Dear Friends,
Welcome to September’s Substack.
I hope you’ll enjoy this month’s essay Back on the Champs-Élysées. The audio version is available by clicking the link in the blog or clicking the link here for all podcasts. https://joanneleedomackerman.substack.com/podcast
Book News shares information and interviews on my latest novels Burning Distance and The Far Side of the Desert and a link to my new short story “The Governor on the Zambezi” in the Hopkins Review.
The Writer at Risk section this month focuses on Dong Yuyu, a renowned Chinese journalist sentenced to seven years in prison.
The Books to Check Out section features the shared 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning novels Trust by Herman Diaz and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.
In the Scene section you’ll find a photo relating to text from my novel The Far Side of the Desert. Words of the Month share a couple of words you may not use but might like to know.
Thank you to everyone who has come to bookstores, libraries, book clubs and online for my new novels Burning Distance and The Far Side of the Desert. Also available are my novel The Dark Path to the River and short story collection No Marble Angels and nonfiction books PEN Journeys: Memoir of Literature on the Line and edited volume The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate. Word of mouth sells books so thank you for spreading the word!
If you’d like to have me speak at a venue or with a book club, click here. Thank you too for reading and sharing this free monthly Substack On the Yellow Brick Road. I hope you’ll stay in touch!
Back on the Champs-Élysées
I’ve never lived in Paris, but in my mind I have. I get to Paris as often as I can. In fact I am sitting outside at the famous, albeit tourist, restaurant Fouquet’s with its red awning at the center of this famous boulevard, drinking cappuccino, writing and confirming research here and in other venues in France and in London, where I have lived. Both are opening settings of a new novel. If I can’t live here in fact, I can live here in my imagination.
How to separate and harmonize imagination and reality? For me, it’s partly a matter of timing, usually in increments of four to six hours when I write each day and let in worlds outside my own immediate experience and try to shape these. Other hours reading lets in new ideas and perspectives. The rest is spent on other work and community and with family and friends and grown children.
Many of us try to find balance in our lives, try to live a purposeful life, make the world a better place, though people have different views of what that better place should look like and how to achieve it. But whatever one’s politics, nationality, gender, race, religion, spending some time exploring and considering new ideas from our own or others’ imagination enriches the life of the mind.
Part of my non-writing life over the last decades has been reading and working on behalf of writers who have not had the freedom to explore ideas without being jailed or even killed. Yet for all the control jailers may think they have, they cannot incarcerate the imagination. I remember well the testimony of writers who were imprisoned in the 1990’s in the Western Sahara in dire conditions with little food or space and with the expectation that they had been sent there to die. When several who did survive were asked how they managed, one of them answered, “We lived in Paris in our minds!”
(Scroll down to see the Writers at Risk column this month and check previous months’ posts for other featured writers.)
I hope you’ll enjoy my new short story “The Governor on the Zambezi” in the recent Hopkins Review. Published quarterly by Johns Hopkins University in partnership with the Hopkins Press, America’s oldest university press, the Hopkins Review literary magazine has had a transformation over the last years. It continues to publish thoughtful essays, poetry and fiction from a wide array of writers domestic and international and has had a facelift with bright engaging covers and art.
From “The Governor on the Zambezi”:
The nose of the crocodile rested on the water among the lily pads, its eyes squinting, barely open, the rest of its body submerged. Hidden among the reeds along the bank, the old crocodile could lie still for hours. This particular crocodile, called “the Guv,” was rumored to be two hundred years old, though some said three hundred, and one retired guide, who himself was rumored to be over one hundred years old, said the crocodile had been around for half a millennium. No records existed to prove these stories. The oldest confirmed age of a crocodile was closer to 125 years, but ales of the Guv spanned more generations than anyone could count. All agreed that the Guv had witnessed history from the river.
The great-great-grandfather of the senior guide on the Sunset Cruise almost lost his leg to the Guv. When skeptical tourists asked how the guides could be sure it was the same croc, they said that if you’d lived on the Zambezi River for as long as they had, you knew one croc from another. Tourists came from all over to see the Governor. That had been his name for the past hundred years, though everyone just called him “Guv.” He was said to weigh over a ton. Most visitors weren’t lucky enough to see him, for the Governor swam the Zambezi from Katima Mulilo in Namibia to Livingstone in Zambia and then to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. No one had seen him farther south on the Zambezi, and no one was ever sure exactly where he was.
Today, Gani, the senior guide, pointed out the Guv to the passengers on the Zambezi Sunset Cruise like a tour guide in Beverly Hills pointing at the house of a movie star. As Gani navigated the boat from an open wheelhouse, he perched one foot on the cooler of hors d’oeuvres that would be offered to the passengers as they returned to the dock…
I’m honored that The Far Side of the Desert (Oceanview Publishing) was named a finalist in the Suspense category for the 2025 National Indie Excellence Awards. The novel was also awarded the 2025 Bronze medal in the Suspense/Thriller category by the Independent Publishers Association (IPPY) Book Awards.
Published in 2024, The Far Side of the Desert was released in paperback April, 2025. I hope you’ll order, read and enjoy. If you’ve already read the hardcover, I hope you’ll buy the paperback and give to friends!
“The Far Side of the Desert is that rare story – a literary work and a first-rate thriller. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, who has traveled the world advocating for human rights, is one of the few writers today who can construct a superb and complex international spy novel. The Far Side of the Desert is stellar.”
—Jennifer Clement, former President of PEN International and award-winning novelist of Prayers for the Stolen and Gun Love
Burning Distance (Oceanview Publishing, 2023 and paperback in 2024) was honored by the 2024 American Book Fest International Book Awards as a Finalist in the Best Mystery/Suspense and Thriller/Adventure categories.
“Burning Distance is a double helix of a book, carefully plotted and beautifully told. It’s a spy story interwoven with a love story, and the strands fit together in a way that moves the reader effortlessly from chapter to chapter. While fiction, its narrative of the CIA and the Middle East arms trade are very close to fact. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman observes the world of American spies and Arab fixers through the eyes of a young woman who keeps asking questions about her mysterious past until she gets all the revelatory answers. A subtle and satisfying novel.”
—David Ignatius, New York Times best-selling author, Washington Post columnist and novelist of The Quantum Spy, The Director, and many others
Thanks to Monica Hadley and Writers Voices for the recent interview about The Far Side of the Desert. You can listen here.
Selected recordings of past events and interviews:
Interview with Monica Hadley, Writers Voices
Strategies for Living Podcast: Finding Resilience Through Story
Interview with Janeane Bernstein on NPR’s KUCI, Get the Funk Out!
Book Launch for Akram Aylisli's People and Trees with Plamen Press
Why Baldwin Matters Series, The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center
Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café in Asheville, NC
Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York City with Salil Tripathi
Baum on Books on WSHU Public Radio
Interview with Anna Roins of Authorlink
Interview with Deborah Kalb
For more podcasts, videos and interviews, click here
Dong Yuyu (China)
[Sources include PEN International, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Harvard Neiman Foundation, Associated Press (AP)]
While having lunch with the Japanese Ambassador in a downtown Beijing restaurant, veteran journalist Dong Yuyu was arrested as was the Ambassador, who was soon released. However, from that February day in 2022 Dong Yuyu was held incommunicado in what has been called an enforced disappearance. Six months later he was formally arrested and in March 2023 indicted on charges of espionage with little evidence presented and little access to legal counsel. In November 2024 Dong Yuyu was sentenced to seven years in prison. His appeal has been rejected by the Beijing High Court with no reason given. He has been denied regular family visits.
A long time journalist, Dong Yuyu served as deputy head of the editorial department for Guangming Daily, a state-owned newspaper when he was arrested. Never a member of the Communist Party, Yuyu through his writing has advocated progressive reform. In 1989 he protested at Tiananmen Square and served a year of hard labor then returned to his newspaper.
Between 2012 and 2014 Dong Yuyu wrote columns for The New York Times Chinese website and in 1998 he co-edited Political China: Facing an Era of Choices for a New System with essays by liberal scholars about judicial independence. One of his own articles ‘我要送儿子去美国读大学 (I want to send my son to study in the United States) was widely circulated. His son Dong Yifu did in fact attend and graduate from Yale University in the U.S. and currently works as a journalist in the U.S. He hasn’t seen his father since a zoom video call in 2022.
A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2006, Dong Yuyu was also a visiting scholar at two Japanese universities. Since his arrest, he has received the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award and the Press Freedom Centre’s President’s Award.
In his writings, including some under a pseudonym, he called for reflection on historical injustices such as the Cultural Revolution. “He faced censorship and was threatened with demotion in 2017 for testing political ‘red lines,’ yet he never retreated from his principles,” his son has said. “An independent voice like my father’s is extremely rare in China’s state-run media, where most journalists are Communist Party members. He was non-partisan and always sought truth and justice for the Chinese people and the nation.”
“This case is not about justice. It is about silencing voices that speak freely, and it is about warning others not to engage with the outside world,” Dong Yuyu said through his family after his sentencing. His family has recently expressed concern because of his health and has declared, “Yuyu is now effectively facing a death sentence.”
According to PEN International, his imprisonment is emblematic of the Chinese authorities’ use of national security charges to criminalize writing and journalistic work, and to silence independent expression.
To Take Action for Dong Yuyu:
Take Action:
Send appeals to the Chinese government:
Protesting the detention of Dong Yuyu as a violation of her rights to freedom of expression.
Requesting the immediate release or Dong Yuyu.
Calling authorities to drop all charges and overturn detention orders against Dong Yuyu.
Send your appeals to:
Permanent Representative of the Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations
Ambassador Fu Cong
350 East 35th Street
New York, NY 10016
Email: chinesemission@yahoo.com
Website: https://un.china-mission.gov.cn/eng/
Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations Office at Geneva and Other International Organizations in Switzerland
Ambassador Jia Guide
11, Chemin de Surville 1213 Petit-Lancy,
Geneva
Email: chinamission_gva@mfa.gov.cn
Website: https://geneva.china-mission.gov.cn/eng/
Please also send a message to the Chinese Embassy in your country.
After more than five years in prison, Dr. Hany Babu, an associate professor of language and linguistics at Delhi University, has been granted bail by the Bombay High Court. Arrested in July 2020, he was charged, along with other noted Dalit and Adivasi rights activists, for allegedly inciting caste-based violence through speeches at a rally in December 2017. He languished in prison without a hearing for bail and without a trial for five years. Bail was granted on the grounds of prolonged pre-trial detention with a warning that “justice delayed should not become justice denied.”
(Details of Dr. Hany Babu case can be found in the Writers in Risk profile October 2025 Substack)
After more than five years in prison, Amanda Echanis, Philippine poet, writer, and activist has been cleared of a charge of illegal possession of firearms and explosives. She was arrested at her home where she was caring for her one-month-old child and detained without evidence. The court has found that the prosecution failed to establish its case. Her case has raised questions of evidence planting and violations of due process. The delays kept her in prolonged pre-trial detention, taking away her right of a speedy trial and five years of her freedom.
(Details of Amanda Echanis can be found in the Writers at Risk profile in April 2025 Substack.)
An attack on a writer, the shutting down of a publishing house, the torching of a newspaper reduce the space in the world where ideas can flow. Freedom of expression is vital to writers and to readers but is challenged daily around the world. Listed here are organizations whose work on human rights and in particular issues of freedom of expression I’ve been engaged with directly and indirectly over the years. Some of the organizations have broader agendas, but all have contributed to keeping space open for the individual voice.
PEN International (with its 147 centers in over 100 countries)
PEN American Center
English PEN
PEN/Faulkner Foundation
Human Rights Watch
Amnesty International
Amnesty International USA
International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX)
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
Article 19
Index on Censorship
Poets and Writers
Authors Guild
International Center for Journalists
The two books featured this month won a joint 2023 Pulitzer Prize, a fact I didn’t focus on at the time. I had read and known Barbara Kingsolver from her first novels and applauded the deserved Pulitzer awarded to her novel Demon Copperhead. Only this past month did I read Hernan Diaz’ Trust and recalled that he and Barbara shared the prize that year. The pairing of the two books has symmetry beyond the masterful skill of the authors. Trust follows characters at the top of the socio-economic pyramid while Demon Copperhead traces the life of a character near the bottom scrambling for a place in the world and agency over his life.
Hernan Diaz’ Trust spans generations of storytelling and points of view, beginning with a narrative about Benjamin Rust, a Wall Street scion and the main character of a novel Bonds by a fictional novelist Harold Vanner. I had read little about Trust before I started it, except to note it had won the Pulitzer Prize, so I entered without fore-knowledge of its structure or narrative.
As I plowed my way through the first section of a novel-within-a-novel, I almost put the book down. The narrative was third person, arms length narration, conventional and not that interesting, I thought, and I was wondering why the novel had garnered the Pulitzer Prize.
But I persisted. As the points of view and the narrators changed, the novel came to life, at least for me. Trust presents its story in four sections told by different narrators in different styles with the point of view shifting and even the story and history and focus changing depending on who is telling the story of a very wealthy Wall Street financier and his wife in the early 20th-century.
The reader is left to sort out truth from fiction and the stories told versus the stories lived, including the cause of the 1929 stock market crash, the relationship of the very private main character Andrew Bevel and his wife Mildred, and the true role of Mildred in his life and business success.
At the conclusion I understood why the Pulitzer was awarded and also the dilemma the judges must have had between Trust and Demon Copperhead. Sharing the award in fiction for the first time in Pulitzer’s history may not be ideal for the writers, though I suspect both admire each other, and the writing and the story are the reward after all.
From Trust:
Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise: his was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross. According to the back of the Rask family Bible, in 1662 his father’s ancestors had migrated from Copenhagen to Glasgow, where they started trading in tobacco from the Colonies. Over the next century, their business prospered and expanded to the extent that part of the family moved to America so they could better oversee their suppliers and control every aspect of production. Three generations later, Benjamin’s father, Solomon, bought out all his relatives and outside investors. Under his sole direction, the company kept flourishing, and it did not take him long to become one of the most prominent tobacco traders on the Eastern Seaboard. It may have been true that his inventory was sourced from the finest providers on the continent, but more than in the quality of his merchandise, the key to Solomon’s success lay in his ability to exploit an obvious fact: there was, of course, an epicurean side to tobacco, but most men smoked so that they could talk to other men. Solomon Rask was, therefore, a purveyor not only of the finest cigars, cigarillos, and pipe blends but also (and mostly) of excellent conversation and political connections. He rose to the pinnacle of his business and secured his place there thanks to his gregariousness and the friendships cultivated in the smoking room, where he was often seen sharing one of his figurados with some of his most distinguished customers, among whom he counted Grover Cleveland, William Zachary Irving, and John Pierpont Morgan.
At the height of his success, Solomon had a townhouse built on West 17th Street, which was finished just in time for Benjamin’s birth. Yet Solomon was seldom to be seen at the New York family residence. His work took him from one plantation to another, and he was always supervising rolling rooms or visiting business associates in Virginia, North Carolina, and the Caribbean. He even owned a small hacienda in Cuba, where he passed the greater part of each winter. Rumors concerning his life on the island established his reputation as an adventurer with a taste for the exotic, which was an asset in his line of business.
I first met Barbara Kingsolver in Los Angeles at an awards banquet featuring her second novel Animal Dreams. We sat at the same table and talked together. I had recently published my first novel The Dark Path to the River set with a backstory in Africa which she later read and said she admired. She sent me a glowing letter and comment, which she no longer does for books, but has let me use. After I moved to London, Barbara came over to present at a literary event at South Bank which I attended as her guest. She and I had a long English tea together and wide-ranging personal conversation. She was on her way to Africa to research her new novel—Poisonwood Bible, my favorite of her books—and left some of her gear at my home while she traveled.
Demon Copperhead is my second favorite of her many books. The story of Demon Fields, also known as Demon Copperhead because of his copper hair, drives the narrative of the Appalachian community riven by poverty where many of its habitants are addicted to drugs, especially opioids.
Inspired by Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield, the homage lifts the narrative of economic indifference into the mountains of Lee County, Virginia, bordering on Appalachian communities in Tennessee and Kentucky, and also shows the uses and abuses of the foster care system.
Barbara usually has a social message within her books, but her skill as a novelist carries this message through convincing characters who the reader bonds with and finds empathy for, thus opening a lens to new worlds. The large array of characters in Demon Copperhead is related in one way or another to the main character and carry him and the story through the rough terrain both physically and metaphysically. The message lands like common sense in the heart.
From Demon Copperhead:
First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.
On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl tile, worming and shoving around because I’m still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life.
Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he’d spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to go see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn’t beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.
Like a little blue prizefighter. Those are the words she’d use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom’s life. And if that’s how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I’ll take it. To me that says I had a fighting chance. Long odds, yes I know. If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic highway. This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian, nonusing type of mother. Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.
Me though, I was a born sucker for the superhero rescue. Did that line of work even exist, in our trailer-home universe? Had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for bigger action? Save or be saved, these are questions. You want to think it’s not over till the last page.
Image and passage of text from my novel The Far Side of the Desert:
A Moorish king and queen bobbed momentarily above Samantha Waters’s scrambled eggs as if waiting to be fed. Outside the second-floor windows of the Hostal dos Reis Católicos, 12-foot puppets of kings and queens and devils and saints peered into the dining room then lurched away toward the square.
Over the years I’ve accumulated a running list of words I haven’t known from two main sources: WordDaily and WordGenius and from the books I read.
Gravamen
/Grə-vā-mən/
Part of speech: Noun
Part of an accusation weighing most heavily against an accused.
The substance or material grounds of a complaint.
Examples:
"The gravamen of the claimed wrongdoing is that the Laundries exercised their constitutional rights and essentially made no statements to Plaintiffs or law enforcement."
”The gravamen of their complaint lay in the fact that I reintroduced the same characters so often
Organon
/OR-gah-non/
Part of speech: Noun
An instrument of thought, especially a means of reasoning or a system of logic.
Examples:
“The doctoral student followed an organon of peer-reviewed documents, books, and studies to inform her work.”
”Asking the librarian for research work was my organon of choice before the internet existed.”
”As a fantasy writer, he has created a complex organon and magic system for this book series.”
I’ve spoken at bookstores, university classes, book luncheons and in-person and zoom book clubs and look forward to more ahead. I enjoy giving readings and addressing audiences in many venues and moderating discussions on a wide range of topics and most of all meeting readers.
Click here for a list of future and past public events.
Or fill out the speaking request form to schedule an event.
I like engaging with readers so if you are in a Reading Group or Book Club and read one of my books, I’m glad to be in touch by email, zoom, or when possible in person. I can also suggest discussion topics.
Fill out the reading group form here to schedule a meeting.
The line between imagination and freedom is especially powerful here. Institutions can confine a writer's body and circulation, but the work still creates a meeting place that censorship cannot fully control.