Ruth Ozeki ’70
Meditating on the Story ovelist Ruth Ozeki ’70 remembers the point in time when her dream of becoming a writer took flight. She was a third grader at Foote, in Mrs. Thompson-Allen’s class, learning to write italic lettering with a flat, stubby pencil.
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That same year, she and her classmates received their first fountain pens — “Osmiroid Italic fountain pens with broad stub nibs,” Ruth recalls with precision. “Somehow this early fetishizing of pens and writing implements warped my mind sufficiently so that it never occurred to me to do anything besides write,” she says. Ruth has used her pen to great effect in the decades since. Now the author of three novels published by Penguin and Viking, her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages and published worldwide. Her most recent work, A Tale for the Time Being, won the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and will be published in over 30 countries. Ruth is also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest and documentary filmmaker whose films, including Halving the Bones, have been shown on PBS, the Sundance Film Festival and at colleges and universities across the country. To this day, Ruth remembers Foote as the place that launched her journey as a writer and storyteller. “I became a person at Foote. All of my childhood memories have to do with Foote.” While mining the library for poetic inspiration, Ruth discovered that tilting her head sideways and scanning and copying down book titles yielded word combinations that made for some interesting poetry. In Bob Sandine’s English class, she encountered the power of the teacher-student bond. Ruth and two friends challenged Bob to stop smoking for a month, and offered dinner at his favorite restaurant as a reward. Bob accepted the challenge. He threw out his cigarettes, claimed his dinner at a Chinese restaurant and hasn’t smoked a day since. “I wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for Ruth Ozeki,” Bob says. Ruth grew up in New Haven, the daughter of an American father and Japanese mother, and her bicultural background infuses much of her work. Ruth wasn’t encouraged to explore her Japanese roots as a child, but she has delved deeply into her heritage as an adult. She studied English and Asian Studies at Smith College and later received a fellowship for graduate work in Japanese literature at Nara University. While in Japan, she polished her Japanese at a hostess club, pouring drinks, lighting cigarettes and conversing with the mostly male clientele. After returning to the U.S., she worked on low-budget horror movies with titles such as Mutant Hunt and Robot Holocaust. Summer/Fall 2014
“Writing and Buddhism are both expressions of my life and my understanding in the present moment.”
Ruth took both jobs to support her dream of writing a novel. But in an unexpected twist, it was her first novel that helped pay down $20,000 in debt from her film projects. That book, My Year of Meats, tells the story of a documentary filmmaker hired to produce a Japanese television show sponsored by an American meat-exporting business and her ensuing discoveries about love, fertility and a dangerous hormone — a tale based on Ruth’s experience on a similar TV project. Ozeki’s books weave a good deal of autobiography into their stories. A Tale for the Time Being follows a novelist named Ruth who lives in British Columbia and New York (as Ruth Ozeki does) and has a husband named Oliver (Ruth Ozeki’s husband is artist Oliver Kellhammer.) “Writing and Buddhism are both expressions of my life and my understanding in the present moment,” Ruth explains. “They are both forms of engagement and inquiry, and both require patience.” But like many writers, Ruth finds the process excruciating at times. She finished her first novel in a year, but each successive book took longer to complete. Putting a novel into the world often leaves Ruth feeling like two people: the “writer” who does the hard but rewarding work of dreaming up stories and writing them; and the “author” who goes out on the road and talks about writing. Her next project, currently in the early stages, is another novel, but Ruth is keeping the details to herself for now. She’s back in writer mode, meditating on the next story. 57