We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Judith Turner-Yamamoto. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Judith below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Judith with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where did you get it?
Near the end of his life, my father told a story about my first bicycle, with the training wheels. How he removed them and threatened to return the bicycle to the store if I didn’t learn to ride. And that night, my mother reporting I spent the entire day falling off the bike, skinning my knees, and before dark, learning to ride on my own. Hearing this story, I had no memory of this day or of my tenacity.
But here was a glimpse of the child I had been and a near allegorical tale for the adult I had become, the telling resonating with my resolve and my circuitous journey to book publication, a lifelong dream unrealized until I turned 69.
I grew up in rural North Carolina, in an insular place where it was difficult to be my true self. For women, a college education meant you could teach, period. Though I was a passionate reader, the idea of writing fiction was out of reach, something that someone from somewhere else had permission to do.
At 16, I wrote a story for the Seventeen magazine short story contest and never submitted it, the comment often heard in my crushingly critical family “who do you think you are” echoing in my head. 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. I worked in galleries and cultural nonprofits and then in museums, all while writing art reviews for local publications. I broke into major papers and national magazines, 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, Annie Leibovitz and Lucinda Williams.
At the same time, I attended writers’ conferences and took fiction classes where I found the mentors and readers whose criticism helped me become a better writer and discover my voice. But novel publication proved to be a path as fraught with lessons and bruises as that long-ago day on my bike. 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. 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 20-year period when I fit the 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. But 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. 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.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
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.
I’m now completing a new novel, The Drawing of Angels, that draws from another chapter in my life, my long career in the arts and fine art photography. In the novel, a young photographer and mother experiences devastation when the photographs of her children that bring her financial and critical reward fracture her family.
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;” “I feel like I was meant to read this book.”
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Grit, focus, and drive.
“No one is coming”, as inspirational speaker and writer Mel Robbins has so succinctly said. At the end, it’s all on you. If you want to accomplish something, do something, anything, each and every day that moves you closer to your goal. It’s rolling a snowball up a mountain and traction only comes through tenacity.
I’ve learned that success is all about redeploying the skills that you have acquired over a lifetime of work. I’ve done everything from hotel maid (okay, I only lasted three days), fast food service, made sandwiches in a liquor store, worked in retail, and waited tables in an era when I was costumed as an Elizabethan pub wench, a geisha, and a Scandinavian milkmaid. I went on to be a curator, a Smithsonian Institution project director and head of public affairs, to establishing my own pr firm, and to travel the world as an arts and travel journalist. Welcome any and all experience; it is never wasted.
To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?
In a fluke of reverse positivity, my parents fought me at every turn in becoming the person I became. In their world risk was danger. In one of my most vivid memories, I’ve just moved across the country to start graduate school in a new city. My car has been broken into, and all the possessions I was keeping there while looking for a group house stolen. I call home, looking for the comfort that will never come. My mother says, “If you didn’t have such big ideas, your life wouldn’t be so hard.” I resolved to always do the hard thing, to pursue personal growth over security. I would believe in me. I would leap and trust that the net would appear. And from here, I can see that choosing the hard path led to all the unexpected opportunities, personal growth, and moments of triumph in my life.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://turneryamamoto.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jturneryamamoto/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/judith.turneryamamoto
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/judith-turner-yamamoto-b033bb
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jturneryamamoto
- Other: threads: https://www.threads.net/@jturneryamamoto?xmt=AQGz8deXbJqfY54vwp7QHsqQG-f3nelrta8Q_sdHy8rcGgw
Image Credits
author on in fuchsia seated onstage with interviewer: Susan Sasser Gaudioso, Magnolia Photography
