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The beauty of visible grief

Out of all the griefs there are, a child’s grief may be one of the hardest to witness.

I’m not quite sure why that is. Maybe it’s partly because children feel emotions with naked intensity. If they’re hurting, they’re hurting badly. But I also think that as a culture, we often want to protect children from death, from grief, from feeling sad. There’s some strange unwritten agreement that childhood is supposed to be sadness-free, and that it must be innocent, even though we know (or forget) that these words would not always describe our own childhoods.

Childhood is part of life, right? And all life contains some slice of sadness. Why should childhood be any different? It may even hinder a child’s emotional growth to deny them the opportunity to learn what my friend Jeanne calls the “skill” of grieving.

And still, it has been difficult to watch my oldest daughter grieve. I’ve been watching my child, and many other children, grieve for the last two weeks. It has been hard. And this has surprised me: it has been beautiful.

*****
Maybe for you too, “principal” was a word to fear when you were growing up. You only saw one if you were in trouble. Principals were Grownup and Scary, and they stayed mostly in their offices. They were somewhat like hibernating bears: you didn’t want to see them, and you didn’t want to make them angry.

But C’s principal, Bob Dahl, was a beloved leader for staff, students, parents, and community members alike. He died a couple of weeks ago. He’d been sick and out of school since last October, but I think that many of us thought that he would recover.

So many people have Mr. Dahl stories. When C went to visit school one summer with Josh, Mr. Dahl was there, unpacking boxes of textbooks for the teachers. Mr. Dahl took them around the school, looked up her teacher’s name, and showed her what her classroom would look like. He did his very best to make sure that C felt welcome and at home. This was the summer before she started kindergarten. The last time I saw her with him, she was giving him a huge hug at her first grade back-to-school welcome celebration. C trusted him very early.

I’ve heard many other stories about Mr. Dahl, and they all say essentially the same thing: he was a kind, respected, and reassuring man. All this, and we’ve only been part of this community for two years. I can only imagine what it must be like for the families who have known him as their principal for ten or fifteen years, who have watched several children grow up in Mr. Dahl’s school. I can only imagine what it must be like for the staff who worked with him for the same amount of time.

As a parent, it was comforting to see Mr. Dahl each morning and afternoon at one of the crosswalks, where he did crossing guard duty. After the first few months of school, some of the older students joined him at the crosswalk to help. At first, I thought it was just charming—a way of saying that the highest administrator of the school had something to contribute to the small everyday workings of the school.

Upon second thought, though, it was clear that crossing guard duty was one of the smartest things Mr. Dahl could do as a principal. Crossing guard duty meant that he was there at the school: he was reliable, he was visible, and he was accessible. He greeted parents and students as we came to school and as we left. Crossing guard duty was more than his office hours, because office hours require the student go to the instructor. It was his way of bringing his office down to the crosswalk.

*****
The evening after Mr. Dahl died, her teacher called us at home. (I thanked her later for the call. Imagine what it cost her to break the news to twenty-four families, while still reeling from the loss herself. She’s worked for him for fifteen years.) Though C was getting ready for bed, Josh and I decided to tell her anyway, instead of waiting for the rush of morning activities. We sat her on the couch between us, and explained that Mr. Dahl had died. We had explained death to her when she was a toddler, in the simplest possible terms—that someone’s body stops working. (A flexible thinker even then, she thought that death meant that they needed to get new batteries.) A distant family member died a couple of years ago. A family pet had died a year before that. We’ve talked about my dad, and she’s now old enough to be a little sad about the grandfather she never got to meet. But Mr. Dahl was the first person that C knew who died. This is really the first death that she’s old enough to understand. When we told her she buried her face on her dad’s shoulder, and she cried a bit. “Why?” was her first question. We talked about it some more. And then we read her some extra stories, and tucked her into bed.

What I really want to tell you about, though, is how amazing it has been to watch this elementary school, this larger community, teach my child how to grieve.

*****
When I dropped C off at school that Monday morning, parents and staff were already weeping and hugging at the playground. But thanks to the school district, grief counselors were available the next day for the entire school, including parents, staff, and caregivers. The counselors had been pulled from other elementary schools that day. If kids became too sad to function in class, ventolin inhaler generic they went to the library, where they could talk to counselors, and do simple activities like coloring or doing math problems. Many classes did some form of activity to honor him, even the kindergarten classes. C’s class, which usually talks about kind words and deeds in a “kindness circle,” formed a circle to talk about Mr. Dahl and his kindnesses. They made a book of drawings and notes to give to his family.

And then there came the visible symbols of public grief, which have been equally heartbreaking and heartwarming. Two classes, whose rooms face the street, painted murals on their windows: “We love you Mr. Dahl.” Flower arrangements arrived from neighboring schools, and were placed on a table near the main school office, with a guest book to sign. That very afternoon, the school marquee changed to mark his passing. This week, students and parents have written on colored plastic memory flags, and tied them to the chain link fence surrounding the school playground. (You can see some of them in the first photo, above.) Many students wrote messages and traced their handprints onto colored construction paper, and someone made these into flowers to decorate the stage in the school cafeteria. The hallways are filled with the children’s letters and drawings for their principal. At the candlelight vigil that the school held this week, the school chorus sang a song that two students had written for him.

And for two weeks now, there has been a steadily growing pile of bouquets, handwritten letters, illustrated signs, and balloons at the northwest corner of the school. Members of the school community have laid these at the crosswalk where Mr. Dahl used to stand every day.

*****

At our house we’ve talked about Mr. Dahl off and on, whenever C wants to raise the subject. Though it makes C sad to talk about him, I think it is also comforting to her that she can talk about him. Yesterday she brought home two things: a wallet-sized picture of him, and a blue plastic bracelet that says, simply, “[Our school] loves Mr. Dahl.” After the memorial flowers have wilted, and the signs have come down from the hallways, the children will still have this bracelet that they can wear as a symbol of collective mourning.

Not so long ago, in Victorian England, mourners wore special clothes which were black, and (after a time) half-mourning clothes which were lilac or gray. Having to wear these clothes might feel somewhat restrictive now, I know. But I’ve been wishing for those outward symbols of mourning. If you’ve been reading here, you know already that I’m writing a book about my father, and his early death when I was ten, and that this book is partly my way of grieving. It’s taken me far too long—well over two decades—to learn how to grieve my father.

I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to help my daughter grieve, or if I could stand to watch her grieve. I think that if I hadn’t been writing the book, I would have wanted to detach from far too much these past few weeks. I would have avoided talking about it, asked her not to talk about it. And I probably would have avoided the school as much as I could. I would have stayed away from anything like a memorial service or candlelight vigil.  I think I would have sprinted towards full emotional retreat. Emotional detachment’s been my coping mechanism for far too long.

Now I wish that I’d had something like C’s blue bracelet to tell the world that I was in mourning when my father died. Sometimes I felt as though I was in a completely different planet than almost everyone else, and I couldn’t remember how normal life felt. Maybe because I was a child, I felt strangely important. I knew that this massive catastrophe had happened and I was one of the few people who knew about it. I wish I’d had a bracelet or a sign, even a sandwich board I could wear, that said, “My father’s just died.”

And yet I don’t know how many people would have talked to me if I had worn such a sign. Why is there such a silence around grief?

I’m thinking of so many people I know who have lost someone vitally important to them. I’m thinking of family members and friends who have lost loved ones to aging, miscarriages, illness, suicide, accidents, abandonments. Some of these deaths have happened under brutal and inexplicable circumstances. There are so many of us, walking around with so much loss, and we don’t really know each other. I bet we could have a sandwich board party, those of us in the Grief Club. I bet the membership would be larger than any of us would expect. But we don’t speak enough about our losses to each other. Shouldn’t we be able to offer more than “I’m sorry”’s to each other?

*****

These last two weeks have been hard. And they’ve been beautiful. My daughter’s elementary school community has taught her how to grieve. The teaching’s happened not through direct instructions or textbooks, but a tapestry of collective actions. And I’m so grateful that it’s happened in terms that she can understand:

It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to cry. Crying might even make you feel better.
It’s kind to comfort other people who are also sad.

We are never alone in our grief, though it often feels that way.

Beauty is not only possible but crucial at these times. It unfurls when we need it most.

And finally, one of the best things to do with grief is to bring it into the light.

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Girl’s Day (Hina Matsuri)

It’s been one of those weeks when I’ve been writing bits and pieces, but not a nice satisfying chunk of writing. That’s okay–at least, I am trying to remind myself that this is okay.  All of it is part of the process. But it’s hard to trust the process on some days. Yesterday I took Anne Lamott’s “one-inch picture frames” approach and just tried to write as many small moments as I could. I’m not sure that these will make it into the book, but it’s clear so far that I needed to write them down, if only to download them from my brain.
I promised you some small breaks from the writing process here. So I wanted to tell you about the Girl’s Day celebration we had this year.

About Girl’s Day
Girl’s Day is a Japanese (and Japanese American) holiday, originally intended for little girls and their families and celebrated every year on March 3rd. We have a book about Girl’s Day and Boy’s Day, with photos and traditions, mostly intended for kids in Hawai’i. When C read about Girl’s Day and asked if we could celebrate it too, I couldn’t say no. I want her and her sister to know about Japanese culture, to know that this is part of who they are.

Girl’s Day (Hina Matsuri) is the Festival (matsuri) of Dolls (hina). Most traditionally, the family has a set of  hina that they take out every year for a few weeks before March 3rd. The hina are usually dressed in the court robes of the Heian era. Some sets are as small as just the emperor and empress on a stand, while one famous set in Japan has over a thousand dolls.

I never celebrated Girl’s Day when I was growing up, but this fact also means that I got to play with the day and the traditions as I went along. There are lots of traditions about Girl’s Day, and while I love some aspects of these traditions, I also like adapting tradition in order to keep the day meaningful and fun.  Hiragana Mama‘s collection of links about the day was especially helpful.


We made the day about dressing up fancy, eating special food, and playing with dolls. Josh finally finished making the dollhouse from a kit that we bought for Christmas, so the girls got to play with the dollhouse, too.
Ultimately, I wanted to keep the intention of Girl’s Day, which is about connecting girls to their families,  letting the girls know that they are loved and cherished.

The food
All of the food served on Girl’s Day symbolizes something, including hopes for the girls’ longevity, strength, and purity. A clear soup with clams is sometimes served, but I didn’t think any of our girls would like it this year. (Some of the food is offered to the dolls themselves, but I forgot this part. I’ll buy a small bowl to place by the stand (hina dan) next year. A sake cup might also work, since it’s the right size.)


Other foods that we served:

  • Thin egg crepes over rice from this recipe
  • Orange slices cut into flower shapes. We used to cut these up for dinner parties when I was little, and my family still likes to serve these on New Year’s Day.
  • Pink and green mochi. The mochi are supposed to be diamond-shaped, and they’re supposed to be pink, green, and white. I almost made the mochi, but decided it might be too much work (with everything else). Josh brought some guava and kiwi mochi from Uwajimaya, which was just fine.
  • Crepes. Yes, I know these are French, but here’s my reasoning: Japanese people are really good at making crepes. And some of the best crepes I’ve had are from places in Japantowns. I sweetened some cream cheese with powdered sugar, and made some strawberry sauce. I also had some ham, turkey and cheese. We presented them as fancy pancakes, and the girls loved them.

Clothes
Girls usually dress up in kimonos and have their pictures taken next to (or in front of) the hina dolls. I actually have two things which were appropriate here: the yukata that my relatives had made for me when we visited Japan, so long ago, and an orange Korean robe which my sister sent to C. M didn’t want to wear her robe, which was fine. I just let her (and her cousin) ventolin tablets 4mg dress up in fancy dresses. C looked adorable in the yukata, though. Both girls wore hair accessories that my auntie had bought in Okinawa.  I wanted them to feel comfortable, but fancy, and special.

The hina (dolls) and their hina dan (doll stand)
This project took a while, but I’m a crafty sort of girl. I love taking materials that are available and then transforming them into something else. There are a whole bunch of wonderful cutouts online that you can download and print off. But these didn’t feel right to me. (I did print off a coloring page for each of the three girls, as a sort of party favor for the day.)

  • The dolls: I made the emperor and empress dolls, adapting this set of origami guidelines along with a washi ningyo kit that came with black crepe paper for hair and cutout white circles for faces. I made a small gold sensu for the empress, who often appears with an open fan. The emperor’s hair is shorter and more like a topknot. And then I made very simple stands (shaped like Vs, attached to the back of the dolls) which help the two dolls to sit up.
  • The doll stand: The emperor and empress appear on a stand, which is usually striped. I took an Altoid tin and drew stripes on the front. I also used a folded sheet of gold cardstock as a makeshift screen behind the dolls. Next year I’d like to make the screen fancier, maybe with a cutout decoupage from origami paper.
  • Cherry blossoms: And I knew that I wanted to make cherry blossoms. I’d been looking at this project for a while. So I picked two twigs from our backyard that looked small and interesting enough. I twisted small triangles of pink tissue paper and glued these onto the branches. I took paper cups, deconstructed one to make a template, and then covered the paper cups with blue origami paper. I turned the cups upside down and stuck the branches into the bottom.
  • The hina dan (doll stand): The actual stand is a black box that contained some beautiful Japanese bowls. Over the front, I draped a swath of obi fabric that my friend Marcy had sent me from Japan. It has gold origami cranes embroidered all over it. And, just for good measure, I folded three tiny cranes and put them in front of the dolls. Here’s how it turned out:


 

Family
I wanted this day to be a day of celebrating little girls and family. So we invited my niece, as well as her parents, though they’re not Japanese. And we invited one of my best friends, B, and her boyfriend. Though B grew up in Kansas, she had read about Girl’s Day when she was a little girl. My girls have adopted her as an aunt. She brought a copy of an old children’s book, The Japanese Twins, which is about a little boy and girl growing up in pre-World War II Japan.

And I wanted to connect the day to my family, too. I mentioned that I didn’t celebrate the day while I was growing up. However, I have a picture that my sister framed and gave me. It’s a picture of the two of us in front of my grandmother’s set of hina. I put that picture next to my hina dan, and then put a picture of my daughters and my niece next to that. I wanted to connect those little girls with the little girls that my sister and I once were.

Traditionally, a big focus of Girl’s Day is marriage. As I understand it, this is why the hina are supposed to be from a Heian wedding. The day is supposed to represent your hopes for the girls’ future. But I didn’t really want marriage to be the focus here. If they want to be married eventually (far, far, far in the future), that’s great; if not, that’s great, too. Instead, my sister-in-law and I wrote short notes to the girls, describing our hopes for them. I’ll keep these notes and I hope that we’ll add to this jar of notes every year.

What special holiday traditions do you celebrate in your family? How have you adapted these traditions (or not), and why?

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Two steps forward, one step back

 

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” ? E.L. Doctorow

In the two steps forward news, I’ve written a little over two thousand words of the Introduction to the book this week.  I’m already feeling out ways that I need to develop myself as a “character” in the book. I’m feeling how I need to adjust my pacing for this longer work, something like a marathon might feel. Blog posts and other things that I’ve written this year are very short, and the high point of the action occurs pretty early.

I can feel how my prose and descriptions are stretching themselves out. In these posts, the descriptions can afford to be lush occasionally, but this quality might feel overwritten or overblown (or overwhelming) in a longer work.

I can feel how I don’t want to give too much away in the Introduction, but I want people to come into the room and stay awhile. I’m not sure buy albuterol online exactly where I’m headed next, but it feels like E.L. Doctorow’s headlights on a nighttime car trip–I don’t have to see the entire way, just as far as the headlights will let me.

And I’m trying to write at least a thousand words a day.

Last week, Anne Lamott told us to “write what you love to come upon,” or write about what you would love to read. So far, then, my invitation to the reader is about reading–which is no surprise for anyone who knows me.

****

In one step back news, this weekend marks the one-year anniversary of the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan. I’m humbled by the resilience of the Japanese, as I knew I would be. Look at these “before and after” pictures.

But I’m also aware that physical rebuilding and psychological renewal may not be the same thing. I’m posting a link here to my post from last year. The story of a tsunami doesn’t end when the wave breaks; in fact, for humans, that’s when the story begins.

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Beginning the book

I’ve got an idea for a book, and I’ve got some drafts of pieces. So what’s next?

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to structure the book overall. There are a number of pieces that I’m juggling, several historical time periods, and at least several plot lines (my dad’s incarceration, his untimely death, my own job loss and the writing of this book). And a whole bunch of smaller pieces about each “document.” It’s quite a lot to juggle. I’m not exactly sure what story I want to tell, and so much of the writing will be about discovery. I know that I want to begin with an introduction of mine, and then move into physical documents, into virtual documents (like Facebook and blogs). And then end with a memory. It’s not quite a linear approach, but I know that non-linear can really turn people away from a book (‘too difficult to follow”). We’ll see if the book really ends up this way.

So I’ve begun to write a draft of the Introduction, which feels really exciting to me. As I’ve been reading (and rereading, obsessively) Anne Lamott’s wonderful Bird By Bird, it strikes me that her Introduction does some of the work that I’d like my introduction to perform. It establishes trust and intimacy with the reader, and it does so with humor and wit. My book has heavy subjects (wartime history, death, loss), but I don’t want it to be a “downer book.” I do want it to be helpful for people who have gone through similar situations, or who are going through similar situations, but I don’t want it to be A Grief Book. So I want my introduction to establish me as a narrator, but a narrator that will bring people into the story, rather than pushing them away or putting up barriers right away.

I’m also feeling how the Introduction can and should be longer than the blog posts that I write here. I began writing as a poet, really, and longer forms terrify me. So creative nonfiction lets me integrate some of the sensitivity to language and keeps me grounded (at least for now) in a reality. The idea of writing fiction terrifies me, even though I have an idea for a novel already in mind. Maybe I’ll need to start with short stories after this.

Some books that have helped me think about structure, in no particular order:

  • Anne Lamott’s writing advice book/memoir, Bird by Bird (juggling of many pieces, intimate, funny)
  • Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Birds of Paradise. This lovely novel uses multiple third-person viewpoints, but also surprised me towards the end.
  • Kim Severson’s memoir Spoon Fed. Each chapter here centered on a different “subject”, a woman who inspired or changed the author, but changed it up a bit, because it did not approach each subject the same way. To do so would have felt repetitive, and I’m glad she structured the book this way.
  • Rebecca Skloot’s biography The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. One of the very best nonfiction works I’ve ever read, frankly. Skloot juggles multiple time periods, jumping back from our contemporary present back to the 1940s, 1950s, and so on. She also juggles multiple subjects, including Henrietta Lacks, and her children. And—this is a move that I greatly respect, especially because Skloot is a journalist—she examines her own role in the writing of the book, critically and thoughtfully. Skloot has said, I think, that the novel Fried Green Tomatoes helped her to think about how to structure her book, so perhaps that’s a lesson for me to consider. (Outlining Flagg’s novel might be interesting, just in terms of timing.)

In the meantime, though, I am working on a grant application. Lots of people are applying, I’m sure, so I’m trying not to get my hopes up too high. But it’s useful to work on this application because it’s another step towards writer identity. I’m having to write down my goals as an artist, and to think of my biography as a writer. And those two exercises, alone, are also worthwhile for me to progress towards this degree, another step in the MFA.
Back with another post next week. In the meantime, if you can think of any books that would be interesting for me to read, because of their structure, I’d love the suggestions.

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My own private MFA: the final project proposal

Thanks for all your responses, here and elsewhere, to the last post about beauty. I loved reading what everyone had to say. I’m trying to hold onto that momentum, and trying to remember how lovely the trees were last fall (see that picture above?). It’s been a bit gray here lately.

Coming into Year 3 of this private MFA and the second anniversary of this space, I’ve been thinking about the Final Project. Yes, I’m on the 3-year program. Tortoises, represent.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading still, which is lovely. I still find myself itching to get things when I’m in bookstores, but I no longer feel the rush to buy the latest must-read or bestseller when I’m there. Instead, I find myself making lists of things to place on hold at the bookstore. Now, I know that writers need to make a living (boy, do I know), but it’s also gratifying to know that the books I really want to buy now are the books that I want to keep around forever.

I’ve been drafting pieces of my book project all along, here on this blog, as well as in a separate document that I call “Book journal.” But the other day, I realized that I haven’t really laid out what the project will be for you, here in this space.

So it’s a good time to describe the final project of my private MFA to you. I want to tell you more about it, to give the project some needed rejuvenation, to kickstart me back into action (remember, go) and to bring some narrative flow back to this space (for you non-lit types out there, some “what’s going to happen next?” action).

I’ve been thinking about it for so long, I can’t believe I haven’t explained it to you properly. I wrote about an earlier version of it in a writing contest, almost 2 years ago. Over the last year I’ve been reorienting myself to life outside the academy, rethinking myself into writer identity, and looking for a job. But lately I’ve been talking about the project to a few people, and I can feel some energy coming back. And I’ve found that two things motivate me: 1) making lists, and 2) making promises to other people.

Here’s the project. And aaaaah, I can feel the fear creeping up as I type, so I better type fast. I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain the book, and I’m going to keep figuring it out over the course of the project. So this is not my elevator pitch, or my NPR “Fresh Air” draft, but another draft of my explanation to you.

I’m writing a memoir.

It’s a memoir about the aftermath of two—no, three—major events which have affected my life. The first event is my father’s death. He died when I was 10 years old. The second event is the Japanese American incarceration of World War II, which affected my father’s life and continues to affect my own. The third event, the one that made me turn to writing this project at all, is the loss of my job and my return to the writing life.

Here’s another way to explain it: it’s a triple-voice memoir, one that intertwines my writing, my sister’s artwork, and the voice of our father, who died when we were very young (10 and 6 years old, respectively). We have our father’s voice in many things, but perhaps most concretely, we have it in an unpublished memoir manuscript that he wrote about his incarceration experience. I plan to intertwine parts of my father’s manuscript, some of my sister’s artwork about memorials and memory, and my own musings about the aftermath of death, as well as the aftershocks of camp history. For right now, I want to organize the book into chapters using different forms of documentation, and writing about the different forms of memory that they evoke. For example, there will be a chapter about a family recipe, a chapter on the albums of Polaroids that he took of me when I was a baby, a chapter on his diary when he was in the military, well before I was born. There will be a chapter, or a series of chapters, about my dad’s typewritten book manuscript itself. I hadn’t seen the manuscript in twenty-five years, until I reread it a couple of summers ago. And when I began to read, I realized just how much I hadn’t worked through my feelings about his death.

And yet here’s another way to explain it. No one knows everything about the lives of their parents. When they leave us, they leave so many unanswered questions. I wanted to look at one particular stretch of time when I know the least about my father’s life: the time after his memoir, after his wartime incarceration, and before he married my mother.

Writing has helped me to clarify and discover and process what I’ve learned about my father’s death, and myself, and memory, over the last two years. So it’s a book about a writer’s (and visual artist’s) struggle between loss and memory, the ways that we memorialize our dead in an age where so much information is “in the cloud.” In some ways, it’s a present for my daughters, who never got to meet their grandfather.

Over the next few months I’ll share pieces with you, some revisions of blog posts, and updates about the writing and publication process. I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about the project in process, and I look forward to sharing the journey with you. I’ll continue to post intermittent musings like these, so it won’t all be about the book. But I need to move forward, to keep writing, and to keep moving towards this bigger goal. Comments mean a great deal to me, even a quick line or two, so please don’t be shy. I promise to respond, too. Thanks.

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Tsunami: What the Waves Leave Behind

When I am dreaming, it’s usually my body’s emotional response that wakes me up. Dreams have shaken me awake out of joy, out of fear, out of desire.

But last night an image woke me up: Hokusai’s “Great Wave at Kanagawa.”

You probably know Hokusai’s “Great Wave,” or have seen a version of it, somewhere. It’s one of the most famous Japanese woodblock prints in the world, and it’s nearly two hundred years old. I think there’s even a copy of it in my favorite local Japanese restaurant. I loved this painting for a long time, just being attracted to the vibrant blues, the serene curve of Mount Fuji in the distance, the perfect arc of the wave.

But for an embarrassingly long time, I never saw the boats—perhaps because I only saw reproductions of the print from far off, or in small-scale reproductions. A lifelong reader, I’m used to seeing things so clearly in my mind’s eye, but I’m appalled at how often I must train my physical eyes over and over again. How could I overlook the fishing boats, the rows of bodies straining in unison against that wave?

Once I saw the boats—and there are three of them!— the entire painting changed. The wave, like Stevens’s jar, “took dominion everywhere.” The foam at the crest of the waves started to reach like claws, or thorns, or teeth. Terrifying.

It’s been hard not to think about this image lately. As far as I know, none of my family members have been directly affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, or their aftereffects. Yet I have been stunned and overwhelmed, like so many others, since Friday. After seeing this footage, or this footage, it is hard to write anything or even read very much. A picture of a mother carrying her toddler on her back can undo me. It feels disrespectful to write about anything else, and even for me (but not for the Japanese) to want to return to anything ventolin inhaler like normality.

And yet, as a literary critic, I have to admire the narrative tension of the woodblock print itself.  Literary critics call this “in media res,” beginning in the middle of the action. A wave itself is narrative: with calmer waters moving into larger waves, then breaking, and receding. The boats and the humans in Hokusai’s painting add a patina of fear to the entire scene, and become story: what will happen to the people? Adding all three elements together, the wave, the mountain, and the boats, we wonder: when will the waves break, and where, and how? When the waves recede, what will they leave behind?

There are two steps in my usual response to tragedy and grief: first, to picture the worst-case scenario; and second, to detach. I don’t say this with pride. Recently, because I’ve been writing this book, and because I want to be more available for people in my life who might need help, I have tried to deal with grief differently. I have tried to stay available for them.

None of it is easy. But at the center of this impulse, I hope, is my urge to connect humanity: the reason why I read, the reason why I write. What will happen to us? When will the waves break, and where, and how?

Perhaps most importantly, Hokusai’s Great Wave forces us to ask: what should we do with the nearly unbearable tension of such a terrible moment? While our impulse might be to resolve that tension, Hokusai instead asks us to stay there for as long as we can bear it. As the Japanese people know, and as my Issei and Nisei ancestors knew, grace and knowledge and strength can arise from that space.

Please consider making a donation to Japan earthquake relief efforts, if you have not already done so.

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An interlude

My mom’s visiting this week, and she brought more papers and objects from the archive, also known as her garage. And though I haven’t even finished writing about my dad’s manuscript, I’ve got a whole new set of documents to feed the book project. A letter from his chess-playing friend, along with a sheaf of computer chess score sheets. My dad’s old 5-year diary, from the early-to-mid 1950s. The diary itself will take a while: each whole day compressed into about an inch of space. Each page has five years of the same day. In some ways it reminds me of a Twitter feed, a Facebook status update. Perhaps the technology of documenting our days isn’t so different.

There are difficult documents in this batch: a copy of my dad’s death certificate, which means that I can now request his military records. A copy of the first and last Father’s Day poem that I wrote for my dad; he died in June. Hard. And harder still: the poem’s folded inside a copy of the eulogy that my uncle delivered at the funeral. A small gift from the eulogy: according to my uncle, my dad was conscious enough to read my poem before he died.

These are papers that I haven’t seen in years, if at all.

I’ve been thinking about my family archives: all those garages, all those places where we’ve kept paper traces of our lives. I’ve got my own archive growing a life of its own in my basement. “Nimuras,” my grandfather once mused, with some disgust, “are notorious pack rats.” What if we took that pack-rat tendency into historical ventolin inhaler usa context, with the Depression, with the dispossession of internment? (And, yes: am I just excusing our love for clutter?) I wonder how long it takes my family to go back through those boxes, if at all.

In fact, a couple of nights ago, I woke up wondering about my own pack-rat tendency to keep everything, but rarely look back at it all. Why has it taken me so long to begin this book project, to go back through the family archive? The metaphor may be too obvious: put everything into a box, and imagine that the keeping will be enough. But as most historians and librarians would probably tell you, an archive’s almost no good until somebody processes it, makes sense of it, organizes it. The literary critic in me would add: and makes it into narrative.

Can memory work the same way as archives? Can you bury memories desperately, leave them untouched for years, and return to them intact? And if not, is this one reason why we need physical archives?

What draws me back to this archive, this set of memories about my dad, is something I can only describe as an insistent tug. I don’t think that nostalgia is drawing me back, if nostalgia means the desire to look back, relive, find pleasure in the bittersweetness of the loss.

It’s more like the reason you might press a bruise. Yes, that’s still there. Yes, it still hurts. But maybe your fingers want to return to that mark, precisely because it’s a visible sign that you have hit something hard and survived. You press it, and wonder if it’s healed yet.

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Desert chrysanthemums

Thus far, one of the best things that my dad’s book has given me is my grandfather.

Although there are pictures of me with my dad’s mother, I never got to meet my grandfather; he died before I was born. And my maternal grandfather actually died the year I was born, a few months before my birth in December. So I never had a biological grandfather, growing up.

But my grandfather, my dad’s father, is all over the manuscript.

He was a dancer. There’s an entire chapter devoted to a folk dance that my grandfather used to perform, and even performed in camp, a fisherman’s dance. As a granddaughter, it’s lovely to know that he was a dancer; as an editor, I am not sure why the chapter is there. But that’s a conversation I’ll have with the manuscript another time.

He was a rabble-rouser, a speech-maker. Contrary to what I used to think about our family history, my dad and his siblings were not sent to Tule Lake initially because of my grandfather’s “troublemaker” behavior. While at Tule Lake, my grandfather made a series of fiery speeches against the military recruitment policies in camp. For that series of speeches, he was taken away to New Mexico. I say this with pride.

He cared about his community. Upon his return from New Mexico, when asked what he would like to do, he answered, “I would like to serve the people of this camp.”

He was a man with a sense of history. When he learned that World War II had ended, he sighed, and said “From this day on, I will become an American Indian.” How did he know what it was to be an American Indian, to associate his own experience of dispossession with theirs?

In other words, the manuscript is shot through with a young boy’s hero-worship of his father. (I realize that’s something I’ll need to think about for my own book.) It makes a certain amount of sense: my dad was writing about the time from when he was 10 to when he was 14. Not long after that, I believe, he was no longer living at home, working in various jobs. (I’ll have to find out more about this gap.) For all I know at this moment, actually, my father was writing about and through the loss of his own father.

In my dad’s buy ventolin with no prescription manuscript, the loss is so palpable that even after my grandfather returns to camp from imprisonment in New Mexico, my dad thinks hard about what his father’s absence meant. “What is a family without a father?” he asks himself.

My father’s response to his own question stuns me: “Not much of anything.”

And here I can begin to write back to my father. After age 10, I grew up without a father. And while we missed him terribly—what he said about a father’s absence? It’s just not true. Or at least, it’s not true for everyone. It wasn’t true for us, for my sister and my mother and I, and our larger extended family (who never abandoned us, even though their brother had died). For my sister and me, the youngest of our generation of 13 cousins, it has been a family existence rich with love.

Before opening the manuscript envelope, there were so many questions that I wanted answered. I think that I went to the manuscript not just to find my father, but to find fathering: to find advice, support, strength. How does one endure terrible, difficult times?

And I have to confess that in this respect, the manuscript feels incomplete. Why? My friend B put it best, I think. I told her that I’d looked for a father in the manuscript, but didn’t find him, and she nodded with understanding. “You went to find your father—but what you found was another kid.”

So it’s unexpected and wondrous, painful and lovely, that while the fathering I wanted wasn’t in my dad’s book, the grandfathering was. “You must have the capacities to bounce back,” he said to my father, “no matter what the adversities are.”

I like to think that my grandfather learned that lesson from the gardens that they grew in camp. I didn’t know that families could grow anything in Tule Lake. But my father describes growing flowers and vegetables in his manuscript. “The flowers brightened the area,” my father says, “and the sense of desolation was removed.” Few people can talk about the power of endurance and regeneration like farmers can.

You see, all this time I thought that I love chrysanthemums because my father loved them. I didn’t know he inherited this love from my grandfather.

They grew chrysanthemums in camp, too.

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(Approximately) Five Questions About Writing, History, & Technology: Hans Ostrom

With the shift in new routines, I’m missing a few things that I know the non-private MFA would offer: externally-imposed structure and accountability. But! I’m a Capricorn, as I’ve said, and usually good with internally-imposed deadlines.

So with the beginning of a new school year, it’s time for a new assignment. To help with more regular posts, I’m introducing a new occasional feature here: a series of short interviews with writers, historians, and anyone else who’s interested in questions of writing, history, technology, and memory.

Today’s inaugural series post is a short interview with my good friend and colleague, Hans Ostrom. One of my favorite stories about Hans is our very first meeting. I’d done some research before we met, and saw that we’d gone to the same high school. I realized that my high school principal also had the same last name, and so I asked Hans if they were related. Hans raised his eyebrows, dropped his jaw, turned slightly paler, and actually dropped the paper he was holding. My high school principal was (is) Hans’s older brother. Hans and I have worked together now for almost seven years.

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KikuGirl (KG): In the “customary” Google/Wikipedia search, I couldn’t find any interviews with you! Are you that reclusive? Has anyone called you the J.D. Salinger of Tacoma, or Sierra City, where you grew up?

Hans Ostrom (HO): Ah, this one is easy. There are no interviews because no one has been interested in interviewing me.  I like the interview as a genre, and I don’t mind being interviewed.  One problem, if it’s a problem, is that I have written in a bunch of genres—poetry, fiction, scholarship, criticism, journalism, textbooks, encyclopedias, blogging, etc.  I think if I’d decided on one thing early on, I might be better known as a writer of that thing—be it poetry or mystery novels or whatever.  But I love to try different kinds of writing. I would say I’m solitary—writing-groups, for instance, have not worked for me, and I’m terrible at literary politics—rubbing elbows, going to the right conferences, etc.  So by default, not really design, I’m a lone wolf and a contrarian. But I’m not reclusive, and  always thought Salinger was simply bizarre.  Whereas I’m simply obscure.  I think bizarre pays better.

KG: Speaking of all of that writing: you write and publish more, both in hard-copy print and online, than just about anyone I know. (Maybe you’re the Joyce Carol Oates of the West Coast.) In addition to the multiple, regularly-updated blogs, there’s the edited encyclopedia of African American literature, there’s the poetry collection, the textbooks about creative writing, the scholarly studies, the detective novel, and probably a whole other set of writings I haven’t discovered yet. How do you produce so much, so consistently?

HO: I’m probably a compulsive writer.  Not an obsessive one, but a compulsive one.  I just love to write, so I write more or less all the time—in waiting rooms, in bed, sometimes while watching TV.  I do very well with deadlines, which are a kind of drug for compulsive writers.  This all may have started at community college, where I had a full-time academic schedule, worked as an R.A., and wrote sports articles for local newspapers.  This required multitasking and writing quickly.  So I just tend to plunge in and write and then see what I have later, as opposed to a lot of planning, outlining, etc.—although these are often necessary, too.  And one genre tends to carom off the other, so in the midst of an  encyclopedia entry, you might get an idea for a poem.  [KG: I love this idea.] Writing is probably also my way of processing the world, perhaps of coping.

KG: In your historical novel Honoring Juanita, there are several metaphors for history. There’s the standard history as “the dusty, distant past”; history as the recurring, haunting Juanita; history as the origin of objects (the ventolin buy online trees that the main character, Mary, uses in her woodcarvings); history as sedimented levels of trees and nature. What did writing historical fiction do for you that reading written histories might not have?

Mary is a kind of poet, and I think poets are mad to make history “real”: palpable, something you can touch and smell.  Of course, this is impossible, as history is past, is gone.  Its effects aren’t gone, but it is, so it always exists once or twice removed. Perhaps my favorite metaphor is the sediment/compost one, history as a slow building up, an accumulation, something that feeds the present, for better or worse—good compost vs. unhealthy compost. A woodcarver, Mary wants to get her hands on Juanita, but of course she can’t.

KG: Elsewhere, you’ve written about the Kindle and e-books, and you (like I) have lived from dial phones to IPhones. How do you think these forms of digital technologies will impact our reading habits, and our memories?

HO: I think they are revolutionizing reading and writing—right now.  And this will only accelerate.  There’s something called “Moore’s law,” which is that micro-chip storage capacity doubles every 12-24 months.  I think you’re seeing an erosion, even a collapse, of publishing hierarchies.  Vested interests need to try to prevent this from happening, but I don’t know if they can. We could be witnessing a vast democratization of writing and publishing, and I love it.  The old way depended upon an economy of false scarcity, which is reinforced by rigid ideas of “genius,” by making art mysterious (“it can’t be taught”), a fixed canon, only so many slots open for “great” writers, etc.  Many people are nostalgic for this setup, but I’m not.  Interestingly, you can archive books with Amazon  after you’ve read them on Kindle, so there is a chance that people will leave their Kindles to their children—a library of hundreds of books, maybe thousands, if we go by Moore’s number.  Few saw this coming.  Huge personal libraries owned by everyday folk.  At the same time, we may also be entering an era in which most people don’t have the patience to read for a long time or to read complex things.  Don’t get me wrong—I love books as books, as artifacts, but I also love these new developments.  It’s not an either/or question for me.

KG: What’s your favorite metaphor for history, or your favorite quotation about it, and why?

HO: The compost one I mentioned. I think maybe another expression would be “a necessary illusion.”  That is, history represents what is gone, but we need an illusion of its still being there, so we continually create  illusions of past—in our personal lives, in history books, in the media (“founding fathers,” “the greatest generation”).

Where history is still alive is its effects, and oddly enough, people are often reticent to accept that reality; thus the U.S. has never fully come to terms with the effects of  slavery, for example (just one example—there are many).  A kind of deep denial festers, therefore—and you see it coming out in the overreaction to Obama’s being elected.  He is as moderate as Eisenhower, but confused racist reactions drive people to make him some kind of Other—socialist, Kenyan, proto-dictator.

I can’t think of a favorite quotation, but I’m sure it would be something  ironic, something to let the pretentious steam out of history.  There’s probably one from Wilde or Twain.

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I’m honored—and frankly, surprised—to note that this is Hans’s first interview. And it’s my first written interview, too. Many thanks to Hans for being the first contestant, and for playing along.

Writing, history, and technology are going to be important in my book, so these interviews are also a form of research. If you know anyone who would be interested in being interviewed for this series, please send me a message at kikugirl (at) kikugirl dot net.

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Today’s fractional finding

Today’s fractional finding: my dad’s annotated bibliography of “Japanese in the United States,” published in 1969 by Sac State Library. The cloth binding is red. It’s got a Library of Congress call number (E184 J3 J37 1969), which we might dangerously equate with an Amazon listing or an ISBN barcode presence. But I accord a similar kind of official-ness to these numbers: once you’ve got one, you’re published, baby.

Josh said that it was an amazing feeling to pick up the bibliography from UW’s Interlibrary Loan today: someone handed him a book that my dad wrote. I asked Josh what he meant. But thinking about it, I can only describe it as a presence that physical (not virtual) objects can carry. This pamphlet is, in all likelihood, an object that the two most important men in my life have now both touched.

Somehow, this copy of the bibliography did not come from Sac State Library, which would be expected. Instead, it’s from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. I have no idea how it got there. (But my sister now lives in Austin, a little over an hour from San Antonio.) Inside the back cover, the card pocket has an empty chart printed on it, which suggests that the bibliography’s never been checked out, or at least that it wasn’t checked out before the digital age. Or maybe even until now.

The contents: first, there are two introductions. There’s an introduction by the College Librarian, before my father’s introduction. Some of this first introduction is useful, historically speaking. It says that my dad’s bibliography was part of a series of publications by Sac State Library staff, intended to showcase the Sac State Library collection for faculty and students.

Then, there’s a longer paragraph, assuring the reader that my dad is “especially well qualified.” Given what I know about the publication of American literature by minority authors, this part of the introduction seems to echo the well-meaning-but-slightly-problematic genre of “white author introduces and thus validates minority author.” Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar: all African American authors who had these kinds of introductions to their first published works. The introductions were something like a gentleman’s “letter of introduction,” trying to smooth over bridge (or boundary) crossings.

I don’t mean to critique the college librarian heavily: he’s promoting my dad’s work, saying what my dad could not, and did not, in his own introduction. This librarian knew a fair amount about my dad’s personal history: he talks about my dad’s internment, and he mentions my dad’s book manuscript. And he says that my dad spoke in secondary schools and colleges about internment.

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A memory detour here: my dad used to come to my elementary schools to talk about Japanese culture. Sometimes he’d bring food, but most of the time he’d wear his dark blue kimono along with an array of objects. He’d shake the huge pocket-sleeves of the kimono, making them jingle: “What do you think is in here?” he’d ask the kids. “Money!” they’d shout. The year before he died, he spoke to my fifth-grade class, but he didn’t talk about Japanese culture. Then he talked about internment, at least for the first time that I can remember.

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My dad’s own introduction to the bibliography is oddly detached and academic: the first sentence is in the passive voice: “This bibliography was compiled by…”. After that, there’s a note about how the annotations “are not critical evaluations, and there is no attempt to make value judgments of the materials under review.” (Why not? And, the humanist-skeptic in me asks, “How not?”) He concludes his short 3-paragraph introduction with a bit about scope, which strikes me as overly modest, or perhaps very Japanese enryo: it is “not a definitive and comprehensive study of the subject field.”

No first-person voice, no “I” whatsoever. Maybe all of that “I” is in his own manuscript.

A bit more about the content for now. Because it’s a bibliography about Japanese Americans, my dad included annotations about both Miné Okubo’s graphic novel Citizen 13660 and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter. These are now two of the most well-known (and now widely-taught) narratives of internment. I’ve written scholarly papers about both of these books.

So the bibliography gives me something unexpected about my father: He was a scholar of internment literature and Asian American literature, like me. We could have had a conversation about those two books, Okubo’s and Sone’s.

And in a sense, I suppose, we’re having a conversation now. Peeking behind the Interlibrary Loan tracking slip, there’s the cover image for the bibliography: the pen-and-ink outline of a red chrysanthemum.

P.S. Didn’t win the writing contest, but am nevertheless excited that I submitted something, and that it made it to finalist status at all. And, some exciting news: I’ve been asked to talk about the book-in-progress, and possibly give a reading from it, in November. More details when they’re finalized.