Going Places, Letting Go (ePub)

Kim Matics is a novelist whose plucky English ancestors immigrated to colonial Virginia as indentured servants. Some who were royalists fled to Canada during the War of Independence and returned to the States after the dust settled decades later. The author might have continued the family tradition of being born and raised in the South, but for an educational accident. The future wordsmith first saw dawn’s early light north of the Mason-Dixon Line at a training hospital run by Harvard Medical School, opposite a zoo with roaring lions.

Winning a series of competitive scholarships paved the way to teaching Fine Arts courses in NY and PA. After a hiatus from full-time lecturing to continue postgraduate research at the University of London, the Anglophile headed for Thailand armed with a full-year Asian Study Grant. Subsequent affiliation with intergovernmental projects led to prolonged stints in the Far East, South Asia and Southeast Asia (particularly Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, and Indonesia and Malaysia).
As a result of a long-standing academic interest in Asia and its cultures, five monographs have been published so far, i.e., Wat Phra Chetuphon and Its Buddha Images [selected by the Tourism Authority of Thailand as required reading prior to certification for Thai English-speaking tour guides]; Introduction to the Thai Temple; Introduction to the Thai Mural; Cambodian Silver Animals; and Gestures of the Buddha [reprinted four times; short-listed for distribution to foreign dignitaries attending the royally-sponsored cremation of the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand on 16 December 2015], as well as scores of popular articles and journal papers.

The Odyssey Trilogy comprises three stand-alone novels whose themes and characters are intricately related:

(1) Behind the Folding Fan (2014) set in Japan;
(2) Revolving Doors (2015) explores parts of Thailand; and
(3) Something Else Again (2016) takes place in Paris and southern France.

Forthcoming works of