About

How I got here.

I’m a fiction writer, born in London, now living in Philadelphia and studying a creative writing MFA at Rutgers-Camden.

The last several years have been pretty remarkable: when I was twenty five, I quit my job at the Bank of England and went travelling. With the money I’d saved, I spent 14 months backpacking around the world, beginning in New York and ending in New Delhi. I wrote about my experiences on the travel diaries “A Year and a Day” and “No Place As Home“, if you’re interested in following my story right from the beginning.

When I was tired of my back pack, I went home briefly to London, then flew back to Asia (this moment marked the end of my blog “No Place As Home”). Originally, “Suitcasing” began with my arrival in Thailand (in late 2004), and described my return to China, my life in the city of Kunming, and then my first several months in Taiwan. However, that first year of Suitcasing is now offline. Partly this is because I stopped blogging for a while, and transferring all the old posts to a new site turned out to be rather difficult. Partly it’s because 2005 was a hard year for me: more or less running out of money in China, then really running out of money in Taiwan (despite my clever plan to teach English and repair my savings) and generally feeling alone and sorry for myself for a few months. Looking back, I see 2005 the year when I was really trying to figure what to do and who I was after my 14 months of backpacking.

I lived in Taiwan for two years, and now I’m very nostalgic for the island. In time, I found a good teaching job, made many friends, found a wonderful roof-top apartment and learned a lot about Taiwanese culture. I also became serious about writing: I taught myself to write a thousand words every morning, and began the long effort to read the classics of literature and philosophy.

In the summer of 2007, I left Taiwan for Syria. I wanted to try somewhere new; I wanted to live in a country where I could write full time and prepare an application for graduate schools in the USA. I lived in Damascus for six months, and then the coastal city of Lattakia for two, did a lot of writing, and learned some things that are hard for me to express. In February, I discovered I’d got into the creative writing MFA programme in Rutgers, a college in New Jersey, where I am now studying and teaching.

If you’d like to contact me, leave a comment or send me an email – daniel wallace a t g mail . com.

Best wishes to you all.

–

Daniel