Four Questions on Farsickness is an interview series with creative writers for whom place is essential to their work. Each writer answers the same four questions—and featured here is creative nonfiction writer Heather Diamond, whose debut memoir, Rabbit in the Moon, was published by Camphor Press in Spring 2021.
1. Share a little about where you’re from. When you were growing up, what place—real or imagined—most fascinated you, and why? I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and dreamed of moving far away from the rain, gray skies, and encircling mountains. I was obsessed with fairytales and stories about journeys and foreign places. Once I read a National Geographic article about Tahiti and felt homesick for a place I’d never been. When I was fifteen and my family went to Hawaii, I felt that same intense longing when I encountered the smell of plumeria, the brilliant color and light, the otherness of the people. Three decades later, a visit to Honolulu would change my life in midstream. Hawaii would become my home for twenty years and my gateway to Polynesian and Asian cultures. 2. What travel has been a particular inspiration to your work? Spending a year on the island of Cheung Chau in Hong Kong was the inspiration for my first memoir. Now I am working on second memoir about falling in love with a man from Arkansas when I was eighteen and moving to a small town in the Ozark Mountains. That relocation was my first cross-cultural experience. It taught me things about about poverty, creativity, and resilience I could never have learned at home in my middle-class life. Bluegrass music still gives me a thrill, and my coming of age there set the stage for later moves to Texas, Hawaii, and Hong Kong. In each place I have been immersed in new circles of friends, new families, and new ways of thinking. I’ve been forced to introspect, not always willingly, and have had to figure out how to belong all over again. My work reflects the resultant struggles and epiphanies.

Cheung Chau Harbor, Hong Kong.

3. Where do you “escape to” to recharge creativity? When I think of intentional travel, I think of rejuvenating trips to places like Norway, Portugal, Denmark, and Slovenia where I have relaxed over good food and been awed by beautiful scenery. However, it’s the unintentional travel—for love or some other passion—that has jarred me out of my comfort zone and permitted me to see myself in relation to alternative worldviews. Discomfort fuels my work, and sometimes revisiting places Iʻve lived, like Arkansas, jump-starts an idea to life.

Madison County, Arkansas.

4. Where would you most like to travel to next? When my husband and I moved to Hong Kong three years ago, we had plans to travel to Japan, Vietnam, and Indonesia. I especially wanted to travel to Hokkaido and Laos. Then the pandemic struck, and we had to content ourselves with sticking close to home and exploring Hong Kong neighborhoods. Home becomes a relative term when you have lived away and abroad, but my next travel will be home to where I grew up. We are building a house in the woods of Whidbey Island in Washington State, and I can’t wait to move there and immerse myself in gardening, wildlife, and writing.

Whidbey Island, Washington.
Heather Diamond grew up in the Pacific Northwest and worked as a bookseller, university lecturer, and museum curator before turning to writing in her sixties. She has a Ph.D. in American Studies and is the author of American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition. Her first memoir, Rabbit in the Moon, was released in Spring 2021 by Camphor Press. Her essays have appeared in Memoir Magazine, Sky Island Journal, (Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences of the Pandemic, Rappahannock Review, Waterwheel Review, The Hong Kong Review, and New South Journal. She lives in Hong Kong and is working on a second memoir. Find her online on Instagram @heather.diamond, Facebook @HeatherDiamondWriter, or on her website at heatherdiamondwriter.com.
[Header image: Kuanyin Temple, Cheung Chau. All photo credited to Heather Diamond.]