In high school in the seventies, Mitch Wieland was enthralled by a weeklong Japanese film festival on PBS—Masaki Kobayashi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Akira Kurosawa—which he watched on a portable black & white TV. He followed that experience by reading Shōgun, a new bestselling novel. After graduating from San Diego State University, where he took classes in Japanese and the history of the Tokugawa era, Wieland sold his car for a one-way ticket to Tokyo, arriving with $300 in his pocket. He would spend almost five years teaching ESL at a small college in Shinjuku.
In 2012, Wieland—now a tenured professor and MFA director at Boise State University—spent two months in Japan researching the triple disasters of March 11, 2011—earthquake, tsunami, and three reactor meltdowns—on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The result is The Ghosts of Okuma, which Charles Baxter calls a “wild ride that leaves you breathless” and National Book Award winner Andrea Barrett proclaims, “Wieland’s haunted teen-aged lovers are both wildly funny and pierced by yearnings everyone in our crumbling world will recognize.”
“In my mind,” Wieland says, “The Ghosts of Okuma could be a modern retelling of Shōgun, if the English sailor was a teen stoner from San Diego and Lady Mariko was a rebellious Japanese high schooler named after a Flaming Lips song.”
Wieland’s first novel was awarded starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist and received high praise from The New York Times and Kirkus. The book was later optioned for a film. His second novel was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award and became Idaho Book of the Year, earning endorsements from Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Ford and Anthony Doerr. His short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Best of the West, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, and The Sewanee Review, among numerous other journals. He’s been awarded grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, The Idaho Commission on the Arts, The Boise State Arts and Humanities Institute, The Cabin, and The Alexa Rose Foundation.
Wieland is the founding editor of the award-winning Idaho Review—publishing writers such as Joy Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, T.C. Boyle, Ann Beattie and Rick Moody—and co-founder of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Boise State, where he teaches classes in fiction writing, editing, and narrative structure. He lives in Boise with his wife, Cyndi, and a pack of very rowdy chihuahuas.
www.mitchwieland.com
