Cover To Cover with John Fadely

0:00Welcome. You are listening to Cover to Cover, hosted by Mary Elizabeth Jackson, a show featuring lively conversations with cutting-edge authors from around the globe. From debut to multi-award-winning to inspirational, you will find a new author and book to love. Mary is a special needs advocate, educator, speaker, and an award-winning author who brings that edge to dive deep into the writing world, sharing the journeys behind the stories and tips and tools for all things in the writing world. Now here's Mary. Hello everyone, welcome to Cover to Cover on the Brushwood Media Network. We are America's number one syndicated network and Cover to Cover is every Saturday and Sunday 12 to 1230 PM Eastern time. I bring you a wide variety of authors. I love that and I feel like that right now we're in like a poetry phase because I've got several authors who are

1:06poets kind of in a row here and I love that. It's wonderful. We're going to have some poetry weekends and all of us, most of us, I believe love poetry. So if you're on social media, please connect with me and I love hearing stories from where you are around the world and what you're doing, what's going on and what you love reading and that you're inspired to read because literacy is so hugely important in our lives and we need to turn around and teach our kiddos that so that they have a love for reading because sometimes kiddos can struggle with that. Also check out my website myriagaxon.com. I am talking today and meeting for the first time, John Favley, he lived in Asia for 30 years including practicing law for 25 years in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore. Now his book that we're talking about is called Before Leaving the Island. It was the winner of the 2025 Trail to Table Book Award in poetry as part of a midlife journey. Now it's still hot off the presses so you

2:10can get it. I want you to get a copy of it and you know it's a really poetry is such a great gift. Don't you think John, for people like even not sure where to buy somebody, buy the poetry book, right? Absolutely and certainly to your comment about how to listen and read quietly and increasingly loud world poetry is the cure. Oh okay we need a hashtag for that Mr. John. Poetry is the cure for a loud world right or whatever that hashtag would look like. It's so nice to meet you. How are you? I'm doing great thanks. Thanks for having me on. All right. Well we were talking a little bit before we started the interview here. So I do want to I want to dive into where John is in his life and what he's got going on and okay so you have been well first of all why did you decide to practice law in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore like not as opposed to or did you do it in the States also. I practiced a little bit in the United States but

3:13I came to my interest in Asia actually before I attended law school back in in the 80s and 90s and so I always wanted to try to combine that interest with whatever professional path I decided to go down which happened to be law. So I ended up practicing I would say at least 90% of my career in Asia instead of the United States although I am a US lawyer you know admitted to various US bar associations. Okay so what's your focus for law? I am a corporate lawyer and my specialization is private funds so I spent my career advising people who wanted to raise private funds could be private equity real estate buy out venture capital on how to do that and structuring and negotiating those funds and also doing some transactions with them after the funds were raised so that's my

4:15area of expertise. That is amazing okay so how different this is not about your both this is about law how different is is that there in the Asian countries compared to American law with that particular focus. It's a bit different but actually my skills all translate well back to the US simply because my clients in Asia and say some clients here in the US were all raising capital from the same set of global institutional investors so the the ways that you do that and the skills and the knowledge you need pretty much the same the differences usually came down to local regulations or tax laws or and frankly being able to speak and read Chinese and read Japanese were also important because my clients tended to be people who came from that part of the world but they were all trying to do the same thing as as as fund sponsors here in the US namely

5:19raise capital from institutional pools. I see okay now did you so I think you I think I did hear you say so you you've written poetry have you done it your whole life? Well no not really I wrote poetry and through college and in college I took some creative writing courses I decided at that time that I just didn't have enough experience to really have enough to say through poetry or any other form of creative writing so I said at a side I kind of hit a wall for that reason and of course you know when you're only maybe 20 years old you know there are people say there are two kinds of poets their poets who are just amazing when they're young and those poets you know the sort of Dylan Thomas's of the world maybe flame out for various reasons before they get too old and then there are poets and this is probably true of other writers as well who just get better with experience and I definitely fall into the second class so I I set aside poetry

6:21decided to major in East Asian studies there was a great East Asian studies program where I happened to be going to school at the time I learned Chinese took a year actually after my junior year just to learn Chinese and went back and graduated a year late and then spent some time in Asia working before I decided to to go back to grad school and ended up getting a JDMBA and then practicing law so I didn't actually come back to poetry I guess against your question didn't really come back to poetry until the year 2019 and what really kind of jolted me back into poetry were events completely beyond my control so in 2019 I've been practicing for a long time in Hong Kong as a corporate lawyer and Hong Kong descended into civil unrest the local government decided unfortunately to propose to Beijing this extradition law that would have allowed Hong Kong residents

7:24who committed crimes in countries that didn't have a treaty an extradition treaty with Hong Kong to be sent to the courts of those countries which meant that anyone in Hong Kong who committed a crime in China including an alleged political crime could be sent by the Hong Kong government to China for trial before Chinese court that scared the daylights out of the people of Hong Kong and went against the basic law that the UK hadn't negotiated when it left Hong Kong handed it back to China that in turn caused massive protests over 10,000 people were arrested a couple thousand people have been incarcerated many are still serving prison time and it really marked sort of the end in my opinion of the Hong Kong that I knew the dynamic open Hong Kong and sort of turned it from an international city into what it originally was which is just sort of a window on China and it continues to thrive today but with very a very different set of people in charge and I think different talent

8:28there much more mainland China driven so at that point I started to meditate and I took up a simple meditation practice you know just to deal with all of these changes and once I started to meditate I found that I just started writing poetry again hotly enough after about three decades of not having written it so that was sort of the initial jolt that got me back into poetry and then the second was the pandemic that jolted everybody do you know why do you know the main reason why Hong Kong chose to do that back in 2019 with the jurisdiction and everything I can really only gas and certainly there are plenty of people who know kind of the inside politics game better than me my guess at that point is the mainland China probably trusted the Hong Kong government to some degree and the Hong Kong government presented this extradition bill as something that they thought

9:32would probably please Beijing because you know it would bring the Hong Kong people further underheal there had been a series of intermittent protests in Hong Kong pushing back on I guess you could say Chinese control isn't quite the right word because Hong Kong became a part of China but perhaps intervention in the Hong Kong model in way of life ever since it was handed back to China in 1997 so Hong Kong leadership was handpicked by China and you know when you have sycophants in charge they're not going to be thinking so much what the Hong Kong people want but rather what they think Beijing would want I think Beijing probably trusted the Hong Kong government's judgment more than it should have and the whole thing blew up in everybody's face when it triggered mass protest that my guess is Beijing probably didn't particularly want to have to deal with that and certainly it was

10:33very bad for Hong Kong's economy and it's you know it's standing in international trade and finance so it was lose lose so that's for what it's worth my read of how it happened it was quite unfortunate it sounds like it and you know I will say that it seems like on this show we never know what we're going to get into in conversation or then we're going to get a history lesson I love it thank you very much that was awesome well okay so your poetry what is your focus for poetry because when you know your poet it is it romantic is it cathartic is it you know what is it familial what is your you're kind of your focus for your poetry so I would say my poetry is definitely a reflection of my life but I'm not a confessional poet you know I I'm not a poet who uses I and me you know a lot although I certainly do bring my poems back to myself and try to ground it in my experience in

11:38particular my experience as a mid-lifeer going through a transition that involved me leaving a profession where I'd happily been working for 25 years in a part of the world you know Asia where I'd been for 30 years and coming back to home and in air quotes you know I now live in northern California in the Silicon Valley area but really home had been Asia for a long time so that sense of displacement and how to navigate it really is the overall theme of my book but there are lots of concerns that I have as someone who's been around long enough to sort of have been exposed to various things so I deal with in a few of my poems the protests in Hong Kong I deal with topics of religion that interest me I deal with other sort of aspects of Asian culture that interest me but I

12:39also write poems about writers be it Jack Kerouac or Halleo Zhebran who I owe a debt to and have inspired me as well so and there's there are other poems too they're you know they're poems about nature they're poems about the destructive power of nature etc so it's a pretty wide-ranging collection with an overall theme of mid-life transitions that unifies it well there's the gentleman I want you to check out his name I don't know if you know him but Aaron Poochigian and he's in New Yu Waka and so he writes he does translations like his latest book is on Marcus Aurelius and but he does poetry and one of his other books is based on Central Park and how he used forest bathing to heal him out of something that that happened during the pandemic so he's really fascinating and brilliant guy and I think you guys should meet each other so I like connecting people and sometimes people

13:42say things that I'm like oh I know somebody that I think y'all should connect with each other you know so I think you guys would have a lot to talk about okay so before we started you also shared with me your business that you've opened you're publishing right so this year I founded a press a small press called fifth stands a press and the editor in chief is a someone named Autumn McClintock who also was my editor for my book and the goal of this press is to publish first and second collections so full-length books of poetry by writers who are in midlife or later which we loosely define as 40 enough in other words we're looking for people who have lived at least a chapter of life be it as a professional and or as a parent or whatever before coming to

14:43poetry or returning as I did to poetry in midlife fifth stands up because therefore stands as to an Elizabeth and Sonnet this is what comes after the fifth decade of your life is your 40s so it's what comes after that first 40 years of life and we're looking for people who you know maybe published uh chatbooks don't count um you know certainly publishing individual poems uh doesn't count but if you publish two books already then we're not the press for you if you're if you're at a point where you're trying to sort of break through then really that's the people were therefore so I wanted to do something for people who like myself are in midlife and trying to find an avenue for for their voice so it we had a three-month open reading period uh we received over 230 submissions were in the midst of reading through them um a lot of the submissions are really

15:46strong there's some amazing work out there in addition to publishing this year probably one perhaps two books we'd like to get up to three or four next year we're also going to do an online anthology so if even if we're not publishing someone's book if they allow us um we may put a few of their pieces online to try to develop community so I'm very excited about this I think there's a big market for it um you know not say the poetry market itself is huge but certainly there are a lot of people who have things through experience that they want to say and are expressing it through poetry um so I'm very excited that we can have the privilege of working with some of those people yes and I love that you're providing a platform for these individuals to have a voice and to share their work because have did you do uh is there anyone else out there doing exactly what you're doing not many there are a few uh but really not many and for example this year I was at the AWP conference

16:54in Baltimore that's the biggest conference held annually that concerns itself with poetry and the literary arts generally including from a publishing perspective the one session that I attended that was standing room only was called like writing in your fifties or later or something like that um lots and lots of people are trying to figure this out and I think experience is so important for most poets like I said there's some poets who can write um amazing poetry without much life experience but I'd like to think they're in the minority and there are just lots of things that people when they get to midlife or later have to say and I also think that generally poetry is just of social value even though it's not front and center of a cultural scene anymore the way it was a long time ago uh it promotes careful reading listening and also group discussions

17:55of poetry where people have sort of a metamine you know group a group mind where they can get insights into a piece of work that's worth spending time on by working together so those are all skills that I think are really important to have a happier society and idealistic as it may sound I think poetry has a role to play in helping us enjoy being together in this world a little bit more yeah I think so too and it's a lovely you know poetry is a lovely place to go in your mind you know and when I'm reading it I always kind of try to figure out what was the author thinking at that moment like what prompted them to write what they did like what was going on in their life and where were they I know for me going out in nature is always where I end up writing a lot of stuff because it's just so many metaphors I feel like in nature and certainly if I'm feeling kind

18:58of stuck I just that go out there and then you know it usually opens up for me if I need it too so but um when I first started writing like where stuff that I ended up getting published back in well that was 2013 and it didn't get published until 2017 but it was funny I had like this download for a children's book and um and a moment I was having in uh after that everything that came out was was rhyming so I just wrote everything down it was all children stuff it was all rhyming and I was like what is happening with me I can't stop you know right so yeah so someday I hope to put that in a poetry book you know I just never have but um I think that it's um it's such a deep place to go for reading yeah look certainly it's true for me too that sometimes a line will occur to me and it has a certain musicality that stays in the ear and I'll write it down and you

20:00know maybe I'll return to it later and see if I can build on it writing a poem for me is almost a compulsive act in that I don't know what the poem is going to say until I finished it it's a bit like a sculptor trying to reveal the sculpture underneath the block of stone and uh there's some sort of learning process that goes on there and and yet I've heard other people say and it's true for me too that when I go back and read my poems two others especially you know usually I don't read them on my on my own to myself it seems like they're written by somebody else so all this learning happens at a moment in time but for sure it is something that sheds light on life in a way for me that you know other forms of thinking and engaging with the world don't really do so you know maybe people don't think of poetry that way but that's sort of the angle from which I come at poetry and

21:06and so you know there's a lot of learning that goes on and one of the great things about poetry is that you don't have to be an expert on a topic you don't have to be credentialed have a PhD or whatever in order to write a poem about it right you can engage with whatever topics of concern you know merit a poem in your life and you end up in my case you know I've ended up learning maybe not at at a deep sort of expert level about the things that I write about but certainly you know you do engage more deeply and it's it's the focus is really on okay well what does this mean for me does this add meaning to my life could it add meaning to a reader's life and I think there's always the question of is this a poem that needs to be written or not there are lots of poems in the world there are lots that will be written in the future so I do try to ask myself that question too is this a diary entry or is this a poem you know yeah absolutely and you know that's what a song is a song is

22:12a poem you know in and of itself because you are trying to make it you know you've got to have it very precise it needs to be as little as little verbiages it can be to get your point across but also rhyming you know and so I you know noticed that how much that that happens in music right in songwriting oh sure I mean even going back to the troubadours there was always a big overlap between song and poetry actually even going back to Homer you know the the the Nolan movie about the Odyssey is such a big deal now but you know the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally recited by heart by people who essentially were probably participating in the poetic process I assume over many years or decades or longer making revisions to these stories that were you know

23:13passed down over time so there was always an oral tradition yes Dylan is a Bob Dylan is a good example you know to some controversy I personally don't have any issues with them having received the Nobel Prize for literature but he was recognized you know for a genre that's crossover and and so yeah and and so musicality is important not always rhyming um sometimes they're in perfect rhymes internal rhymes I use I use all of those uh and also perfect end rhymes um but then sometimes I feel that a poem needs to resist rhyming because it needs to resist being neatly tied up in a bow and the poem really needs to kind of do what it's talking about I don't know if that makes sense but the form of the poem requires some consideration because you want the poem to be kind of doing what it says so if resolution is what it's aiming for rhyming can be a great way to convey a sense of

24:17resolution and closure for example rhyming can be for other things too um but the I would say you know the content kind of drives the form um and that's another big challenge certainly for me is I was learning over the last five or six years how to become a better and better writer I had to figure out strategies for writing poems and sometimes I had to ask myself at the beginning okay what is this poem trying to say and then what forms might work for this so I have writing forms in my book a few of them are very formal like have a few Elizabeth and Sonnets in my book which are very much out of style but I wrote them anyway because I thought they would work and you know I have some some other things too um you know but generally um I'm writing in free verse wow that's amazing gosh there's so much to it isn't there now uh what is your we have we have time for like one or two more questions we're almost at a time and it goes by so fast what is your writing process like what time

25:18a day do you like to write or do you have it or is it just sort of like when it comes I don't have a daily writing practice but I do have a writing practice and one of the most essential things when an idea occurs to me I write it down and I might keep a journal that runs 10 or 15 or 20 pages before I decide to go back through it and write a poem then again sometimes a poem just comes to me usually if it does it will be a shorter poem um generally a page long maybe page in a half um I do write longer poems in my book I have a poem that runs about well not sure you call this long the same mid-range eight pages or so I just finished a poem that's about three four pages long usually that requires more of a magpie approach of taking different things and combining them seeing the commonality and combining them into a poem in a way that I hope works so the process is

26:22different depending on the poem but certainly being aware and wanting to create poetry out of life and sort of just having a daily awareness of that is something that I do I think if if if I hadn't done that then there would just would have been too many missed opportunities so that's sort of my writing practice and I know a lot of people have a daily writing practice I admire them to no end that they can sit down for a set period of time every day and write but that's not the way it's worked out for me. No it's okay everybody has their way of doing things now to everyone where they can find you. Sure well my author portal is just my name john fade.com john fadel y.com and you can find my book there you could also find it before leaving the island on amazon barns and noble bookshop.org and also one of my publisher's website wandering angus press angus is a

27:26e and g us wandering angus press will also be on me. Okay that's awesome well thank you so much for being here I want everyone to go get a copy and before leaving the island by john fade and you know leave them a nice review leave him kind constructive thoughts you know and i'll be back soon thank you so much john for joining me and have a wonderful day night or evening wherever you are in the world thank you john. Thank you for being a part of our audience today please subscribe like and share the show with your friends and tune in for the next episode of cover to cover for all things in the author world.