Professor Mitch Wieland joined Boise State in 1996. In that time he’s created the Idaho Review – a nationally recognized magazine that has published renowned fiction authors like Anthony Doerr and Joyce Carol Oates – and co-founded Boise State’s MFA in Creative Writing program, serving as the program’s director for a decade. Recent graduates have published with Simon & Schuster, Doubleday and Random House.
In 2026, Wieland will publish his third novel, “The Ghosts of Okuma,” about a grieving American teenager searching for his runaway sister in Tokyo. He teams up with a rebellious Fukushima refugee, leading them both on a dangerous journey into the radioactive exclusion zone where they must confront family secrets and find the courage to rebuild their shattered lives.
Wieland wrote a screen adaptation of the novel while on sabbatical in fall 2024. His script was a quarterfinalist in Screencraft’s 2024 Drama competition.
We sat down with Wieland to talk about the new book, his writing process and his experience on the creative writing faculty at Boise State.
Q and A with Wieland
Q: Your first book was set in Ohio, where you grew up, and your second was set in Idaho, where you have lived and taught for many years. How did you decide to set your new book in Japan?
A: I lived in Tokyo from 1986 to 1991, right after getting my bachelor’s from San Diego State. I was so changed by my time there. I just loved living in Tokyo and I found it such an amazing place. In the back of my mind, I always thought that I would write about it.
When the disaster hit [in 2011], I was already working on a novel about Japan. That night, I was watching NHK as the tsunami was rolling in. I watched that coverage for hours and I realized that I’d have to start the entire novel over again because I didn’t think you could write about Japan without including the tsunami and then, later, the disaster at Fukushima. It was such a tragic series of events.
Q: What was your research process like for a book set in Japan?
A: I think that the key part was winning a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Boise State Arts and Humanities Institute fellowship at the same time. I received an entire year of paid leave from my teaching duties and a pretty nice travel budget. I was able to go back to Tokyo in 2012 for 8 weeks and research the novel and interview people that had moved down from the exclusion zone.
When I was there, I went to each setting that the novel takes place in and took notes. I really try to be strongly visual when I write. I try to take kind of a cinematic approach, so it’s those concrete sensory details that really help a scene.
At Yanaka Cemetery, one thing that struck me is they have these wooden slats with kanji written on the sides beside the stone headstones. When the wind blows, the wooden slats hit against each other. It’s quite a distinctive sound. That’s the kind of detail I’m always looking for.
Q: The main character in your last book, “God’s Dogs,” is memorably named “Ferrell Swan.” What is your process for naming characters?
A: With Ferrell, I was sitting at my desk and I edited the Idaho Review, so I had a bunch of literary magazines from around the country piled next to my chair. So I just looked at the back of all the issues at the contributors’ names and I picked out Ferrell from one and Swan from another.
Yoshimi [the Fukushima refugee from “The Ghosts of Okuma”] is named after the Flaming Lips album, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.” The refugees from Fukushima were not treated well after relocating to Tokyo and joining a new high school. So, in the novel, Yoshimi is bullied by a gang called the Pink Flamingos. To make a long story short, she really identifies with that Flaming Lips song. Her real name is Mariko—the interpreter from “Shogun”—but she has changed her own name to Yoshimi.
The main character’s name is Wyatt and that took me a long time. He had several names until I found a name that I thought matched his personality.
Q: Boise State students in the creative writing program benefit from thoughtful feedback from their peers and instructors in writing workshops. Who did you look to for feedback and inspiration as you wrote your new book?
A: I had a really wonderful agent, a woman named Wendy Weil. She was an iconic figure in New York. Wendy had represented Alice Walker her whole career and sold “The Color Purple” as the novel and film. She represented Fannie Flagg, who wrote a book called “Fried Green Tomatoes” that also became a film, and many, many other writers.
So I began the novel with her. She was offering guidance and it was taking shape under her direction. Then she unexpectedly passed away, so I was without an agent suddenly. And in my field, you have to have a completed book to get an agent, so I was really left stranded.
Fortunately, I was in communication with another famous agent, a guy named Warren Frazier in New York, who represents Joyce Carol Oates and several Pulitzer Prize winners. I had published three Joyce Carol Oates stories in the Idaho Review, so I would talk with him on occasion and I thought he was just a fantastic guy. He had lived in Japan when I did.
I told Warren that Wendy had died and he offered to read [the draft]. So he read it three times and gave me tremendous feedback. That really helped it take shape.
Eventually I landed an agent named Julie Stevenson at Massey and McQuilkin in New York and she came up with the final piece of the puzzle, which was to cut the entire first 70 pages that takes place in San Diego.
Then, of course, you always have writing buddies. Brady Udall, who used to teach here and had a tremendous career, gave me feedback. So you rely on the kindness of friends.
Q: You have been part of Boise State’s creative writing program for almost three decades. What are you most proud of from that time?
A: It’s been a great thing to witness the MFA program gain national attention. Boise State doesn’t have a lot of funding to throw behind graduate programs, so all of us in the MFA program, just through sheer force of determination, have been able to make it work.
The track record lately with our graduates has been super impressive. In 2020, one of our graduates, Mary Lowry, published her thesis with Simon & Schuster. Another writer after her, Jackie Polzin, published a book called “Brood,” which won the LA Book Prize. Then right after her, Ariel Dixon published a book with Random House, a two-book deal.
We recently had a student, Ayotola Tehingbola, from Nigeria who was a lawyer in Lagos. We accepted her into the program and she came over and spent three years with us. Wrote a collection of short stories and was able to publish three or four of them in literary magazines, even before she graduated.
When she graduated, she got an agent right off the bat. She sold her thesis to a publisher in Nigeria and one in the UK. This summer, she sent me a signed copy of the book of the stories that she wrote in our program. That’s pretty rewarding.