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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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****
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.

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Maybe that’s why

Dear C-bird,

It’s the night before your first day of kindergarten. Tonight, as I tucked you in, you wanted to talk about how you didn’t want to go to kindergarten. The only thing you liked about kindergarten, you said, was the outside playground part. And that you got to pick your own lunch (peanuts, pasta wheels with feta, dried cranberries, homemade chocolate chip cookie, apple juice). And that you get to see Kaiden every day. Those are some of the familiar things.

We’ve been trying to get you ready for kindergarten, of course. All summer we’ve been playing at the playground, so you know that “park” really well. You saw your classroom and met your teacher last night at the open house. It’s got a lot of low tables, and tiny chairs, and white wooden cubbies, and a round bench, and a couch, and a piano, and so many new books within arm’s reach, and a view of Puget Sound. We’ve read books about kindergarten, and we’ve talked about some of the new things you’ll learn, like counting money, and new songs, and reading books without someone having read them to you first.

And still, there are traces of fear amid the traces of excitement. Dad and I have been trying to explain to you that our brains don’t like new things at first, and that’s what your brain has been doing: it’s resisting the new. So you won’t know what you like about kindergarten until you get there. We won’t really know, either. I kind of hate that.

But it’s hard to explain ambiguity and ambivalence to you at five, because at thirty-six, I’ve been feeling this way, too. I’m excited for you and scared for you, even though I know you will be fine. You’ve been practicing the monkey bars, challenging yourself to hold on just a little longer, or drop down all by yourself, or making it all the way around from one end to the other. You’ve been wanting new games to play on the computer. The crafts that you usually love (drawing, paper cutting, gluing) are getting old. Even daycare, which you’ve loved for several years, is getting stale. That’s how we know that you are ready, have been ready for a new school.

I’ve been wondering if I will cry when we drop you off tomorrow. And you might know this about me already: I hate crying. I’ve heard all these stories of moms crying on their kids’ first day of kindergarten and I’ve wanted to resist. Why? I don’t know.  Maybe I don’t like the idea of crying just because I’ve been told that it’s a moment to cry. The PTA may even plan a coffee-and-kleenex moment.

I’m so happy that you are ready for kindergarten, that we are sending this confident, sweet, giving little girl out into the world for school. You draw pictures with captions for your family and friends. You run to pick up your little sister when she falls down and cries. You like doing “strong things,” whether it’s climbing a rope ladder, mixing a huge bowl of cake batter,  picking up your little sister for a twirly hug, or trying to outrun your dad at the track. You’re picking up new facial expressions every week, it seems: this week you’re holding up your hands palms-up, looking up at the ceiling, shaking your head and smiling bemusedly. You think hard about what should and shouldn’t happen in a book or a movie, and you still ask questions about characters’ motivations and actions. “What is it with him?” you like to ask, as the bad guy throws a temper tantrum or makes somebody else sad. You think it’s cute that Yoda has a light saber, and you picked out your first graphic novel, a Star Wars one, at the bookstore. This morning at breakfast you were preparing your little sister, telling her that you were going to go to kindergarten tomorrow, and you didn’t want her to be too sad. You and your sister are amazing, and you still make us laugh every single day.

Now, the script for mommies crying on the first day of kindergarten goes something like this: “She’s growing up! It goes so fast!” And you are, and it does. (And I don’t mean to offend any mommies who do cry for these reasons.)

But here’s why I don’t want to cry: I don’t want to stop you. I am so glad that you are growing up to be who you are.

I wanted to resist crying when I married your dad, too. But I was so happy that day, I was going to burst if something didn’t release. And I still hate crying, even though I’ve now cried out of joy more times than I can count, since you were born. “It’s a girl,” your dad whispered to me in the delivery room. “We have a little girl.”

Oh. Maybe that’s why it’ll happen tomorrow.

Love, Mama

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Panzanella to celebrate summer

“Fahmis makit!” cried toddler M when we pulled up to the Saturday farmers market.

I am thrilled that she recognizes it. Our long-delayed, dearly-missed summer weather finally arrived in late July or so, and the Tacoma farmers markets have been overflowing with berries, peaches, zucchini, eggplant, green beans, corn. C loves the chocolate croissants from Grand Central’s stand on Thursdays. I love the apple baked empanadas on Saturdays. I’ve made a lot of blackberry jam because I realized that it’s hardest to find that flavor in stores. We’ve visited the farmers markets at least once or twice a week, for the last month and a half.

Here’s a recipe for my version of panzanella, my favorite way to celebrate summer salad.  I’ve come to love panzanella because it’s one of the best ways to celebrate summer tomatoes. (And I’ve come to love it for the rarity: it’s just not worthwhile to make it when tomatoes are out of season.) This salad is meant to be a dinner salad, one that you can assemble in the salad bowl, toss, and then portion into two large sturdy bowls.

We may have had our last panzanella of the summer tonight. A new year of teaching has started for me; C is starting kindergarten on Thursday; it’s supposed to rain about an inch tomorrow in the Seattle area. Summer, we hardly knew you.

Recipe

This is probably not the most authentic recipe for panzanella (which is really supposed to be more of a bread salad than a bread-with-greens salad). It’s more of a deconstructed sandwich, maybe a caprese-style sandwich? But I make it almost every week during summer. You just have to eat fresh tomatoes in season.

Ingredients

  • About 4-5 slices day-old crusty white bread (sourdough, levain, etc. have worked). This is a great way to use up the ends of artisan bread loaves.
  • Olive oil (for brushing onto the bread slices)
  • A garlic clove, cut in half and pierced with a fork (to rub onto the bread slices)
  • 1-2 stems’ worth of fresh basil leaves (pinch off the hearty stems, then roll the larger leaves and cut into slivers)
  • A large handful of washed and dried spring salad greens (spring is fine, arugula is peppery)
  • About half a pint of ripe tomatoes, preferably cherry or heirloom, cut into bite-size pieces
  • About 1/3 cup fresh mozzarella pieces (if using ovolini, halve or quarter; perlini are bite-size). Low-moisture skim mozzarella, the kind that most people buy for lasagna,  will not taste as good in this case.
  • Fresh Parmesan cheese, shaved, to taste.
  • Dressing: about 1-2 T each of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and about 1-3 tsp. of brown sugar
  • Fresh cracked black pepper to taste

Method

  1. Make the garlic croutons. Brush the bread slices with olive oil, then rub them with that garlic clove pierced with a fork. (I use a fork so I won’t have to get too much garlic on my hands. You can leave out the fork and just rub the garlic on with your hands, if you want.)Put the slices into the toaster oven or very quickly under the broiler. Take the bread out before the slices turn golden brown, and cut them into bite-size pieces.
  2. Add the greens to the salad bowl. While the bread is toasting, cut the basil leaves into slivers. Add greens and basil.
  3. Throw in the cut tomatoes. Ideally, you want the tomato juices to mix with the croutons and coat the croutons, making them just a teeny bit soggy.
  4. Throw in the fresh mozzarella pieces.
  5. Shave the Parmesan over the salad, using a vegetable peeler. I really think that here is a place to be generous. Real Parmesan is expensive, but it adds so much flavor here. And it’s fun to use your fingers to chase that last fleck of Parmesan in the salad bowl.
  6. Using a fork, whisk together the dressing of olive oil, balsamic, sugar, and (optional) pepper. Add a bit of dressing to the greens, mix, and taste. Then add more dressing to the salad as needed.
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Giving the cliché a second chance

This morning, I had three separate dreams about the same thing: the writing contest that my sister and I entered at the beginning of August. Each dream had a different review of or reaction to my contest entry. In the first one, someone whose name was written in Korean Hangul felt “alienated”; in the second one, a panel of judges described my entry as “this odd little project that kept hanging on”; in the third one, my entry was competing against my husband’s, who thought he’d enter the contest just for fun.

In all three of the dreams, though, I made it to finalist status.

Now, you know what they say about these kinds of dreams: they predict the opposite of what happens in real life. You dream about winning, you’re probably going to lose. But, sometimes clichés are stranger than fiction. At 10AM this morning, the organizers announced the names of the finalists on their website.

And the gist of all three dreams came true; I actually did make it to finalist status in the contest.

(!)

I know. I’d been saying that I hadn’t really entered to win. But I hadn’t realized how much I wanted it until my subconscious hit me with three of those dreams in rapid succession this morning. The website kept appearing, over and over again. I actually clicked on it in my sleep. I’m not sure the Internet’s ever appeared in my dreams before, as hard as that is to believe.

Here’s another cliché, though: I am so happy and honored just to make it to finalist status. In an excellent series of blog posts about getting an MFA, the author Alexander Chee suggests that you shouldn’t apply to MFA programs without publishing more or (hey!) placing in a contest first. I don’t think that he is suggesting this as a form of gatekeeping (e.g., “only published writers should have MFAs!”), but as a way to explain that you shouldn’t see acceptance into an MFA program as your only ticket to being a writer. In other words, you should have a sense of how your writing’s received outside of an MFA program before you even begin applying. So I see this finalist status is a stamp of approval for my creative writing, from women who have years of professional publishing experience.

Or maybe “stamp” isn’t quite the right metaphor. I worked so hard as a student, as a graduate student, for something that felt like validation. But unlike my academic grades, this doesn’t feel like validation so much as affirmation and confirmation. Validation: well, maybe you can do this, because we say so. Affirmation: yes, you can do this! but you knew that already. It’s showed me, from a different angle, how much I want to be a writer again.

End of the Miss Universe clichés for now. But thank goodness there’s no bathing suit competition.

*****

In other news, the book project continues to grow. And I’ve found that opening these doors have helped others to reopen. Just watching the water lit up by a boat last night made me think of a memorable night we spent on a cormorant fishing boat in Japan.

  • While I finished (re)reading my dad’s manuscript, I still need to take the time to write about all about what I found. Interestingly, it felt unfinished in certain ways, so I need to write about what I didn’t find, too. So after I write that, I want to reread a few other memoirs of internment, such as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar. How did Houston’s memoir succeed, to the extent that it was adapted for a TV miniseries? What was the appeal?
  • My brother-in-law has suggested that I find out more about my dad’s military service, and that I may even be able to locate those who were in his unit. There are unit reunions, and so on. Fascinating!
  • Have you been following this series in the New York Times? All about technology and attention span and memory. I’m struck by this portion of the article: “At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.” Maybe rats need to blog. Or turn off their Twitter feed. Or both.
  • I am continuing my e-mail correspondence with my dad’s friend, who first commented here. She knows something about the writing of my dad’s book, since (I think) they kept in touch during that time of his life. She wants to give me some memories of my dad, partly because she lost her own dad at a relatively young age. “I too have a drive to understand more about my father,” she wrote in a recent message. “You never get around to asking all the questions you could have asked, no matter when they leave you.”
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This year’s card

1.
Twenty-one years ago, a fifteen-year old girl answered the phone. She was about to turn sixteen, and she had sent out invitations to her birthday party. On the other end of the line was a boy. He was calling back to tell her that he could come to the party. They’d never really had a conversation longer than quick greetings in the hall.

They talked for two hours.

The girl had never talked that long to a boy on the phone. She heard some music in the background. “What are you listening to?” she asked. “Oh, that’s me. I’m just playing around on the guitar,” he answered. Our girl, a sucker for a well-strummed chord, was impressed.

They talked for two hours, about the latest Van Halen album and movies, about English classes and waking up for their shared zero period band class. They talked about his girlfriend, and they talked about her boyfriend.

Over the next few months they talked through isolation, through loneliness. They called each other when her boyfriend and his girlfriend weren’t home. They didn’t see each other as potential more-than-friends. They just talked because the other was there to listen.

2.
Six months later, on the way home from a band trip, they talked through the aftermath of her breakup with her boyfriend. She cried; he stroked her hair. His girlfriend wanted to ride another bus, so our girl and the boy were sitting together.

As the school bus rumbled north on Highway 280 they sat in silence, her head on his lap. After a while, to distract her, he told her about the moonlit hills they were passing. He grew up near those hills. She listened as he told her about the amber  streetlights that were lighting up, city after city, down the highway. She listened and watched as the Northern California darkness crept over the bus, soft as the fog creeping over those hills.

Months later, they talked through his breakup with his girlfriend. After all those conversations in isolation and seeming loneliness, the boy had realized that he had fallen for our girl.

And then the girl and the boy started dating. For a year, they were the couple who made out in hallway corners between classes, the couple who heard “Get a room!” during those embraces at Round Table and didn’t care.

Then the girl went to college. They talked around and then into one breakup.

And then they didn’t talk for nine months. Those nine months of heartbreak carved new reservoirs of empathy for the girl; to this day, she can remember how it felt to wake up and face the prospect of high-tide buy ventolin inhaler online pain washing onto the shore of her days.

At the end of the school year, the girl came back home. They talked their way cautiously back into dating again.

They moved in together. They got engaged. For the next three years they talked through the terror of the mid-twenties: what to do with my life? When does my life become our life? How? Why, and why not? The engagement ring came off her finger, and two days later, he placed it back on. She stormed out of their apartment, and he came after her. She hasn’t forgotten that.

They talked through her first round of rejections from graduate schools. When she heard about those, he picked her up from work. He told her he’d packed a bag, and told her to pick a direction (north or south) along one of the most beautiful highways in the United States.

She picked north. They got lost. But across the Golden Gate Bridge they found a sweet little town, nestled in the county north of the City they both loved, across the bay from their beloved university. They talked all the way up the curves of Highway One and back.

Eleven years ago this month, they got married in a corner of that town, enclosed in a green garden. There was something to be said for speaking love out loud, in front of their families and the friends from the circles of their lives.

3.
How to explain, twenty-one years after those two hours, that the girl and the boy stayed together?

The girl likes to think that it’s hard work that’s kept them together. And it has been work. They learned how to work together by studying together, sitting across countless café tables together. Now they work together to teach their daughters to read avidly and to dance playfully, to eat joyfully and to twirl aimlessly. And hard work is part of the story.

But the elemental truth of their alchemy is conversation: all those years of talking, all those years of listening. They still analyze everything together, from music to moments to meals to Mad Men. At the end of that first phone call, the girl couldn’t believe that two hours had passed. Twenty-one years later, the girl still can’t believe this much time has passed.

All she knows is this: On her worst days, what comforts her is the sound of his voice. On her best days, what makes her even happier is his voice in his body next to hers. She still wants that voice, forever and always.

Happy anniversary, Josh.

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An unexpected stretch

“How does it feel to be writing your own MFA?” my newly-refound childhood friend asked me, while we were chatting on Facebook this week. A concert pianist, and thus an artist herself, she wondered if I faced issues with writer’s block, or struggled with a blank page, or a blank screen. “Sometimes the longest trip is between me and the piano,” she wrote.

“Well, I’ve been away from writing for a while—for now, I still hunger to write,” I replied. “And I know that an artist’s life is not a linear one.” (“Amen, sister!” she wrote back.) “But right now, I think it’s more fulfilling.”

And it’s true, so far. While writing my dissertation had its own rewards, a life lived in bookstore cafes and libraries, this version of my writing life is, well, fun. And it’s a foreign work ethic for me, when my work ethic is usually much more Puritan.

These days I just don’t want writing to be work that I hate. I don’t mind it being hard. I don’t mind working hard. But I don’t want to hate it. I don’t want to write out of guilt for having not written. I don’t want to write in order to please a hostile or cynical audience. I want writing to always have some element of pleasure as the goal. (I’m telling you, Stephen King’s On Writing has some great stuff in it.)

So when I write these days, I am seeking pleasure. Every time I decide to write creatively, it is a gift that I am giving myself.

You might hear the faintest hint of yoga-speak creeping into that last sentence, and I don’t blame you if you are skeptical. Too granola, too Berkeley, too earth-mothery, too woo-woo. I know, I know, I know. Surprising that despite growing up in California, despite going to UC Berkeley, I didn’t take up yoga until I moved to Washington. Like many people, maybe even some of you reading right now, I rolled my eyes at yoga. But really, now that I think about it, the idea of writing as a gift to myself must have something to do with my yoga practice.

A few years ago my sister convinced me to try yoga. For a little while, I took yoga classes at the recreational sports center here. And when the karate students were thumping upstairs over our overheated yoga room, I couldn’t see any “horizon” past my Warrior II fingertips, pointing at the heap of dirty blue gymnastics mats. And then I bought some DVD’s like the ones here. And it was fine, but not great, much less life-changing.

But then I started taking classes, and found a studio that I love, about a mile from my house. The teachers often incorporate meditation techniques. (Some of my favorite techniques: focus on an image, a word, a quotation, and use these as themes for the hour and a half. It’s actually quite literary.) The teachers gently correct postures. And the studio itself tries to create community within its community, from the self-introductions at the beginning of classes to the sponsorship of farmers markets to the weekend retreats, events and workshops.

And for someone like me, who lives so deeply in the mind, yoga has been a priceless gift, because it emphasizes the mind-body connection. Academics live at computers, at desks, at tables; it can be physically and mentally damaging if there are no times to take a break. It’s absorbing, and rewarding, but it can take its toll.

While academia often involves judgment, yoga doesn’t judge me. I rarely look around to see what other students are doing, and I don’t feel the need to compete with them. (“Ooh! She’s holding her ‘tree pose’ longer than I did!”) I’m never sorry that I went to yoga, and that’s an entirely new approach to work, and even exercise, for me. Even after several years, I feel like I’m still pretty new, but I’ve gone to a few advanced yoga classes. There I’m nowhere near as flexible or practiced as other students, but it’s actually fun to shrug my shoulders (mindfully) and just give the pose a try. Or rest.

There was a series of poses that used to be very difficult for me; I had to start out in the easiest, most modified version. Then I had to modify a little less, but for months my arms would shake when I’d lower myself to the ground. But one day I realized that I could do these poses without any modification or protest, mental or physical. And I wasn’t doing it to please my teacher, or to get a good grade, or to receive validation from anyone but myself. For an academic overachiever like me, it’s a revolutionary approach to learning.

Yoga taught me that holding up your own weight can sometimes be the hardest thing to do, but holding up your own weight can also be exactly what makes you strongest.

So now, six years after I started yoga, I can list almost identical reasons for my yoga practice and my writing: I go because there I can practice, and screw up, and fall; because there I can rearrange my mental furniture, or even redecorate my mental living room. And because there I am constantly surprised that I can discover new ways to be happy.

(And yes, now the title of this post comes into play. Sorry for the pun. But honestly, I didn’t expect to end up writing about yoga. I was going to write more about the latest developments with the book. Next time, for sure.)

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Findings in fractions

Music Scores at the Seattle Central Public Library

Here’s a paradox to consider. I’ve got a lot to think about, so you’ll have to look past the academic scaffolding.

First premise: There are very few traces of my dad on the Internet.

You can Google “Taku Nimura,” or “Taku Frank Nimura,” and there isn’t very much connected to him, or who he was. I have active e-mail accounts, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a SheWrites.com page… and as a new daughter of this digital age, it makes me sad that you can’t Google my dad*, for lack of a better term. You can’t find his obituary, the most stripped-down version of a life outline (except for the tombstone inscription), in online newspaper archives.

(Maybe I will create a Wikipedia page about him, but there’s still so much that I need to know. And one wonders: if what makes someone “historic” is debatable, what makes someone Wikipedia-page-worthy?)

And so I wonder about the countless individuals who do not have an online presence, even now; I wonder about the connection between the Internet and identity. I’m not saying that Google should be the only way to find out information, but it’s the first stop for so many, for so much. I wonder about the impact technology will have on my daughters, and the impact it’s had so far. I wonder about them finding out more about their grandfather, in an age where they can’t find him, through search engines that mark their findings in fractions of a second.

Second premise: And yet, Internet technology gave me these things:

1. Pictures I’d never seen before of my dad, from a long-lost friend of his on Facebook. “Are those his granddaughters I’m looking at in your profile picture?” she asks. And that’s a relationship I had not yet connected with my father: he would be a grandfather, my daughters would be his granddaughters.

2. A blog comment here, from someone who knew my dad—during a time when I know so little about his life. I’m not sure we would have found each other without the Internet. I’m so excited to find out more.

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to realize this next thought, and my ten-year-old self would have resisted this, I’m sure. But here goes: my dad never belonged just to me, or just to my family. He also ventolin usa belonged to his friends, and other communities I’d never known or seen. The memoir that my sister and I are writing, then, may not be just a “dual” or “triple” memoir; it may also be something like a community memoir. I want to ask more people what they remember about him.

3. His Masters thesis in Public Administration and a bibliography that he wrote about Japanese in the United States. (Coming soon from Interlibrary loan, more Internet: cross your fingers!)

4. And this page from the California State Sacramento Library catalog, which makes me so happy. Taking my cue from my wonderful university reference librarians, I know that Google does not see everything. There is, however, a great deal of less-Google-able information, available from libraries.

5. A bookstore in Sacramento selling a poetry anthology; one of the poets is my dad.

Last part of the paradox: what does it mean?

Perhaps more obviously, search engines can erase (or obscure) an identity, but it can also restore an identity, in completely unexpected ways.

In the project I want to think more about what that means about humanity’s urges to record, document, remember. Google might not get me a quick answer about my dad, and I’m not sure I want it to do that, anyway. But I can still find him—or fractions of him—through these vast oceans of time and memory.

Despite our rapid technological changes, I think he would have loved our here and now. He wrote so many letters to friends and family. (My first copyediting job, by the way: proofreading those typewritten letters.) I think he’d have an active Facebook account, to share pictures of his granddaughters. And I can almost see him writing witty status updates. Like me, I think he’d share anecdotes about his family, menus of evening dinners, pictures from his travels.

Librarians, writers, readers: our human urge is to connect.

In the book I’ll be writing more about each of these artifacts. For now, I’m remembering that writing the book is one way to put my father’s presence back in the world.

The paradox rephrased: I’m writing both through, and despite, a technology and history that might otherwise erase my father.

*The dystopic novel I’m reading right now–set in the “not so distant future” describes such a person as “ITP” (Impossible To Preserve).

This picture says a lot about where, how, and why I’m traveling, taken at the Seattle Central Public Library:

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To daydream, to promise, to liberate

It’s 10:24PM, and I just finished sending a cover letter and book proposal to this contest. It’s the first writing contest that I’ve entered in…now that I’m counting…hey, twelve fourteen years. I was lucky last time, so maybe some of that luck will carry over to this time.

I’m excited (it’s out there!) and relieved (it’s out there!) and terrified (it’s out there!).

This is the second book proposal I’ve written. The first one was for my academic book. I may return to my academic book eventually. But by comparison, this proposal was so much fun, and so rewarding. I hadn’t realized that I really could write something before I’d written it. I have similar problems writing academic abstracts for conference papers: how do I know what I’m going to argue before I’ve argued it? So I usually need to write the entire paper first, then write the abstract. And, given that proposal deadlines are usually months and months before the conference, the timing of these two acts never works out very well.

With the academic book, I’d already written a full version of the project. So it was easier to write the proposal, knowing the chapter outlines, knowing most of the “through line,” having an academic monograph format to follow (introduction, 3-4 body chapters, conclusion).

But with this project, I have not written the book yet. I know its focus, and I have an idea of how it will be structured. At least for now. You can ask my students: I am a huge believer in (and preacher of) process, allowing the writing process to carry you where it will. That’s where the real insights and discoveries lie.

As I wrote this proposal, however, I was surprised at the book proposal genre’s ability to daydream, to promise, and to liberate, all at the same time. It opened watershed expanses of possibility. Could I do this? ventolin inhaler 100 mcg no prescription Sure. And if I could do that, why not this? It’s a creative work! The writing process actually can carry me where it will. To write the proposal is just that: it’s writing into possibility.

And, I realized, the proposal is a proposal: it’s not a contract. Maybe there are acres (if not oceans) of latitude between the proposal and the finished product.

I have had a hard time with uncertainty, but, as my sister pointed out to me, this is one of the first times in my life that I’m uncertain about my next steps, my next stage. I knew I wanted to major in English before I set foot on the Berkeley campus. I knew I wanted to teach before I finished college. I knew I wanted to be a professor before I finished graduate school. I landed my first teaching job right out of graduate school. To top it off, I’ve had the same lovely and amazing partner for almost 20 years, over half my life. A lot of my life has been stable, and well, I’m a Capricorn: driven, ambitious and goal-setting. Most of the time, I like it that way. And I know that I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have so much stability, especially with love.

On my best days, in my best moments, I know that this new uncertainty—like the creative process—could actually be good for me. Yet I know myself. There’s a strong possibility that what’s good for me, as with most people, is not always going to be what’s easy. That’s all right, though. Capricorns are used to hard work, and that’s usually where and when and how we thrive.

I just want to be strong enough, and graceful enough, and grateful enough to see this uncertainty as a privilege: to see uncertainty as freedom.

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Uncollected

It’s been quite a month, and while I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with my daughters, it’s also been exhausting. I’ve had to choose sanity and take a few expectations off of my plate: mostly self-imposed expectations, often the heaviest ones. Not all laundry must be clean and put away at all times; not every snack my girls eat at home must be homemade and organic and local (you can take the girl out of the Bay Area, but…); dinner does not need to be simmering on the stove when anyone walks in the door. Or, maybe one might be feasible, but not all three in the same day.

And yes: not every blog post must be perfect, beautiful, articulate, collected. For now, the point is to keep writing, whether it’s for the joy of it (Stephen King’s On Writing) or if it’s only for 15 minutes a day (Summer Pierre’s The Artist in the Office).  It’s the writing as habit that’s been an important transition for me this summer. And because of writing, I think I newly understand the phrase “collecting your thoughts.”

So there are a few thoughts I’ve collected, picked up, from the cluttered floors in my mind:

1. I’m not entering a writing contest just to win, really. Although winning would be fabulous, it’s more about the commitment to set a larger goal and put my writing out there. A lot of my thirtysomething peers seem to be running 5Ks or triathlons (or marathons) to commit themselves in similar ways. The contest deadline‘s this week, so I’m going to be working on that application. I’ve got a cover letter mostly finished, and am going to be revising these pieces.  And after that, I’m going to try to submit things elsewhere, maybe here and here. But I just want to keep my head down: write, revise, occasionally send (or hit “publish”).

2. Ever since I wrote about libraries a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about ways to help public libraries, beyond donating my books and beyond using the facilities. I was shocked to see that Seattle’s Central Library will be closed for a week next month, due to budget cuts. That library seems to serve so many, in so many ways. I’ve been heartened by NPR’s prediction that libraries will be the next cupcakes. I’ve seen several articles about libraries that have continued this thread in my mind. But I want to know what else I can do, or where to begin. I’ve been committed to American ethnic studies for almost a decade now, and I wonder if there’s a place for me to combine my commitments to that field with my renewed commitment to public libraries. Both of these institutions are firmly committed to radical inclusion and social diversity and educational justice; it shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, that both of these things are also currently under attack.

3. I’m going to look a bit more into metaphors for history. Ever since I read my first piece of historiography in grad school, I’ve wanted to know more about it. I’m fascinated with Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” with Suzan-Lori Parks’s “great hole of history.” I’ve been thinking more about it ever since I came up with my own metaphor for history and title for the book.  Any cheap ventolin inhalers sale suggestions are more than welcome.

As a subset of that, I’m also curious about what makes something or someone historical. I’ll have to ask my historian friends and colleagues about that.  What strikes me about internment and Japanese Americans is that in some ways, internment is a big part of what makes Japanese Americans “historic”—and there’s so little about what happened to them after they left camp.  Are they no longer “historic” once the historical event has passed, in other words? What’s left once the boat and the wake have disappeared?

I’ve been mulling over the main character’s struggles in Louise Erdrich’s novel Shadow Tag:

How many times have I told you how difficult it is to resist the lure of the historical moment? The one action, the instantaneous truth that changes everything? How many times have I described my own struggles in telling stories, relating historical occurrences, searching for the sequence of events that results in a pattern we can recognize as history? There are always many moments, there is never just one. There are many points of clarity and many causes to one effect. However, after many, many of these points, these moments, have occurred, there is, I should tell you, a final moment. A final scene.” (48)

But I wonder about the desire to resist the lure of the historical moment. We find that the character’s narration is somewhat unreliable. I wonder if her desire to resist transcendence and knowledge (that is, the epiphany) is in itself revealing, and if so, how.

4. An MFA usually requires a large project. I’ve got my project. It’s already larger than I’d anticipated; at first, I thought it would be a reworking of a response to my dad’s manuscript about our family’s internment. And it is, but among other things, it’s also about:

  • technology and memory: how do different forms of documenting (from typewritten manuscripts to Facebook photos) inflect how and what we remember?
  • family and endurance: how has my family maintained its ability to laugh?
  • creativity and multimedia: the textual, the visual, meshed with the archival; the creative lives of me, my dad, and my sister

After I enter the contest, I’ll need to figure out how to plot my next steps. In the meantime, I’ve been happy to spend so much time with printed pages and much less time with online pages (not that I don’t appreciate you reading this!). More printed pages have meant that I’ve been reading books, not just replenishing the well but also stirring up the pot, and seasoning the stew, to mix a few metaphors.

Four things: that’s the collection which is in the laundry basket for now: a few wrinkled items, a few fluffy items, a few that need to be hung up and put away. I’ll add some links to this post tomorrow evening or Wednesday, and I’ll post more about my entry in the contest towards the end of the week.

(For those of who you who asked for a post about farmers markets, I did write one, but it became something else entirely: a meditation about home and a marching song. I’ll keep trying. And I’ll post that one, too, once I revise it.)