their way into the story and the title came about when I talked with a friend about the random nature of some of the online films at the time. What if someone just made a film about 58 random deaths?
Watering Heaven is a collection of 20 short stories and in many ways, I’m happy it was published in the Year of the Dragon, the year of change. The very first story I wrote in the collection is called “58 Random Deaths and Unrequited Love,” and it was written in 2005. The last story to be written is “Resistance,” written in 2011. Whenever I read through the collection, I see how I’ve evolved, not just as a writer, but in the ways I think about the world. During those 6-7 years, I traveled a whole lot, I fell in love, and I found my voice.
When I approach my stories, I usually start with a theme and an idea I want to explore. The plot details fall into place afterwards. “Beijing Romance” has love as the theme, a love story set in Beijing. A story like “Unreflected” is about identity, as in the case of a girl who loses her reflection. Another story, “Resistance,” came about after a long stream of publications and I wanted to write a more personal story, feeling more confident in my narratives while tackling the social issues behind HIV.
“58 Random Deaths and Unrequited Love” is about desire. Filmmaker Larry Chao wants to share his strange movies with the world but keeps on getting denied. That is, until an ironic, but tragic, set of circumstances bring his films to the forefront in the minds of the public. During the time I wrote “58 Random Deaths,” I was helping out a lot of my friends on their independent films so I was on set a whole lot as a production photographer. Being the production photographer meant I could pretty much go anywhere on set, listen to conversations between anyone, and become like a fly on the wall. I met so many different types of people; scientists, stuntmen, models, architects, engineers, family members of various celebrities, even pornstars trying their hand at independent films. All of them had amazing stories to tell. Bits and pieces of all of those experiences made their way into the story and the title came about when I talked with a friend about the random nature of some of the online films at the time. What if someone just made a film about 58 random deaths?
“Forbidden City Hoops” didn’t start with a theme, but a search. I knew I wanted to make a marriage proposal to my then girlfriend (now my wife). I wanted it to be somewhere unique so I searched all of Beijing. I really thought the Forbidden City, also the site of the film The Last Emperor, would be the perfect place. As I went from building to building, I saw some basketball courts in the field and I marveled at them. People played basketball in the Forbidden City which was a place you could not even enter a hundred years ago! That idea germinated and combined with the story of a guy who feels a sense of regret for failing to protect his girlfriend during a car accident. I really loved writing that story, and although I didn’t find a proposal site at the Forbidden City, I found a story which, in a sense, became my symbolic proposal.
So many of these stories have these odd backstories, and it’s reflected in the fantastic nature of many of them, like the woman who gives birth to eggs and the man who can fly. The original collection had twenty-five stories in them, and of the five that were cut, I’d go so far as to say that two of them were my absolute favorite in the collection. However, as my editor at Signal 8 Press wisely advised, they really didn’t fit in with the themes in Watering Heaven and made the collection stronger overall. It was very painful though cutting them from the collection!
As for the title, Watering Heaven, it comes from the William Blake poem, “Tyger,” describing the moment the angels were cast out during the celestial war and watered heaven with their tears. It’s a poignant image of what we sometimes feel when change is thrust upon us and one of the reasons why I wanted to use it.
In the same way, Watering Heaven is my journey and I’m so excited to share it with readers. Thank you again for your time!
Being in the Forbidden City sounds fascinating!!!
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