In 2002, after living ten years in Asia, American poet and musician Scott Ezell used his advance from a local record company to move to Dulan, on Taiwan’s remote Pacific coast. He fell in with the Open Circle Tribe, a loose confederation of aboriginal woodcarvers, painters, and musicians who lived on the beach and cultivated a living connection with their indigenous heritage. Most members of the Open Circle Tribe belong to the Amis tribe, which is descended from Austronesian peoples that migrated from China thousands of years ago. As a “nonstate” people navigating the fraught politics of contemporary Taiwan, the Amis of the Open Circle Tribe exhibit, for Ezell, the best characteristics of life at the margins, striving to create art and to live autonomous, unorthodox lives.
In Dulan, Ezell joined song circles and was invited on an extended hunting expedition; he weathered typhoons, had love affairs, and lost close friends. In A Far Corner Ezell draws on these experiences to explore issues on a more global scale, including the multiethnic nature of modern society, the geopolitical relationship between the United States, Taiwan, and China, and the impact of environmental degradation on indigenous populations. The result is a beautifully crafted and personal evocation of a sophisticated culture that is almost entirely unknown to Western readers.
Scott Ezell is a writer and artist living in California and Asia. He is the author of Petroglyph Americana and the chapbook Hanoi Rhapsodies, and is the editor and coauthor of Songs from a Yahi Bow.
“This is a marvelous journey into the worlds of indigenous peoples in the coastal, seaside mountains of Taiwan, pursuing their age-old habits in the backwaters of empires, Chinese and Japanese, old and modern. Ezell, a young American musician and poet, writes with fine story-telling skill.”—John Balaban, author of Remembering Heaven’s Face
“Scott Ezell is a highly talented, very imagistic writer who packs his work with action and colorful sensory-driven details. He has a knack for showing us a people from an insider as well as an outsider perspective. Ezell writes in a beautiful, lyrical prose style that is colorful and full of texture and emotion.”—Mark Spitzer, author of Season of the Gar
“Reading Scott Ezell’s A Far Corner I gradually became absorbed and actually delighted. Like true adventures this story is about something which, chances are, you will know nothing and consequently become pleasurably informed.”— Jim Harrison, author of Returning to Earth
“There’s magic in this brilliant, lyrical, and deeply informed ethnography. Ezell, happily, never gets in the way of the Austronesian artists, musicians, and craftsmen whose self-conscious recreation and performance of indigenous identity he has so closely and sympathetically observed. So much comprehension has rarely come with so much pleasure and satisfaction.”—James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University
"I’d read all of Fyodor Dostoevsky while still in high school. That was an overwhelming influence. I ran off to New York when I was 18 with a couple volumes of Dostoevsky and Rimbaud’s work. The two didn’t provide for solid sanity. But I wasn’t interested in sanity at the time."
Peter Nowogrodzki interviews the late great American novelist Jim Harrison.
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