Featured Interview With Leslie A. Sussan
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born and raised in Manhattan. If I get emotional, you can still hear the New York in my voice, but I have not lived there in 50 years. I came to DC to go to law school and somehow I am still in the DC area. I share my house with my adult daughter and our cat, Neko-chan. We are surrounded with artifacts that remind me of our time in Hiroshima and our family bonds to that city.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I have never not been fascinated with books. I got my mother in trouble because I taught myself to read by the time I was three and apparently the school system then believed that you had to learn using their phonetic methods or else you would never read properly. I may not read properly, but I do read voraciously. Every wall of my house is well-insulated with bookcases, often double deep. I always wrote little stories and poems as a girl and wrote professionally as a lawyer. My current book is my first venture in narrative/creative nonfiction.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I don’t read by genre because what I adore is the exquisite use of language regardless of the type of book in which it appears. My tastes are nothing if not eclectic. Among my favorites are Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly; Epitectus; C.S. Lewis; Elaine Pagels; Ursula LeGuin; John O’Donohue; Madeline Miller (Circe and Ulysses); and Annie Dillard. As a writer, I have learned the most from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, as well as Writing the Memoir: From truth to art by Judith Barrington.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
In 1946, with the war over and Japan occupied, 2nd Lt. Herbert Sussan received a plum assignment. He would get to use his training as a cinematographer and join a Strategic Bombing Survey crew to record the results of the atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. From his first arrival in Nagasaki, he knew that something novel and appalling had happened and that he had to preserve a record of the results, especially the ongoing suffering of those affected by the bomb (known as hibakusha) even months later. When the U.S. government decided that the gruesome footage would not be “of interest” to the American public and therefore classified it top secret, he spent decades arguing for its release. His last wish was that his ashes be scattered at ground zero in Hiroshima.
In trying to carry out his wishes, I went to Japan in 1987 with my little girl (then 4). I found myself, like my father, deeply drawn to Hiroshima and spent a year there coming to know survivors who remembered being filmed by my father more than 40 years earlier. It took me thirty more years to find the right way to share the first-person accounts that my father and the hikakusha had entrusted to me, but now they are available at last for readers as the world commemorates the 75th anniversary of the bombings — and again faces hard choices about nuclear weapons.
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