Memories of My Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl

Q: Did you write any of your novel away from home?Ī: I was fortunate to be on sabbatical for a semester when I wrote most of “Skull Water.” My daughter happened to begin college that semester, so I would sometimes have lunch with her on the Vassar campus and then spend the time between lunch and dinner in the basement of the beautiful Thompson Memorial Library writing at some of the same desks I used when I wrote my undergraduate creative thesis back in 1982. Readers may pre-order copies of “Skull Water' at. So we spent some nights all sleeping in the car.” The author resides with his family in New York’s Hudson Valley. It was also very hard for us to find motels that would allow a white man with a Korean wife and four mixed-race children to stay. “It made my father furious that we would all have to sit in the station wagon to eat. “We weren’t allowed to enter diners in the South because we were taken for Native American,” said Fenkl, who’s a professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz. In the 1970s, his family took a cross-country road trip from Washington State to New Jersey to catch a flight to Germany.

Born in South Korea and raised there, as well as Germany and the United States, the author said that being a biracial child made him stick out wherever he was. Heinz Insu Fenkl’s autobiographical novel “Skull Water” (Spiegel & Grau, $28) was 25 years in the making.

Memories of My Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl