Back from the Bushveld

I spent most of the 60-hour, round-trip journey from San Francisco to Cape Town combing through my agent's edits to the book. One of Kathy's recommendations was a wholesale reordering of the stories. She's edited Mary Gaitskill and Ursula Hegi among others and proved that she knows how to make a story collection hum with just a few, deft strokes.

Part of my time in South Africa was spent in the veld, three hours north of Pretoria, researching my novel. With less than a week slated for this, I had concerns about how much I'd be able to get done. The thing is--and I remember this from my time as a grad student in Sri Lanka seventeen years ago--when you're researching arcane historical stuff, and especially when it comes to biography, local experts really do crawl out of the woodwork. It's as if they're waiting for someone, anyone, to just show a little interest. I'll be forever indebted to Clive Walker and Mauritz Hansen in particular, who magically wrangled entry for me to a few key sites that had been closed to South Africans for decades.

Highlights of the trip? Too many to mention, but waking up to two giraffes breakfasting just outside my tent certainly ranks up there. (Whereas, say, blowing out a tire on the rental car in the middle of nowhere does not.)