Guest Post: Author Alex Clermont

“Living and Writing from a Different Perspective”

Sometime ago, during a writing workshop I regularly attended, someone brought in a short and uninteresting autobiographical short story about being a college student. In the main character’s creative writing professor told him that his writing was bad because he lacked experience. For example, he had never met a black person so their black character was named “Jamal.” Though my criticisms his bad writing lay somewhere else, his fictionalized professor had made a valid point. This is it: if a writer’s life hasn't shown them anything they’ll write crummy and boring stories.

This became even more apparent to me as I was writing the stories for my book “Eating Kimchi and Nodding Politely.” It’s a collection of stories about my two years, and some odd months, living in South Korea.

Although this collection is the newest thing I’ve written, it’s certainly not the first. I’d been writing ever since I first noticed girls. But for years I wrote stories by digging out gold from the same emotional vein. Stories that treaded over the emotions I felt from two or three impactful events in my life. After years of mining those golden experiences though, my writing became stagnant. Like everything else – your job, your relationships, precious metals – life can become dull if you don’t look at it from a different angle, and dull is the best word to describe what my golden life had become when I first left America to live in another country.

What changed was that I began eating rotten, fermented cabbage with my dinner.

While living in another country I made new friends, I ate strange foods, and I was the odd one out in almost any given crowd. I was experiencing things that were totally foreign to me. It was an adventure filled with new smells and sights, and I was looking again at the little wonders that make life and writing, well, the opposite of crummy and boring.

Because of this jolt in my life I was also able to take notice of the things that were always available for to see, though I never did. I could see the beauty in a sunset. I could truly notice the wonder in a child’s face. I fell in love, and I felt the heartbreak that is universal to everyone on this gorgeous blue planet. I wrote stories about those new things, but also these old things that I was able to see again from a new angle. Thankfully, everyone who’s read the collection seems to like it a lot.

The purpose of writing, to me at least, is to express a unique way of the looking at the world. It makes for good writing when you take that perspective, but the same could be said about living your life in general. My book is titled “Eating Kimchi and Nodding Politely” because most of what I did in South Korea was eat and quietly appreciate all that was going on around me. It’s an approach that helped me as a writer, but, writer or not, I think it’s one that everyone should take more often. It makes for great stories, but it can also make for great living.


Bio:


Alex Clermont is a writer born and raised in New York City. He has been a contributing writer to Beyond Race Magazine, covering and interviewing independent creative artists in New York. Alex has been published in several publications such as, Out of Place – an anthology featuring authors from around the globe. He also regularly posts short fiction pieces on his website AlexClermontWrites.com

Alex’s first book, available now and titled "Eating Kimchi and Nodding Politely," is a collection of narratives about his time living in in South Korea.

He also smiles a whole lot. Say “Hi” if you get the chance. :)

You can find Alex on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads and his Website.