Thank you to Deborah Kalb for her interview about The Red Kimono. It comes at a perfect time to honor my mom as she enters the next chapter. Click HERE for the full interview.

Jan Morrill is the author of the novel The Red Kimono. Her other work includes the essay collection Doll in the Red Kimono and the haiku collection Life: Haiku by Haiku. She is based in Dallas.

Q: How did your family’s history inspire the writing of The Red Kimono?

A: Neither my mother nor her family spoke much about their internment, so for most of my childhood, I didn’t think about it.

But when my parents took us to visit Tule Lake, one of the camps where, as an eight-year old, my mother had been interned, I watched her stare at the desolate site with tears in her eyes. It was then that…