Writers Abroad Magazine Issue 2 March 2015 | Page 9

WRITERS ABROAD MAGAZINE

Author Interview
John Eliot interviews author, poet and
teacher SUE GUINEY
I find Sue Guiney a very interesting person. As a
group, the Writers Abroad members are writers
who don’t live in their place of birth. Sue is an
American. She lives in London, making frequent
visits back to the States, but also spends a lot of
time in Cambodia where two of her novels have
been based and she teaches there. Her blogs,
which can be found on her website,
www.sueguiney.com, make very good reading.
Sue Guiney has written and published two poetry
collections and three novels. The first of her poetry
collections is actually a poetry play called Dreams
of May, while Her Life Collected is the name of her
larger collection. Her first novel was Tangled Roots, about a physics professor finding
himself in Russia. But since then, her work has been focused on Cambodia and she
is writing a series of novels set in modern-day Cambodia. As she says, she seems to
be the only person writing “literary fiction” in English about Cambodia today, ie telling
stories about today’s real people and their struggles there. The first in the series is A
Clash of Innocents and the second is Out of the Ruins. She began writing when she
was eight.
Sue: I wrote a play for my school class adapted from a book I was reading.
Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the book and the play itself is long gone,
but I think by that age I already knew I wanted to be a writer (even if I didn’t really yet
know what that meant). I wrote for years before I was published. I don’t think I could
stop if I wanted to.
John: Did you take any formal training?
Sue: Well, yes and no. At university I had private tutorials with the writer in residence.
I wrote short stories then, and he critiqued them. But I never enrolled in a Creative
Writing degree program. But when I was writing my first novel, I worked closely with a
poet who got me writing poems, and then shepherded me through the process of
writing that novel, which turned out to be Tangled Roots.
John: Do you write across all genres, i.e. fiction, poetry, non-fiction, articles about
Cambodia for example?
Sue: Yes, it seems