Kim Edwards
(1989-90)
I was (and am) married to Tom Clayton, also a teacher in the business program and editor of Cross Currents. Bob Ruud was the director then, and about to leave. We had a couple of months overlap with Warrick Liang before our stint ended.
We left Japan having been there two years and having spent to years previously in Malaysia. We meant to head back to the US, but we were offered positions in Cambodia with a new SUNY/Buffalo program. It was irresistable. Cambodia had been closed to the West for 25 years and was just about to open to the world again. So we went, and spent the most challenging and rewarding year I've ever had, living in Phnom Penh and training government ministers in English.
In 1992 we did return to the US. Tom got his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh. I finished my first book, a collection of short stories called The Secrets of a Fire King, published by W.W. Norton in 1997. (One of these stories, Spring, Mountain, Sea, had its genesis at the wedding of an LIOJ faculty member and a community program student!) In 1996 we came here, to Lexington, Kentucky, where Tom is now an associate professor of English. He teaches linguistics and language policy; he also directs the MA TESL program. I'm currently a visiting professor at UK, and have just sent off my first novel, Capturing Light, which won a Whiting Writers' Award last fall. We have two daughters, Abigail, age 8, and Naomi, age 5. They attend a Spanish language immersion school and are becoming effortlessly fluent. I'm jealous.
Oh-and I teach in and help to direct a volunteer ESL program established to meet the needs of the large and ever-growing Hispanic population in Lexington. It's been one of my great joys. We've been in operation for 2+ years now and have had over 150 students pass through.
I still think very fondly of my time at LIOJ and in Japan. Especially I remember the wonderful, winding walk from my house in Hayakawa and up the long hill to the Asia Center. Being in the hills in five minutes, strolling amid the orchards, and the trees studded with beautiful bright mikans in the fall. Taking the train up to the onsen, and sitting in the steamy dusk, and of course the long climb up Mt. Fuji in the dark, wearing headlamps, and bells ringing through the sunrise. Rice fields flashing through the windows of the romance car. Discovering Kawabata. Fresh tofu, from that wonderful little shop near the train.
We've been back to Japan-took the girls to visit Scott Jarrett, who has a wonderful and successful and thriving life in another small Japanese city, and I was struck all over again by what a lovely country it is, and how glad I was to have two years there.
May 2003
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