My own private MFA: the blog of writer Tamiko Nimura
(In support of National Day on Writing, here’s what I tweeted, using the hashtag #whyiwrite.)
My oldest daughter came home excited from school one day: “An author is coming to visit! Can I get his book?”
She began to write and storyboard her own books shortly after that.
That’s the kind of magic I’m talking about.
(More news and a giveaway, and my homage to Twitter, coming up soon! And, you too can play along: why do you write?)
As you may or may not have heard, there was a teacher’s strike here in Tacoma over the last week. While we were incredibly fortunate to be covered for child care, for the most part, it was also stressful for our family and for the community. I went with C to volunteer at a sandwich-making party at our closest food bank, St. Leo’s Food Connection. Though the strike’s over, I wanted to make sure that the Food Connection’s “Food Bank in a Backpack” program received some attention, and I’m grateful my Seattlest.com editor was interested (we’re down here in T-town, after all). It’s not my best writing, done late at night, but I’m proud that the essay’s out there and I hope it helps the good folks at Food Connection and other ventolin otc usa food banks.
I’m also thrilled that I’m going to be talking about adobo, family, history, and the gaps in between on KUOW, the Seattle NPR affiliate. It will be broadcast on KUOW Presents on Saturday, September 24th, at 12:06PM (just after noon). I think that you can listen via streaming, and via downloadable podcast after it’s been broadcast. All of this came about partly because of this adobo blog post, so thanks again to everyone who’s been reading.
And, I just submitted a story about my family sukiyaki recipe to Remedy Quarterly, a super-cool indie food magazine about “stories of food, recipes for feeling good.” It will be out in Issue 7, the “heritage” issue.
And there’s more news in process, but I can’t share it yet! More soon.
In honor of Robert Hass’s wonderful summer poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” write a poem about blackberry picking.
1.
Did you know that “economy” comes from ancient Greek, meaning “to manage a household”? True story. So let’s begin and end there.
2.
Well, you know.
In this economy, we use the phrase “in this economy,” trading it easily as a head shake or a handshake. Layoffs, job losses, not to mention inequality on so many fronts that we don’t even think about the backs, literal or metaphorical.
Sometimes, it’s true, we say it as an excuse crutch, a lip curl dismissal, a shoulder shrug adjective.
Sometimes we say it as a paper cut insult.
And sometimes we say it like we’re fluffing a pillow on a guillotine.
Let’s be clear: too often we say it too damned often.
2.
And saying it too often makes it part of our everyday fabric, and we might forget that this economy will not always be this economy.
Or rather, we might forget that this economy sparks other economies, or what my friend A calls “informal economies.”
So in this economy, I feel a manifesto coming on.
3.
Informal economies? Barter and trade. Eggs for milk. Classes for web updates. Child care for an airport ride. Under an informal economy, the currency I have may not be what you normally accept, and it may not seem equal at first. But there’s wealth in the social fabric woven by our exchange.
This economy depends on the question, “how can I help you?”
This economy rests in a counterintuitive imbalance. A trust that whatever you give will come back to you, probably in ways that you never imagined, probably when you least expect it.
In fact, this economy depends on a surplus of trust, an abundance of altruism, an unprecedented deficit of selfishness.
This economy depends on the unexpected kindnesses of near-strangers, the stunning acts of giving across continents, across oceans, across alleys into backyards. Like my friend’s S’s love for her friend J, like my friend T’s love for her former home and her people. Please give there, give what you can. By itself, it might not feel like much.
But sometimes giving in some small way is all we have, and all we have is exactly enough.
4.
I know. We can burn out on giving, you want to say. I know.
So I want to tell you about my friend A. We’d ventolin inhaler 2mg worked together over e-mail, and we met in Seattle when she came there for a conference. We lost touch, regained it again. In an e-mail shortly thereafter, she explained that she’d gone through near-unimaginable health issues and surgeries for a young woman our age, which I’ll leave vague for her privacy. She was going through another round of issues as we wrote. I couldn’t say much, but I could write back a little bit, mostly to say, “I’m here.” It wasn’t much.
Almost a year later, I lost my job.
When the whole process of job loss began—and it was a long process, almost a year—I sent out a message to friends asking for moral support. So many responded with shock, with anger, with disbelief, with hugs. I felt and needed them all. A was on the recipient list.
And yet A, I knew, was enduring even more health complications upon complications, severe as the face of a cliff. And from that place, she wrote, “Send me your mailing address! I’m sending antioxidants!”
I sent her my address. I pictured a bottle, some kind of herbal supplement. A few days later, a small plain brown cardboard box arrived on my doorstep, shipped with a FedEx mailing label. No note, not that a note was needed, but these were clearly the antioxidants from A.
It was a box of homemade biscotti. Part—only part!—of what A was facing, herself, was cancer.
Not much: exactly enough.
5.
Now I can remind you that “economy” is about managing a household. As a writer, economy makes me think about tightness and restraint.
But in going back to the origins of the word, there’s comfort and expansiveness and freedom. Doesn’t that make “economy” easier than textbooks and infographics, than pie charts and statistics?
In other words: shouldn’t this economy be about making a home?
P.S. I asked A if I could publish her story here. Part of her awesome response: “For the record, I *did* intend to put a card in that box, but it came down to a ‘send it while they’re fresh, or put in a card’ choice. I chose freshness.”
Where have I been?
Well, I’ve been thinking about you. You’ve been on my list, believe me. I imagine you peeking through the velvet curtains, clicking the website address in vain. Anybody home? Not recently. Ah, well. I’ll try again. And I’m grateful you did.
I’ve been writing, so don’t worry too much about that. You can find my latest food writing here about chocolate and butchers and teriyaki history on Seattlest, and about yoga and running here for my yoga studio. I’m also excited for my upcoming first freelance assignment with the International Examiner, a Seattle Asian American community newspaper. And there’s some other writing I’ve been doing that I can’t quite post here just yet. But I’ve been writing hard. Just not here. Sorry.
I’ve been reading, too. I bought a few new books for the first time in ages—my own copy of Stephen King’s memoir On Writing, plus Colum McCann’s novel Let The Great World Spin, on the recommendation of a couple of friends. I’m excited to begin Monique Truong’s latest novel Bitter In the Mouth. I’m also two-thirds of the way through Daphne Kalotay’s novel about ballet and jewelry and Stalinist oppression, Russian Winter. And I don’t want to return my library copy (though I will!) of the letters between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, collected and called As Always, Julia. Their affection and wit and friendship made me fall in love with the two of them, and made want to write more letters again.
And I’ve been following the discussion on the movie and book The Help. In case you haven’t ventolin inhaler for sale seen this response yet, by Ohio State University professor Rebecca Wanzo, I highly recommend it. It’s pretty evenhanded and thorough, acknowledging the book’s emotional power while sustaining a more detailed critique.
I’ve been out and about a lot more—even a lovely date night here!–which is mostly good for me, not so great for the household sleep schedules, and thus not so good for downtime and writing time here.
I’ve been making jam, stocking the jam closet space downstairs. There’s a wonderful line from my goddess of domesticity, Pat in one of L.M. Montgomery’s novels: “While I move and live and have my being I’ll want a jam closet.” A jam closet! I might have scoffed a few years ago. Ah, but now. Now I understand.
And if you read the last few paragraphs of this haunting essay by Alexander Chee, you’ll get some of the feeling of where I’ve been. “What can you trust of what you can’t see?” his yoga teacher asks at the end. Like the yoga students in that essay, I’ve been moving thoughtfully through uncertainty, and trying not to fall. It is terrifying and it is heady. Because of that combination, I’m sure it will eventually be good for me.
Nevertheless, I’m here too. I made you chocolate cookies. They’re still warm. Or you can spoon up some homemade peach jam over vanilla gelato, to hold onto summer as I have for the last two nights.
In other writing news, my creative nonfiction essay, “How It Feels To Inherit Camp,” is being republished and anthologized. It appeared in Kartika Review this year. I’m thrilled. And I’ll keep you posted.
1.
Picture the calmest, bluest sky that you know. Mine comes from the dusk of Sacramento summers: a dark but softly glowing cobalt blue sky. That’s the sky that contains every summer evening of my childhood. That blue marks the cooling of a brilliant heat for me, and, at the same time, the blue that remembers that heat, something like the center of a match’s flame.
2.
In 2003, my sister and I walked down the cool white entrance ramp into the Henry Art Gallery. We rounded the corner, went down the stairs. A large panel of that summer blue met us on our left, high up on the wall. A pyramid of stairs pointed up towards the panel. Our eyebrows lifted, we cocked our heads to the side a bit. Hm, interesting. Blue, rectangle, stairs. Simple enough. We knew it was contemporary art, so we thought we’d give it a chance, take a closer look.
And then it happened.
“Would you like to go inside?”
The voice came—not from the blue light—it wasn’t that kind of magic, not yet—but from the art docent who had been quietly standing in the corner of the room.
“What? Inside?” We still stood, confused.
“You just have to take your shoes off.” He gestured to the wooden benches behind us. They had cubbyholes and now we saw a few sets of shoes.
We took off our shoes—this, too, felt like childhood, like home, where everyone had to take off their shoes—and left them by the benches. We looked back at the docent.
“So—we can just go in?”
He smiled. “Yep. Just go up the stairs.”
3.
The stairs in James Turrell’s installation Spread are a stark pyramid. They lead up to that blue panel, some 15 feet off the museum floor. This height means that your sense of a solid foundation recedes further and further the higher you climb. By the time you reach the top of the stairs, you’re standing on a fairly narrow platform. You have to climb, just a bit, to reach into the panel.
Or, what you thought was a panel. What you thought was a panel is actually a room ventolin inhaler us online filled with the most lush, calming light imaginable. You can barely see the corners or the walls of the room. By your internal architectural logic you know that there should be a wall facing you when you enter the room. But somehow, somehow, you can’t see where that wall should be. You don’t know where the far horizon of the room ends. The sharpest edges in that space—it’s no longer a room—are the edges of that panel where you climbed in. The panel’s now a window, looking back onto the museum floor.
But the space continues to defy your architectural logic, to twist all your instincts at being confined. Usually a window is an invitation, calling you to look outside. But the not-horizon of the room compels you further in. You don’t feel confined; you feel expansive. You want to drink that blue, to drink the light as if it were water. The light is that fluid, that soft, that nourishing.
So you walk as far as the docent will let you walk. And you drink.
4.
When the docent asked us, “Do you want to go inside?” it was beyond Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, beyond the children’s journey through the wardrobe into Narnia. Childhood wish-fulfillment beyond wildest expectations.
Do you want to go inside the light? Yes. Yes, we do.
That’s where I want to write: in the blue that marks the cooling of a brilliant heat, in the blue that remembers that heat. In the blue at the center of a match’s flame. It’s the space that defies architectural logic. It’s the space that compels us to drink, where we can’t see the horizon.
I’d like to submit this to The Rumpus’s series, “Where I Write,” so would love constructive feedback. I worry that it’s not…something…enough. Alternately, please leave your response to the Reverb 11 prompt–“Describe an unexpected moment, activity, sighting or conversation that touched you during July.” I’d really love to hear from you.
I had been wanting to write about a particular moment, but I also came across this month’s prompt from Reverb10 which fit the moment. Reverb 10 is an online community which asks its members to reflect on creativity, through a series of open questions or prompts.
This month’s prompt really fit the moment I wanted to explore, so I invite you to join in and write about it, too. Please ventolin inhaler online share in the comments below (links are welcome too), or on my response to the prompt when I post it. I would love to hear from you. If blogging is something like speaking to a darkened theater audience, the house lights are up this week–I promise to leave them comfortably dim.
“Describe an unexpected moment, activity, sighting or conversation that touched you during July.”
I am excited to have a guest post here from Diana Abu Jaber, an author I’d followed for a long time before we “met” on Twitter. I first read her lovely food memoir The Language of Baklava, then went backwards and read her novel Crescent. Animal lovers should definitely read her autobiographical essay “The Goddess of Flowers,” published in 2004. Diana’s writing has always been attentive, in the very best sense of the word. She pays thoughtful and generous attention to all of her characters and their settings and their actions. That thoughtful and generous attention can enliven the world; her writing helps to make me a more attentive writer and reader and person.
I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of her upcoming novel Birds of Paradise, coming out in September. I hope to share more about that book with you, either here or in a review elsewhere–it is one of her best, and one of the most satisfying novels I’ve read in a long time.
1. Did you go through an MFA program? If so, how was it structured?
DAJ: Confession: I teach in an MFA program, but I did not get one. When I was in graduate school, I knew I would need to teach in order to support myself, so I went for a Ph.D. I felt that it would give me the widest range of teaching options. And I actually tended to prefer attending literature classes to writing workshops. I wanted to be able to teach college literature, as well as to teach myself about my literary antecedents. It was a great opportunity to study writing from the inside out.
2. If you were to design your own private MFA for yourself—either before or after going through your own MFA program—what would it look like, and why? What would be your goals? How would you challenge yourself, solicit feedback, create a writing community?
My own private MFA program might look like the love child of Walden Pond and a Gertrude Stein salon. [TN: Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.] Though I’d prefer a beachier setting—Key West, Provincetown, or the Bahamas. It would be a retreat sprinkled with conversations with a couple of working writers whom I trusted and respected. We’d hang out, maybe bake or eat or drink, maybe talk about writing, maybe not. Since we’re deep into my fantasy now, the writers would be people like Annie Proulx and Vladimir Nabokov. No more than two or so mentors total. There would be a Friday night dinner party that rotated among the homes of 7 or 8 other creative people—not limited to writers; possibly including painters, actors, dancers, critics. There would be long morning walks with a friend or a kid or a dog or myself. There would be a room with a great view. A balcony. Most of all, there would be stacks and stacks of reading—books by writers whose work I loved. Maybe a conversation once a month or less often with just one or two other people who were reading the same books. There would be the occasional cocktail party at some other person’s house—somebody wealthy, who could deal with the mess afterward.
3. Do you teach creative writing, or do you teach in an MFA program now? How do you measure student progress, or grading?
I teach in the MFA program at Portland buy ventolin State University. My grading is fairly intuitive and I tend to be compassionate. If I think you’ve done the work, you get a good grade. If you’re really engaged and writing a lot and commenting a lot and thinking about books and just sort of psyched about things, you totally get an A.
4. What is the most important thing that you try to teach your creative writing students, and why that? And how do you try to accomplish that goal?
We talk a lot about writing as a process and taking some of the pressure off of this idea of creating a product. It’s really hard to cope with that kind of end-thinking in this culture—we all want to be done with the work and to get our banana. The problem is, you may never get that damn banana. I try to help students learn to love and relax into the experience of being a writer. It’s like that Anne Lamott quote about how writing just to get published is like doing the Japanese tea ceremony just to get the tea. I try to nudge students to take imaginative and emotional risks, leaps, to mentally journey in their readings and writings. Maybe the best thing I can do for them is show them what a working writer’s life looks like. I talk about my process, my struggles, the highs and lows. Once I brought the mock up of a brand new book cover in to show them and we talked about the rollercoaster of bringing out a publication.
5. What have you read lately that’s just blown you away?
I really loved the detail and sensibility of [Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir] Blood, Bones, and Butter, and the narrative voice(s) of Super Sad True Love Story [a novel by Gary Shteyngart]. And the poetry of brain research in [Richard Powers’s novel] The Echo Maker.
6. What are you working on now? Do you have anything coming out? Can you say a little bit more about it here?
My new novel is a bit of a family saga, called Birds of Paradise ,and it’s coming out this September. I got to go deep into the Miami landscape and really examine a lot of my own feelings about my adopted city. The family in the novel is devastated when the 13 year old daughter runs away, and the mother, who’s a mad pastry chef, disappears into work. A lot of my own obsessions are there—baking, organic food, anxieties around parenting, the shrieking of neighbors’ captive tropical birds—and I just really let myself chase them down, take a long, hard look at it.
The book I’m working on now doesn’t have a name yet but it’s a follow up to The Language of Baklava, another food memoir. This one toggles between the development of my academic and artistic career, putting together a writing life, and the more recent choice—in my forties—to become a parent. This book is a new kind of challenge for me because it’s a more grown up memoir about being accountable for your decisions—I’m trying to own up to the ways I may have backed down from things—while constantly trying to learn how to make life bigger, how to get a little braver. Creative self-excavation. With recipes.
Many thanks, Diana! Sign me up for your MFA program, too!
Canning strawberry and rhubarb jam.
A taiko performance at our neighborhood library.
My own homemade piecrust, for the first time.
Salted caramel drinking chocolate.
An apricot croissant with strawberry cream from this bakery.
Fried shallots and grilled eggrolls on a bowl of bun cha gio from here.
More new books than I can read at once, including ones from expected and unexpected quarters. (thanks, everyone)
Chicken teriyaki that tastes like home.
Visits with family and friends old and new.
Regular farmers market visits.
A Pippi Longstocking (and Mr.Nilsson!) doll from Sweden.
Ferry rides when the water matches the sky.
Happy baby gurgles.
Toddler leg hugs.
First grader’s satisfied sigh and happy dance after being read the last page of this book.
Beach parties, block parties, birthday parties, after-party parties.
Tacoma Tuesdays with the girls, ventolin inhaler nz taking more time to discover our city.
Food writing, food book reviewing.
Helping my yoga studio.
And: more writing than I’ve done in a very long time.
Unlike most summers of my life, I have not had a huge list of plans. This is a summer of uncertainty for me, in some areas. Yet I couldn’t have planned all of this better if I’d tried. Look what uncertainty’s brought me!
I am seeing again what my friend B has insisted to me for so long, and in not quite these words: I am lucky to live an abundant life.
We haven’t had much sunlight this summer (hence, the picture above), but it’s been a good one nevertheless. I hope yours is too, wherever you are.
I started reading blogs around 2007, but I can’t remember when or how I began reading Tea and Cookies, by Tara Austen Weaver. I’m not sure if I found her blog first, or Shauna‘s blog first–and was happy to see that they are friends. (Tea is also friends with Christine Lee Zilka, who also went to Mills College and appeared earlier in this series.) But I was hooked immediately by so many things about Tea’s blog: the sensitivity and sensibility of her prose, her gorgeous photos, her love for the Bay Area, and her expatriate sense of moving from the Bay Area to Seattle. Because she lived in Japan for a few years, I loved how she wrote about Japan, and we even joked later about a shared Japanese sensibility. We had conversations over Twitter, and eventually shared picnic blankets at Gasworks Park and a lunch table at Nettletown. I am lucky to call her friend and writing mentor, and I’m so happy that she was able to spend some time here.
Visit her blog for more of her writing, but you should also read her memoir, The Butcher and the Vegetarian: a funny and thoughtful and intriguing look at when and how and why we choose to eat meat, or not.
1. Did you go through an MFA program? If so, how was it structured?
I did the MFA in creative writing at Mills College, in the San Francisco Bay Area (Oakland). It was a pretty standard part academic/part studio program. We had workshop classes each semester, along with literature classes. Most people took one workshop, one lit, and one elective class (though there was the semester I took five classes and nearly died). It was a two-year program, with a written thesis of creative work due at the end. The program was divided into poetry and prose, with a mix of fiction and nonfiction in the prose section.
There’s a good amount of controversy over the MFA program. I know people who wish they could do an MFA, and others who wish they hadn’t, mostly for financial reasons (one woman told me, “$40, 000 could have bought me a lot of writing time”). When people ask what I think, I tell them it depends on the person and what they want to get out of it. For me it was the right thing at the right time. I had been working in publishing for five years, editing for more than ten years, and writing on and off since I can remember. But I’d gotten very much into the editor/publishing track. I was spending my days working on other people’s writing. I wanted to carve out the time and space to work on my own. I might have thought about teaching someday, and how the degree would be useful there, but I soon gave up any plan of that (one teaching theory class cured me).
What has been incredibly useful to me is developing a language around writing. I might have known instinctively what worked and what didn’t in a piece, but the MFA taught me how to talk about writing–how to analyze and convey this to another person. This has made me a much better editor–a more educated eye–which has also helped me in editing my own work. We’re fairly blind when it comes to our own writing, but I’ve become better at seeing the bones.
Of course, at the end of the day, it’s practice in writing and also reading that makes you stronger. My writing really improved when I started a blog (a year and a half after my MFA). Writing on such a regular basis–I posted three to four times a week in the early days–really steepened the learning curve. My writing has grown so much from working on the blog and writing for the web (more concise, ruthless editing). Regular and set practice is invaluable.
That said, I do think having feedback and assignments pushes you out from the comfortable places. During my MFA I was asked to write things I never would have otherwise, required to read and analyze in a way I wouldn’t have on my own, and told truths about my writing that I didn’t particularly want to hear, but which pushed me to a higher level. I’m not saying you couldn’t get that through a lot of personal work and a good butt-kicking writing group or mentor, but it would be a harder thing to orchestrate. I think a lot of workshopping also helps you be less precious about your writing, which is good if you have plans or hopes of being published. It’s the first step towards developing some perspective and a thicker skin about your work.
2. If you were to design your own private MFA for yourself—either before or after going through your own MFA program—what would it look like, and why? What would be your goals? How would you challenge yourself, solicit feedback, create a writing community?
My ideal program would have a big mentorship component. I’d love a strong mentor whose work resonated with my own and would ventolin inhaler 100 give me feedback on my writing. Good mentors are hard to find, but can be invaluable. I’d also have a lot of reading involved. I sometimes got frustrated with my own program, because it seemed like I was spending as much, if not more, time writing academic papers on literature as I was on my own creative work, but I do think the reading part is important (I might skip the analysis essays, however, and opt or group discussion instead).
My first thought was that I’d skip the workshops, where you critique each other’s writing. Not everyone is going to give you good feedback, and you pretty much know in the first few months who your good readers are. But if this is my ideal MFA, I’d pick a small writing group of people whose feedback I valued and keep that. I might also add in a book group–an opportunity to discuss the books I’d been reading (without having to write papers on them). And I’d have lots of writing time. The program I did had less of a studio component than I would have liked. The benefit, however, is that I learned how to talk about writing and dissect it, which has been very valuable to me as a writer and even more so as an editor.
3. Do you teach creative writing, or do you teach in an MFA program now? How do you measure student progress, or grading?
I don’t teach in a traditional sense, though I did take classes in teaching theory as part of my program. I do work one-on-one with writers, however, as an editor, and much of what I know is passed down in that way. Because my work is project based, I’m focused more on the writing than the writer. That said, I’ve had wonderful experiences with writers who were eager to learn and took advantage of having the dedicated attention of an editor to soak up the feedback I gave them and apply it to their future writing, becoming much stronger writers in the process. Some of them managed to break chronic bad writing habits (one former client says she’s haunted by all the semi-colons she wrongly used over the years). One of my clients, who I walked through a major overhaul on her novel, later went back to an old editor of hers (she still had credit for hours she had already paid for). The woman couldn’t believe how much stronger her writing had become and wanted to know what she had done! That made me pretty happy.
4. What have you read lately that’s just blown you away?
I haven’t been blown away by much lately, I’m afraid to say. I’m working on a new book and during that time I find I don’t read a lot of full-length books. Shorter pieces work better, and fit into the spaces in my schedule and in my brain that are not devoted to the new book. I’ve been reading some pieces by MFK Fisher—I’ve been inspired by the recent biography of her that I read, An Extravagant Hunger by Anne Zimmerman, and wanted to read her stuff again with the new lens of knowledge I now have. I’ve also been really enjoying the advice column written by the anonymous “Sugar” on The Rumpus. She is writing about real life in honest and often heartbreaking ways, with a lot of compassion. She has a great post about writing. I look forward to Thursdays, to see what she has come up with this week. Another new-to-me read was Toast, by Nigel Slater, which I could barely put down. He tells the story of his very difficult childhood through the food he ate, and manages to capture the mind of his child self. It’s an unusual book, but sad and lovely. I’m also reading A Wrinkle in Time, which I never read as a child. It’s made me think about reading or rereading more kid lit.
5. What are you working on now? Do you have anything coming out? Can you say a little bit more about it here?
I have a new book in progress. It’s early days still, but it deals with a garden, growing food and family and community. It will be called Orchard House. I also have a short collection of pieces about living in Japan (with recipes for Japanese food dishes I love) that I’m releasing electronically as a fundraiser for Japan earthquake aid. That will be out soon and is called Tales from High Mountain. I’m also working on some magazine articles, and always writing for my blog. I’ve been covering more writing-related topics there recently, and it’s been fun to write about the process.
Thank you, Tea! I really appreciate your insights here–I have done some editing myself, and I never (strangely) thought about how the MFA could help a full-time working editor. I especially like the insight about “developing a language about writing,” or “what we talk about when we talk about writing.” I’m looking forward to both novel and memoir.