Goodreads asked David Joiner:

What are you currently working on?

David Joiner I've recently started a new novel, the third in a series of novels set in Ishikawa prefecture, Japan, that involves characters who make their livings as BUSSHI, or sculptors of Buddhist images. I've long been interested in the life and work of the famous Japanese sculptor Enku, who lived in the 1600s and is from nearby Gifu prefecture, and I'm fortunate to have made friends with some busshi living in and around Kanazawa – good sources of information! My idea at this point is to try to turn one of my characters into a modern-day Enku, who lived a fascinating life as he wandered across much of Japan, acting as a kind of saint for many people and carving over 100,000 Buddhist figures.

For the time being I've set aside another novel I've been working on intermittently for many years, which is set in the Lower Mekong Basin of Vietnam and Cambodia in the early 1990s. More than half of this book takes place along the Mekong River, in a made-up town in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, and in Phnom Penh, Kratie, and Stung Treng, Cambodia.

An excerpt from the novel was published several years ago in the Ontario Review and can be read here (I’ve recently modified the excerpt slightly): http://repository.usfca.edu/ontariore...

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