It’s Never Too Late to Seize Your Creative Destiny, featuring Vanessa Hua

Guest Vanessa Hua shares her circuitous path to literary success, which happened later in life, after a career in journalism and after age forty, and after the birth of her twin boys. In this episode Grant and Brooke explore the many ways writers seize their creative destinies—by following the thread of their curiosity, by taking up hobbies that spur creative endeavors, and by staying open to possibilities. If you feel like your next Big Creative Thing is just over that next hump, or even more so if it’s feeling frustratingly elusive, this episode will give you a shot of inspiration and the encouragement you might need to keep going—or looking, or trying.

ABOUT VANESSA HUA

Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of a short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, and the novel, A River of Stars, which O, The Oprah Magazine calls “a marvel” and The Economist says is “delightful.” For two decades, she has been writing, in journalism and in fiction, about Asia and the Asian diaspora. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. She works and teaches at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.