Clifford Garstang grew up in the Midwest and received a BA from Northwestern University. After serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea, he earned an MA in English and a JD, both from Indiana University, and practiced international law in Singapore, Chicago, and Los Angeles with Sidley Austin, one of the largest law firms in the United States. Subsequently, he earned an MPA in International Development from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and worked for Harvard Law School as a legal reform consultant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. From 1996 to 2001, he was Senior Counsel for East Asia at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., where his work concentrated on China, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Garstang received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Cream City Review, The Baltimore Review, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere and has received Distinguished Mention in the Best American Series. He won the 2006 Confluence Fiction Prize and the 2007 GSU Review Fiction Prize, and has had a Walter E. Dakin Felloswhip to the Sewanee Writers' Conference and scholarships to both Sewanee and the Indiana University Writers' Conference, as well as residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

He is the editor of Prime Number Magazine and currently lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  

Q&A

Q: Why did you write this book?

A: When I first moved to rural Virginia, I felt like an outsider. But when I looked around, just about everyone I met was an outsider in one way or another--their political views weren't mainstream, or their lifestyle choices were nontraditional. And it intrigued me to think about how everyone struggles to fit in, whether it's in a community or a family or a culture. That was the genesis of the book.

Q: In an Uncharted Country is a collection of linked stories. What does that mean?

A: The twelve stories in the book are connected in three ways: overlapping characters, a shared setting, and recurring themes. Some of the stories are more closely linked than others. For example, three of the stories, at the beginning, middle and end of the book, follow two brothers at various stages of their lives. All of the stories, though, are about characters searching for identity and for a sense of belonging in their families and community.

Q:  Why a collection of stories instead of a novel?

A: I love novels, and am working on one now, but stories are a real pleasure to write and read because they are compact and can explore a variety of situations and characters. In this case, I wrote one of the stories and realized that in the process I had created characters about whom I wanted to know more. And so I gave them their own stories, which meant I had to invent fuller lives for them than they’d had when they were minor characters.

Q: Have the stories been published in magazines?

A: Almost all of the stories in In an Uncharted Country have appeared in literary journals such as The Baltimore Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and REAL. I’m grateful to the editors of those magazines for choosing my stories for publication.

Q: You practiced law for many years. What made you turn to fiction writing?

A: I have always loved fiction and wanted to write. In fact, before law school I got a Masters in English because I thought it would help my writing. At the time I don’t think I knew what an MFA was, but in any case I needed to broaden my knowledge of contemporary literature, so that was my focus. At the same time, though, I was interested in international law and my legal career beckoned, until I finally decided at about the time the new millennium rolled around that I wanted to write full time.

Q: Has your international law background had an influence on your writing?

A: The “law” part not so much, at least not yet, but the “international” part without question, because I’ve spent so much time living in Asia. One of the stories in this book is set partly in China, and I’m working on other projects with similar cross-cultural settings. There has been an indirect influence, too, I think, because I’m always interested in the challenges faced by the outsider—whether that’s an American abroad, or a visitor to the United States, or just someone who finds himself in an unfamiliar setting.