More About CG FEWSTON

The person

CG Fewston is an American novelist. Born in Texas in 1979, he has spent the years since as a husband, a father, and a man who lived abroad long enough to know those countries as home.

Listen · Read by Willa

Read by Willa, named after the writer Willa Cather.

He was raised in Texas. Brownwood High School, then Howard Payne University, a B.A. in English and American Literature. At thirty-five he left teaching to stay home, write, and raise his son, Thor. His wife is Axton. He met her in Hong Kong on Christmas Day.

Where the years went

He lived for years in South Korea, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and China. He has also been through Lucca and Rome, Dubai, Mexico, Guam, Japan, Macau, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Taipei and Beitou, Bali, and, in China, Guilin, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Sanya, Xiamen, Zhuhai, and Beijing. He studies French, Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Mandarin, because those were the rooms he was in.

cg fewston — With Axton, Tiger’s Head, Discovery Bay, Hong Kong. 2016.

He jumped from an airplane over the plains of Texas. He won a state championship in Little League with the Tigers, and lost one in youth soccer with the Eagles. On Jeju he bathed in the waterfalls. He lived on an island for more than three years, and in a hotel for more than three. In China, in the first months of COVID-19, he spent 104 days in quarantine. He heard Bob Dylan play in Vietnam. In Siem Reap he ate spiders and crickets. He has had Peking duck in Beijing, gone mudding outside Guilin, kayaked the Hainan coast, and ridden a horse across the dunes at Mui Ne. He is a PADI Open Water diver. The dives he still talks about are the sharks and the wrecks.

He has been a Chicago Bears fan since 1984.

What he keeps

He reads in long stretches. In six months he read all six volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. He has read Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the four volumes of The Masks of God, and he has read the King James Bible through. In 2018 he fasted on water for 22 days and 22 nights, and wrote the days down. He gave his hair to Locks of Love. In Rome he had a private viewing of the Vatican museums.

The degrees came in this order. An M.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership, with honors, from Jones International University in Colorado. An M.A. in Literature, with honors, from Stony Brook, where the thesis “An Unnatural Demise” was nominated for the Deborah Hecht Award. An M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Fiction from Southern New Hampshire University. He was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome and a Visiting Fellow at City University of Hong Kong. He has been a member of the Hemingway Society, Americans for the Arts, PEN America, and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.

Born Texas, 1979
Home Husband to Axton. Father to Thor. Left teaching at 35 to write and raise him.
Lived South Korea, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China
Languages French, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin

The name

Fewston is a pen name, and a phonetic spelling of Fuston. C.G. is a family name handed down. On the family account, Fuston comes from Fust. The old German word meant fist, and was given to a man known for strength. The Fusts were a burgher family in Mainz, traceable to the early thirteenth century. Until 1506 the name was written Fust. Peter Schöffer, dedicating a German Livy to the emperor, called his grandfather Faust, and the family took that spelling. That is the name attached to the story of Doctor Faustus. It is not the same as a proved line from Mainz to Texas.

Johann Fust (c. 1400–1466) was the Mainz financier who advanced money to Gutenberg, sued him in 1455, and with his son-in-law Peter Schöffer printed the 1462 Bible. American name books give Fuston a different reading: an altered form of the English Forston, often written Furston in the sixteenth century. In the 1840 census the name sits mostly in Tennessee. Rhinelanders did settle in Texas after the seventeenth century. The two accounts can both be true of some families, and neither has been tied, on paper, to this one.

What is on paper is Brownwood. William Clarence Fuston was born March 24, 1912, in Erath County. He was the first Brownwood police officer killed in the line of duty. On February 3, 1939, at the Del Mar Courts, he was questioning William Thomas Haley, a jailbreaker out of Palo Pinto County. Haley shot him four times. He died an hour later at Medical Arts Hospital. He was 27, a member of Coggin Avenue Baptist Church, and was buried at Greenleaf Cemetery. He left a wife, his mother Ruby Fuston, and two sisters, Lila Gilbreath and Irene Williams. His name is on panel 25-W, line 23, of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.

What he has finished

In 2011 he studied under Dr. Ann P. Saab at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, a post-baccalaureate certificate in Global Studies. The course was “Current Problems in the Middle East: An Historical Perspective.” That work led to A Time to Love in Tehran.

Diver PADI Open Water
Service Locks of Love, certificate of appreciation
Writing “Revive Your Writing,” Clemson University
Language “Chinese for Beginners,” Peking University
Study Philosophy, and E-Learning and Digital Cultures, University of Edinburgh
Study Sustainable Development, and The Age of Sustainable Development, Columbia University
Study The Music of the Beatles, with distinction, University of Rochester
Study History of the Slave South, with distinction, University of Pennsylvania
Study Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World, University of Copenhagen
Study Søren Kierkegaard, University of Copenhagen
Study Successful Negotiation, University of Michigan
Study Fantasy and Science Fiction, University of Michigan
Study English Composition I, with distinction, Duke University
Study Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence, with distinction, Case Western Reserve
Study Total Leadership, with distinction, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

For the evenings

He has watched whole runs, not samples. Among them: Quantum Leap, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Lost, The Sopranos, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and Game of Thrones. The ones marked in his own list as watched with Axton include Friends, Seinfeld, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. He has also read books aloud to her.

The other half of that habit is the coursework above. One part is the screen. The other is the certificate.

In print

Stories, essays, and photographs have appeared in HCE Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Penmen Review, Expat Living, The American Conservative, The American Spectator, American Thinker, Intellectual Conservative, Foreign Policy News, Sediments, Ginosko, GNU Journal, Prachya Review, Driftwood Press, The Missing Slate, Gravel, and others. For several years he wrote for Tuoi Tre, in Vietnam. “The Girl on the River Kwai” was a finalist for the 2019 Adelaide Literary Award for best short story. “Lazarus, Come Forth!” was highly commended in the 2009 Tom Howard contest. A Time to Love in Tehran took gold from Literary Classics in 2015. Little Hometown, America took gold in the 2020 Human Relations Indie Book Awards.