Professor and fellow author Tony Eprile conducts the interview. Check out all our episodes on our podcast page or just go ahead and subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Stitcher , Google Podcasts or Spotify. Announcer: This is Why We Write. A podcast of Lesley University. Each week we bring you conversations with authors from the Lesley Community to talk about books, writing and the writing life.
One quick note before we start. Ok, on with the episode. Tony: Hi, I'm Tony Eprile. I'm a teacher in the low residency MFA program. Cheryl is from Singapore and she holds a degree in journalism from Northwestern University. Hi, Cheryl! Tony: Cheryl is both a journalist and a fiction writer. She's written for the Wall Street Journal. Cheryl, what led you to move from writing journalism to writing fiction? Cheryl: Well, I had always thought that I wanted to write fiction. I had been a voracious reader since I wasβas early as I could read.
Growing up in Singapore, if you've never been there, it's a very small island, it's very cosmopolitan, it's very modern in many ways. But when you're growing up there, the way to see the world when you're six, you're not going to be traveling the world, is to read.
I read as many books as I could. My parents took me to the library every single week to check out as many books as the entire family could just for me. Well, if I could show them that I could have a salary while writing maybe they'll let me do it. I loved journalism so much. One of my first stories when I was a high school intern at the nationalβat the Straits Times , which is the national newspaper in Singapore, and I was only seventeen or eighteen at the time and my boss somehow trusted me with this story.
He said, "Hey, I hear there's this illegal puppy mill out there you should go check it out. He took pictures, I asked all sorts of questions which they answered because why would a teenager be writing a story for the national newspaper? Cheryl: No [laughs] but it was terrible! It was so heartbreaking to see this puppy mill.
