Check your local PBS listings for the interview of acclaimed author, Maxine Hong Kingston, who is teaching “All I Know About Writing” at the Art Workshop International workshop in Assisi, Italy, August 8 -21.

Quote from Maxine Hong Kingston about her interview with Bill Moyers:
“In addition to The Fifth Book of Peace, we focused on my editing of VETERANS OF WAR, VETERANS OF PEACE. There is a website for that book: http://vowvop.org/ ”

Kingston’s latest work, “The Fifth Book of Peace,” has taken an extraordinary journey. Traced all the way back to the late 1980s, it all began with a rumor she heard regarding three lost books of peace in China. She hoped to track them down to “balance the damage” done by Sun-Tzu’s famous book “The Art of War.”

After years of research in China, she wrote her fictional book of peace, only to see it destroyed in the 1991 Oakland Hills fire. After that, she wrote an entirely new book—this time nonfiction and personal—reflecting on her ideas on ending conflict and her coming to terms with the Vietnam War.

Writing an almost 800-page peace work of her own revealed changes about her future as a writer.

“At that point, I wanted to be socially irresponsible,” she said with a smile. “I wanted to write as I did as a child, about my feelings, my inside.” To do that, Kingston turned to poetry.

The result was the recently released “To Be the Poet,” in which Kingston chronicles her attempts to adopt “the life of the poet,” and in later sections shares her poems.

Kingston, who is also a creative writing professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to continue shaking up how college students are taught creative writing. Kingston doesn’t back away from her 1970s statement that college interfered with her creativity. “Creative writing is a seed, it must not be criticized right away,” Kingston said. “College writing has to be about building a supportive community of writers.” In her own Berkeley classroom, she takes time out for activities like meditation, which helps her students move from a “rational to an imaginative state.”
[Excerpt from Wikipedia]