Q&A: Professor Ruth Ozeki Reflects on Her Extraordinary Writing Career

Imagine my surprise: it was days after I had finished and fallen in love with “A Tale for the Time Being,” and I had just realized its author, Ruth Ozeki, was in the Pioneer Valley, teaching at Smith College. Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, Zen Buddhist priest and professor whose career and identities as a Caucasian-Japanese-American and naturalized Canadian have inextricably shaped her writing. After graduating from Smith College in 1980, she completed a fellowship studying classical Japanese