Hello. I’m John Traphagan—a university professor turned mystery writer. I’ve spent my career writing, but most of what I produce is academic prose. I’ve enjoyed putting my ideas on paper since I was in 7th grade when I wrote a story about a person jumping from an airplane whose parachute doesn’t open. It followed his thinking all the way to the ground and simply stopped, mid-sentence. My teacher didn’t like it. She said, “it doesn’t have an ending!” Um, that was sort of the point…
I started writing professionally after I received my MA degree in social ethics from Yale. I was just looking for work and managed to land a position as a technical writer for the National Head Injury Foundation. From there, I moved to a computer company where I did technical writing and editing for a few years. At that time, I also started selling articles to magazines and wrote as a music critic for a local newspaper.
Making a living writing was great, but producing and editing software manuals was a bit tedious, so I returned to graduate school and pursued a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh. Being an academic inherently means being a writer, even if much of what is written in the academic world isn’t particularly good prose. I’ve always tried to take the crafting of my academic writing seriously.
To date, I’ve published a total of seven books, five of which are about Japan and two of which are about the culture and ethics of space exploration. The most recent book is about uncertainty—I’ll come back to that.
I know. These are rather different topics. The themes of science and culture, as well as religion, have run together throughout my career. My work as an anthropologist has focused on Japan, where I’ve spent several years doing research largely in a rural part of the country not far from Fukushima. One of the great things about being a professor is that it has given me the opportunity to travel all over the world. And travel is one of the best ways to challenge one’s ideas about how things should be.
As a kid growing up in the 1960s, I was fascinated by the Apollo space program and watched the original Star Trek on television. The interest remained and after I settled into my career I started thinking and writing about space travel from the perspective of an anthropologist who studies culture. Much of my writing in that area has focused on ethical questions such as whether we should attempt to contact alien civilizations (assuming they exist).
My work about Japan is largely academic but writing related to space exploration has been a mix of academic and more general books and articles. I’ve found that I enjoy writing for a non-academic audience and have always believed scholars should write for people beyond their own little world of eggheads. Several years ago, I started writing op-ed pieces for outlets like Huffington Post, The Diplomat, and The National Interest. I recently had an article in the American Scientist and greatly enjoyed a return to writing in a style appropriate for a magazine feature article, something I had done more of early in my writing career. I also enjoyed most of the process of editing the article, which was rather intense at times.
The pandemic meant that I didn’t go to campus for many months, which gave me some time to think about my career and writing. I concluded that I’ve become bored with academic writing. So… I started to write a mystery novel. This was a great deal of fun, as it turned into an experiment in ethnographic writing. All the scenes and most of the people in the novel are real and it takes place in the community where I have been doing research for three decades. It’s called The Blood of Gutoku which is a reference to Shinran, who is one of the major philosophers/monks of Japanese history. This will come out on Balestier Press in the autumn of 2021.
My most recent book, Embracing Uncertainty: Future Jazz, That 13th Century Buddhist Monk, and the Invention of Cultures, also veers away from academic writing. It’s basically an intellectual memoir that conveys some of my experiences as an anthropologist and weaves these together with my ideas about culture, diversity, and ethics. I had a difficult time finding a publisher—several indicated it was too short at about 45,000 words. Thankfully, Sumeru Press picked it up and they did a wonderful job with the design and editing.
When it comes to the act of writing, my method is probably a bit weird. I write in intense bursts. For example, The Blood of Gutoku was completed in about three weeks and 20,000 words of it were written in one weekend. Embracing Uncertainty was written in a month. I never write outlines—I just start writing and see where ideas and characters will take me. This approach reflects my basic value structure. I’m not a big fan of setting goals in life. For the most part, I have simply gone with the flow without setting any significant goals. In fact, that is one of the major themes of Embracing Uncertainty. I think very little about the future and even less about the past. Perhaps the most important thing about my writing approach is that I write like I live—as much in the present as possible.
After an intense writing period, I may not write anything for a month or two. Then the cycle starts again. The exception is when I get asked to write something, like an article for a magazine, in which case I jump-start the cycle.
Writing for me is most of all about the expression of creativity. I see creativity as the fundamental feature of what makes us human and I try to engage creatively in everything I do. In addition to writing, I’m a jazz drummer with a trio in Austin called The Botolph Jazz Trio (botolphtrio.com) and I’m always looking for innovative ways to teach. Many of my colleagues disliked online teaching through Zoom, but I found there were aspects that worked quite well. And teaching online forced me to think in new ways about how to engage students.
I believe in supporting other authors as much as possible. To that end, I am a podcaster for the New Books Network. This is a wonderful resource for authors because it typically gets their work out to several thousand listeners. Each podcast is a discussion between an interviewer and the author of a book. Most of the interviews last about an hour and provide an opportunity for the author to elaborate and discuss the content of their book. My particular podcast focuses on books related to science, technology, and society, but I also do books on Japan.
If you are interested in my work, please visit my website: johntraphagan.com. There you can learn about my research on Japan and space travel, as well as poke through a selection of photos I have taken in Japan. You can also check out a link to my trio’s recent jazz album, called This I Dig. And if you want to see boring lectures, you can see this one from a conference at UCLA that focuses on the Tohoku region of Japan. Or this Q&A on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence I did a few years ago at the SETI Institute.
You can follow me on Twitter @john_traphagan, my Goodreads author site, or my Amazon author site.