I could tell multiple stories within the story of how I became a writer. It’s an occupational hazard.  Scratch the surface of any story, as many writers know, and a multitude of sedimented stories lie in waiting.

But I have never been good at the through line: the theme that connects all parts of the story, the arc, the overarching bridge.  The spine that holds everything upright. I’m trying to focus on the art of the through line.

We could tell my becoming-a-writer story in rising action:

Ever since I was a little girl—yes, that kind of rising action. Reading books by the hundreds; my dad was a librarian, after all.  He would check out all of the Caldecott books, stack by stack, and bring them home. I was drawn to books about young women who were writers. Jo in Little Women. Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon. Harriet the Spy. Anne Frank. Summers were library reading programs with little colored dot stickers to mark progress on a paper chart. Journals, diaries.  On my desk were beautiful notebooks that I received as presents but never allowed myself to write in, thinking that I needed to write only beautiful things inside.  A secondhand store copy of Writer’s Market on the shelf in my childhood bedroom. Writer’s Digest in my mailbox when I was thirteen years old. When I was ten years old my father died, and I found so much comfort in Vicky writing poetry in A Ring of Endless Light.

Summer school meant writing camps. Between seventh and eighth grade was the summer my mother cashed in her stocks and savings so I could take Expository Writing with other “gifted kids” at Scripps College. 

I say “I,” but I mean “we.” Not wanting me to fly alone and live in the dorms, my mom and my sister and I drove to Southern California and stayed in a Motel 6 for three weeks. We ate at many buffet restaurants and drank a lot of Ovaltine. During the day my little sister and my mother went to Del Amo Mall and got their ears double pierced together. I wrote all my homework by hand at the little round table in the motel room. 

So my family’s support, absolutely: essential.

I started writing essays for myself in middle school and returned to writing personal essays in college. Many of them have been like this one: vignettes, snapshots, scrapbooks of words, closeups, portraits. Larger landscapes have—until this year—escaped me in my writing life. As I blogged, I went from posts of 700 to 1000 words. My default mode is usually vignette to vignette. I have written two-thirds of a memoir in chapters, but struggle with the through line, some five years later. More recently I’ve worked on the braided essay, the weaving together of several distinct threads. As much as I love this format, I also wonder if it’s cheating, that way of creating a through line. It asks the reader to do the connecting. And see? I haven’t really introduced my through line yet.

We could also tell my becoming-a-writer story in falling action:

I wrote a college thesis, a Master’s essay, doctoral exams, then a dissertation—yes, that kind of falling action.  Read more books by the hundreds. I wrote job application letters, course descriptions, syllabi, a third-year review file, a tenure file. Notes to prepare for several appeal meetings. Then a request to move my office across campus for my last year, the year I called “my year of shame.” 

When I left academia, I began writing job application letters again, dutifully, three times a week as required by the unemployment office. I started to picture myself elsewhere: different colleges, different states, different employers, and different arenas. There were house payments to make, credit card bills to pay, student loans to defer, shoes to buy for growing daughters.

In between the rising and the falling action stories, I had met the boy who became the man who became my husband. 

Part of the first few years of our relationship were long distance, and we wrote letters to each other. The first letter he wrote to me was when I was at summer school, another creative writing camp, in Oregon. The back of the envelope had a stamp from the mail order company Columbia House—he’d taken the stamp for The Princess Bride soundtrack, because he knew it was one of my favorite movies—and written “As you wish” beneath it.

He’s known me well. During the worst of the falling action years he watched me reach for rising action again. I could get a new teaching job! I could be a department head at the university where we got our doctoral degrees!  I could be an instructional designer, a curriculum developer, a college counselor! I read books on personal change, habit changes, career transitions, Act IIs, biographies. Julia Child became one of my heroes, as she’d reinvented herself at 35. I wrote more job applications, I revised text on community college websites. I was dutiful and practical and beginning to despair.

After I took a questionnaire from the classic  job hunters’ manual, What Color Is Your Parachute?, my husband just shook his head, bemused.

“Ever since I’ve known you,” he said, “you’ve wanted to be a writer. Why you don’t just go and do that?”

He had reminded me of my through line. 

We’ve been together for almost 29 years, and married for twenty years this month. Here’s what I want you to know about him in the story of me becoming a writer: 

He helped me set up this blog. The blog led to writing practice, which led to a writing portfolio. People and places began to ask me to write for them. 

After I fumbled for a year through my new elevator speech of “I used to be a professor,” he said firmly, “No. You’re a writer.” 

He helped me design my business cards that I could hand out: the ones that say, “Tamiko Nimura, Freelance Writer.” 

He changed his career to one which could support our family financially—writing could not—and continues to do that today. 

He is my first reader, my best reader. If you’ve read any of my published writing, chances are he’s read it first. Because I’m writing this as a present, this piece is a rare exception. 

Because he’s not reading this first, I already know I’ve used too many commas. Where I would typically like to pause, he urges me to keep moving forward.

I am a writer now. I’ve just finished writing my first complete book this year. There are still many more stories within the story of how I became a writer. But in all of them, he is my through line: the spine that holds so much upright.

Happy 20th anniversary, Josh. Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I can’t keep track of you,” a friend said to me in the grocery store parking lot yesterday.

“I can’t keep track of me either!” I said.

May 2017 is shaping up to be an exciting month for me.

In print, you can find me talking about David Ishii’s sadly-missed bookstore in the anthology Ghosts of Seattle Past.

On May 6, find me at the Atlas Obscura Central District/Chinatown-International District Atlas Obscura walking tour in Seattle. I’ll be giving a reading from the Ghosts of Seattle Past anthology.

On May 10, I’ll be presenting more recent work in the Artists UP showcase.

On May 18, my colleague Michael Sullivan and I am planning a Japanese American Day of Remembrance for my adopted hometown, Tacoma.

On May 24, my author interview will be featured in Deesha Philyaw’s monthly column, VISIBLE, at The Rumpus. (Squeal!). I talk about my writing projects there.

(Oh, and last month my friend Sandy Evans featured my “advice to my 15-year-old-self” on her author blog. Go read her compelling middle grade novel, This Is Not A Werewolf Story.)

And then, summer will be quickly upon us. Let’s hope for more sun, Seattle/Tacoma.

Thanks to Natasha Moni, whose poetry book The Cardiologist’s Daughter is coming out soon, I’ve been tagged in the Great Blog Tour.

1. What am I working on?
I have a couple of personal essays in the works right now. The first one is in a yearlong series about being Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest, for Discover Nikkei. This next essay is about the Japanese American tradition of Obon in Tacoma. I’m also revising an essay about my job transition, titled “What Remains.” I’ve gotten some wonderful feedback from a writing partner but haven’t been able to revise based on that feedback yet.

When school starts I’ll be back to work on my book, a memoir that weaves together my dad’s WWII incarceration experience (and writing) with my written and my artist sister’s visual responses to that history.

If I’m being honest, it’s been gratifying to write and publish so much material online for the last few years, because of the speed and capacity for response. However, I worry sometimes that I’m writing too often for the instant “hit” of publishing something quickly and having people respond. I’m looking forward to going back to the book again, because so much of that material is going to be offline first and it will have more time to percolate.

2. How does my work differ from others in its genre?
When I was a graduate student, I did a summer project about where “ethnic” literature was shelved in bookstores. This was a time when Borders was still around, and had created a African American section, usually next to the “fiction” section. The paper became a project about questioning the categories “ethnic” and “literature,” and where I wanted ethnic literature to be shelved.

I concluded, shamelessly, that I wanted it all. I wanted a separate ethnic literature section for readers who need and want a separate section, who feel power in critical mass. I wanted the enclave and the refuge, I wanted integration and intersection and coalition. I wanted “ethnic” books to be shelved in Literature, because they, too, sing Literature.

As a writer, that’s still what I want. When I think about where I want my work to be shelved, I hope for multiple cameo appearances: on the memoir shelves, on the Ethnic Studies and Asian American and Japanese American Studies shelves, on the essay shelves, and even on the Literature shelves. I would love to see my book facing out on any bookshelf in an independent bookstore (or a library) with a handwritten staff recommendation.

My work is different from others because it keeps nudging the boundaries of who and what belongs in each of these genres.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I write about any subject I’ve chosen (usually family, food, loss, books) because those are the subjects that I love, that are always with me.

Why I write: I write to understand something that I can only understand through the act of writing. Sometimes I write wanting to please people, as a present for them; sometimes I write despite knowing that I will make people upset. I write because writing has been a cerebral act for me for far too long (as a recovering academic) and because I want it to be cerebral and emotional. I write to get back to my heart and my gut, to what feels true. And I write because I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, ever since I was a little girl reading about little girls and young women who wrote. And I write because the best writing—really, the best art—makes you want to create something yourself. I’ve been surrounded by some of the best writing for my entire life. And I like to make things. I like the pleasure of having an object that says, however imperfectly, that I have been here.

4. How does my writing process work?
I’m still a poet in some ways, so there are times that I will begin with an image or a moment that grips me. Then I will write towards that image, or begin with that image and see where it takes me. I’d like to change up my process this year, and maybe experiment with changing settings—writing in a museum for a while, or by the waterfront, instead of cafes where I usually write.

Most of the time, though, I will begin with mentally clearing the space. Sometimes that looks like staring out the window, or writing a couple of quick e-mails or browsing. Then I will begin with notes. Sometimes the notes are handwritten, but most of the time they are collections of lines in a computer document. That will take a few days. Then I’ll begin by picking one or more of those lines or notes, and write about that for a while without stopping. Then the bowl starts to rise from the pottery wheel, and sometimes it will just sink back into spinning clay again. I know I’m onto something when a part of my body tenses up, whether it’s my heart going faster, my gut clenching, or my head buzzing.

Lately, as I’ve been writing about especially difficult topics, I’ve started with something that already makes me feel: the pictures from my pilgrimage to Tule Lake this summer, a video of my godsister playing piano, an essay about grief by Cheryl Strayed, a song I heard after my second daughter was born. I’ll sit with those things for a few minutes and let those objects do their emotional work, beginning to tap into the wellspring of emotion that’s beneath. Then I’ll write, draft, write, read it to myself in my mind. When I think it’s ready, I’ll show it to my husband Josh, who is my first reader. He’s a composer, so we’re able to talk about theme and structure and form and rhythm together. After that it may be time to send it to another friend, another reader, or in for publication.

I’m tagging three writer friends who also live in the Pacific Northwest: Sonora Jha, Bryn Gribben, and Renee Simms. Definitely time to check out their writing, if you haven’t already.

(for Josh)
(I know I’d planned other topics and they’ll happen here eventually, but this one wrote itself today)

“With music, repetition is the prerequisite to love.”

As a college freshman, I didn’t know that my music professor was one of the preeminent music historians of his time. As an aspiring writer, what I did know was that Professor Richard Taruskin had a knack for a beautiful phrase on a syllabus. Repetition as the prerequisite to love. It’s a phrase that I stared at over and over, as I listened to those four beige Music 27 cassettes (also known as “clapping for credit”), pressing play, and rewind, and play again. I didn’t know that repetition would be essential for me as a writer, too.

Repeating something that much in order to love it? It seems counterintuitive. And of course repetition is necessary, as even Josh (composer of avant-garde music that he is) would tell you. Of course it’s all about repetition, any fan of pop music would tell you: just three chords for the truth. Our ears love, even crave, repetition.

I am thinking about repetition today, feeling what a privilege it is to learn beautiful music by performing it. Repetition is crucial: learning it note by note, measure by measure, rest by rest, movement by movement. And then the rehearsals: over and over and over, until the music has inscribed new pathways in your muscles and your brain. I can still sing beautiful pieces of music to myself, even the tenor and bass parts—a moveable feast.

*****

I have to amend my professor’s saying: if repetition is the prerequisite to love, interruption of the repetition is the prerequisite to memory.

I am listening to Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, the first big choral piece I ever sang in college with the UC Women’s Chorale. As a mostly amateur chorus, it’s amazing that we got to perform what we did in those four years: requiems, Carmina Burana, strange swooping songs set to e.e. cummings poetry, Croatian and French folk songs. Few of us were music majors. When I auditioned, I could barely read music. But somehow I got in, and it’s the Requiem that I remember the most.

In Chorale I learned something about alto pride. Those sopranos taking all the pretty melody, getting all the attention? Forget them! Altos get to sing down into our chests; we feel the buzz, we feel the burn. We got to perform most of our range in the Requiem, which is a mass, as in a religious mass for dead souls, usually performed at a funeral. As an alto, I love Fauré for how he gave us most of a movement (the Offertory), a duet with tenors–how often do altos get their own movement? Then again, in the Sanctus movement, I get a little upset with Fauré for letting those sopranos go on and on, floating like little cherubim, making us altos wait for rests and rests and pages and chiming in with one measly little note at the end of the movement. I can just about forgive him, though, for giving the sopranos that one beautiful high note of “lux,” light, a cappella in Paradisum, opening the door to light for the rest of us.

Then oh, the “Libera Me” movement. At dress rehearsal we had just finished singing the Dies Irae. It’s about the shaking of the earth, about God’s wrath and anger, the day of “exceeding bitterness.” Then someone rushed into the practice space at the church, telling us that we had to leave. The Rodney King verdict had been released that week: the telephone pole outside the church was on fire.

People were looting and breaking windows on Telegraph Avenue. In the crowded car ride back to our dorm, I glanced once down that street. Police officers in riot gear stood at every corner. It was nothing like the tie-dye shirts, free love, and bookstore-crowded street that had convinced me to attend Cal. Frightened groups of us sang the Offertory softly to ourselves in the car, all the way back to our dorms. It’s a plea, and it’s an offering. That night music was what we had to counter the broken glass on the sidewalk, the barricades next to our place of higher education.

Few of us understood what was at stake that day, I think. But that music and that moment repeats itself for me over and over, as I ask myself why I write. I write to exorcise the fear that came from that day. I write to tell the stories that we repeatedly suppress. I write to answer the questions about justice that came from that day. I want to keep those impulses in my muscle memory; it’s something that only music could have taught me.

Here’s another mark of how different my life is now: I was standing in front of a large machine, and for a split second, I’d forgotten how to operate it. It was a copy machine in the teachers’ lounge at my daughters’ elementary school where I was volunteering.

I had to laugh. Copy machines were a regular form and function of my former life for years. I couldn’t believe it had been so long. I could have made copies in my sleep. I’ve always thought that that the copy machine in the opening credits of The Office said so much for office workers; it’s one thing to have that as an everyday function in your life, another thing to see it highlighted as something worthy of attention. Anyone who works in an office environment knows a copy machine. The hum of the machine, the simple pressing of buttons, unless you had special needs like shrinking or highlighting or dark paper or staples or a machine that tended to jam. I remembered all of that, and yet I hadn’t worked with a copy machine in years.

But the copy machine also made me think about productivity: It’s been two months since I posted here, and I have wanted to do some form of productivity report. I haven’t been idle! I keep wanting to tell you. I do things! All day! Let me tell you about them!

Over the last two months, here’s where my writing’s been:

• I copyedited a friend’s novel with 2 weeks turnaround time. (And it was so much fun.)
• I worked with a wonderful editor on a food magazine piece, which will be out in January 2014. (More when the issue comes out.)
• I wrote a music/mothering essay for a literary magazine. It wasn’t quite right for the magazine and its audience, but I plan to rework it and send it elsewhere.
• I wrote an essay about growing up mixed, Japanese American (Nikkei) and Filipina, for Discover Nikkei.
• I reviewed Amy Tan’s latest novel for the International Examiner.
• I put together an application and writing sample for a national education magazine.

Other assignments have emerged from the woodwork; different people and places have asked me to write for them with increasing frequency. I have also started my own letter-writing project for my 40^th birthday. I have been away from the book, it’s true, but I can’t really complain at the variety and breadth and sheer enjoyability of these last few months of writing.

Sometimes the academic, the questioner, the analytic, the philosopher in me wonders: who is the report for? Who really needs or wants an accounting of my day? Isn’t part of the freedom of this life the freedom to live around a different clock? Isn’t part of the writing life the freedom to work outside an office, or to make part of my dining table into an office, or a few carefully chosen sunlit cafe tables near windows? And the people who are affected most by how I spend my day—my husband, my kids—don’t really need a written accounting of my day. They actually see my work accounted in their days: do they have lunches, clean clothes where they can find them, meals and snacks that are healthy and taste good? Is their homework finished? Do they get enough exercise? Are they able to talk about their own days in a comfortable home? This domestic fabric is part of my work. It does not get recognized in the larger economy, and (make no mistake) I love it most of the time, but it is exhausting work.

So where do my guilt and shame come from? There must be all kinds of anxiety wrapped up in that urge for productivity, visible as a paper emerging from a copy machine. I have worked very hard, as a matter of fact, to be outside of a career where I needed to use a copy machine every day. Over the last two years I have worked very hard to be in a career where I did not need to emulate a copy machine in its constant—but stagnant—efficiency. A few weeks ago I was working on that book review and realized (again) that I can’t sit down in an hour anymore and crank out something that I’m proud of having written—if I ever could. Good writing, good art takes time. The thing I am proudest of lately is a short personal essay that went through five drafts and two editors besides me. It took time, it took attention, and it took commitment. And it took my own willingness to be vulnerable, to hover on my edge near tears, the willingness to speak what I don’t say often enough because their truths are so close to my emotional core. That’s where I need to be in order to write the book.

However, I keep forgetting that I have to find time to clear out the voices of guilt (I should be writing every day) and shame (I no longer have a prestigious, high-paid career with a steady paycheck and an office). I keep forgetting that part of the time to write also means clearing the mental space to be productive, space without the to-do lists, the shopping lists, the doctor appointments to make, the kids’ homework assignments that need to be completed. So that commitment to clearing space is also part of my work.

And so I wait, and I make time for writing where I can. The book is waiting, and though I am sad to have spent this much time away from it, I feel it waiting for me in the white cardboard box on my desk. I write essays here and there, essays about music and books and food and parenting and history. And in the meantime I negotiate writing time with my family, who are out running a few errands as I speak.