Writer, Teacher, Traveler.
Joseph is a former Peace Corps China volunteer
and the creator of The Land West of Long Mountain Project.
When I first came to the Land West of Long Mountain in the long-ago, yellow sun-lit and brilliant blue-sky summer of 2009, I never dreamed that the inexplicably beautiful land of Gansu would become my second home. To this day, the humble fact remains a marvel and a mystery, a joyful wonder, to me.
I’m a 2016 graduate of the MFA Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. I grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts and went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where I trained as a cadet and Army officer candidate for a year, before transferring to UMass Amherst and completing my education in English, Journalism and Philosophy. During college, I studied literature and writing abroad in England at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and at Trinity College, Oxford and backpacked through Europe and the Mediterranean, traveling overland from Ireland to Ithaca to Istanbul, and from Ben Nevis to the Alps to the Greek Islands. It was my first trip overseas.
After college, I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer and teacher in Gansu, China’s arid and historic northwestern frontier, and first backpacked across the high deserts of Tibet and Central Asia, to the foothills of the snow mountains of India, Nepal and the Himalaya, and down through the highlands of Vietnam, Burma and Southeast Asia to Borneo, Bali and the Java Sea. After thirty-one months in Asia, I returned home to America to pursue my graduate studies. During these three years back in the states, I traveled through California and the American West.
I’ve studied fiction at Grub Street Writing Center in Boston and attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop in California. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Journalism with a minor in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Commonwealth College and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from the University of California at Irvine’s MFA Programs in Writing. While at UC Irvine, I also taught undergraduate English, Creative Writing and Literary Journalism.
My study of literature, my military and Peace Corps service, my early life up at the quarries outside Boston and in the woods of New England, and my experiences living and traveling in foreign countries inform the subject matter of much of my work and have shaped my concerns as a writer.
Landscapes, warscapes, travel, religion, mythology and the natural world. The experiences of war and the inheritance of violence, the legacy of American history, at home and abroad, rage and racism, beauty and brutality, faith and ferocity, the mystical and the mythic, love and terror, praise, and the search for dignity. These are some of the subjects and themes that my work often engages and explores. Rooted in landscape, my writing ranges far and wide across time and terrain. What unites my stories is their strong sense of place and the struggles, aspirations and yearnings of the narrators and characters as they experience the sublime and the unspeakable and strive to earn wholeness of heart and to unearth grace on earth.
The stories of those who suffer the sorrows of war and the injustices of society, from common soldiers to ordinary civilians, from ruined but resilient families to solitary outcasts and outsiders, and from peasants to refugees, noodle-pullers to grocery-store workers, is where my empathies and my allegiances lie as a writer. The meeting and the muddling of the human world and the natural world in both its splendor and its mess is a terrain that I return to in my writing, alongside the vast and neighboring country of the muddled human heart and its eternal yearning for grace.
My fiction has appeared in The Literary Review, Forge Journal, Orange Coast Review, The Good Men Project, and Juked. My story about plebe life at West Point, “Out of the Long Gray and Into the Deep Blue,” received an Honorable Mention for Fiction from Columbia Journal in their 2017 Veterans Day Issue, edited by Brian Castner.
I’ve completed a novel, Saigon: A Song of Rage and Praise and Coming Rain, and a story collection, Full of Grace, Pray for us Sinners, for which I’m actively seeking representation from literary agents.
Currently, I’m living again in Gansu with my wife, a college teacher. With fall and winter, I write. Through these cold and dark, purgatorial seasons, I work on my writing and pursue my goal of becoming an author. With spring and summer, I travel. During these warm and bright, celestial seasons, I pursue my second love of backpacking and continue to explore the many fiercely beautiful desert lands and mountain terrains of Western China, Central Asia and the Greater Himalaya.
Chinese New Year trips often bring us to Southeast Asia and the verdant climes and lush seascapes there for a brief break and respite from work and the northwestern winter. But with the annual tilting of the earth’s rotational axis and northern pole back toward the sun and the coming of spring and summer, it is always toward the lands west of Gansu and Long Mountain that I turn my gaze and set my travel shoes.
Over the past decade, I have traveled to over forty-five countries in Eurasia and over twenty-five provinces in China. I’ve made multiple trips to Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai, Yunnan, Western Sichuan, Central and Southeast Asia, Northern India and the Greater Himalaya. I’ve spent much of my travel time in the regions of Greater Tibet: Kham, Amdo, Gannan, Sikkim and Ladakh. My present goal as a traveler is to make it to each of the fourteen countries that border China and the many others that lie just beyond China’s borderlands. Russia, Bhutan and Afghanistan remain.
It is in these borderlands and regions that we traditionally call “frontiers,” where different countries, cultures, philosophies and peoples meet, that I am most interested in traveling as a backpacker and a writer. It is the rugged and remote, physical beauty of these lands that draws me to them, as well as the humble but big-hearted hospitality and humor of the people who live in them, and the pleasure of hearing their stories, sharing in their joys and their sorrows, their delights and their hardships, and learning about their faiths, daily lives, wisdom teachings and holy places. Or simply, breaking bread and sharing a fragrant cup of hot tea with new friends. The beauty of Asia, like the beauty of Gansu, lies for me in the radiance of its lands and the vibrancy of its peoples.
And it is out of the marriage of these two loves, writing and traveling, the two ecstatic pursuits wed by a deep reverence for the earth and a sacred regard for place, bonded with an abiding empathy for the so-called “Other,” that I have created the Land West of Long Mountain Project.
In short: it is the stories of these peoples and these lands of Asia that I hope to continue to learn, then to tell and to share. I am committed to making writing my life and my career, and I aspire to create enduring works of literature that explore the fraught lives and moral dilemmas of my characters and subjects as they struggle to unearth grace and earn redemption and wholeness of heart in a muddled-up world of paradoxes, hypocrisies and often savage injustices.
Works that speak to the elemental and precarious beauty of the earth and to the heart of man and the heart of the human experience. Works that convey both emotional insight and spiritual truth, that speak to the mind and to the heart, that resonate and that endure. Forceful language tethered to the lyrical is what I love. A fierce lyricism and dynamic prose that pulsates between high and low registers, between the sacred and the profane, the beautiful and the brutal, the savage and the sublime, and poetry is what I ultimately aspire to in my pages.
Stories that read like myths are what I want to write because stories that ring like myths and that break into the mythical and aspire to the lyrical are what I most love to read. Stories that sing.
Thank you for visiting the Land West of Long Mountain Project. Please stay tuned for Dispatches from Gansu and Travel Stories out of Asia beginning in 2020. Lyric Essays and literary writing about war and peace will be shared, too, along with poems for travelers and seekers in Pursuit of the Sublime Poetry Project.
For now, if you’d like to learn more, you can read our first dispatch, “Welcome to the Land West of Long Mountain Project,” posted under Dispatches and Stories above and linked below. Please also feel free to check out our Gallery for collections of photographs from Western China, Central Asia and the Greater Himalaya and our Resources page for All Things Long West.
Have a good summer, much wholeness and happy travels. My best to all.
–Joseph, Summer 2019
– Dispatch No. 1: Welcome to the Land West of Long Mountain Project –
