Celebrity Travel: Go away with Heinz Insu Fenkl
Heinz Insu Fenkl’s autobiographical novel “Skull Water” (Spiegel & Grau, $28) was 25 years in the making. Born in South Korea and raised there, as well as Germany and the United States, the author said that being a biracial child made him stick out wherever he was. In the 1970s, his family took a cross-country road trip from Washington State to New Jersey to catch a [Military Airlift Command] flight to Germany. “We weren’t allowed to enter diners in the South because we were taken for Native American,” said Fenkl, who’s a professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz. “It made my father furious that we would all have to sit in the station wagon to eat. It was also very hard for us to find motels that would allow a white man with a Korean wife and four mixed-race children to stay. So we spent some nights all sleeping in the car.” The author resides with his family in New York’s Hudson Valley. Readers may pre-order copies of “Skull Water" at https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/skullwater.
Q: Did you write any of your novel away from home?
A: I was fortunate to be on sabbatical for a semester when I wrote most of “Skull Water.” My daughter happened to begin college that semester, so I would sometimes have lunch with her on the Vassar campus and then spend the time between lunch and dinner in the basement of the beautiful [Frederick Ferris] Thompson Memorial Library writing at some of the same desks I used when I wrote my undergraduate creative thesis back in 1982. That undergraduate thesis was the beginning of my first novel, “Memories of My Ghost Brother” [which is] the prequel to “Skull Water.”
Q: What foreign languages do you speak?
A: I speak [fluent] Korean and [some] German. Now that I’m past 60, it’s much harder to retain new vocabulary, but I used to be good with languages in my youth!
Q: What is your best and/or worst vacation memory?
A: One of my best vacation memories is my wife and I wheeling our baby daughter down the street in Cape May with nearly every passerby stopping to say hello to her. We were on our way to eat at a restaurant and taking our daughter along in a deluxe high chair that had wheels like a stroller. My worst vacation memory is of tripping and nearly falling off a 1,000-foot cliff in Yosemite wearing a 60-pound backpack. I survived with some minor injuries, but I still have scars.
Q: What would be your dream trip?
A: I would love to take my wife and daughter on a long cultural vacation to visit major museums and then rural landscapes in Korea, Japan and Europe. Our list of cities would be Seoul, Daegu, Busan, Jeju, Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris, London, Munich, Berlin, Prague, Barcelona, Madrid, Florence, Venice and Bern.
Q: What is your guilty pleasure when you're on the road?
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