Lives Abroad: A List by Mark Sampson
Mark Sampson’s second novel, Sad Peninsula, has just been published by Dundurn Press of Toronto. He also has a short story collection, called The Secrets Men Keep, forthcoming in the spring of 2015. His short fiction, poetry, essays and book reviews have appeared in many journals and magazines across Canada. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives and writes in Toronto. ****Mark Sampson writes: Every act of fiction is, at least for me, a voyage into foreign territory. Even the most autobiographical piece can possess shadowy corners and unexpected landscapes. That’s part of the appeal: every work of the imagination is an undiscovered country. But this is especially true with expatriate writing, when an author is either living in or writing about a country or culture that is not his own. When I began working on my new novel, Sad Peninsula, set mostly in South Korea, a country I lived in for two and half years, I was very cognizant of the expatriate tradition of which (I hoped) my book would become a part. From Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and Anthony Burgess’s Malayan trilogy to the short stories of Somerset Maugham and the best works of Hemingway, this genre has proven time and again that foreignness is a double-edged sword. As writers, we can gain incredible liberty when we put distance between us and our home countries. But we also face the challenge of capturing our new locales with originality, accuracy, and sensitivity.
