Heidi Fiedler, creator of Nebula Notebook on Substack and a writer/editor/mother herself, interviewed me as part of her “Mothers Who Make” series about parent artists. I really enjoyed gathering my thoughts on these questions, which have been on my mind and in the foreground of my creative practice for more than eight years now.
Check out the full interview here.
Thanks to J.K. Fowler and Ayodele Nzinga, first Poet Laureate of Oakland, for editing this collection of poets from The Town. Be sure to check out Ms. Nzinga’s introduction (“change is dancing in the middle of all the rooms, and talking very loudly”).
I moved from a grey high-rise in Shanghai to a one-bedroom near Lake Merritt in 2009. I remember feeling so grateful for its blue skies and the scent of orange blossoms wafting up to my window. I love this town. I love its unruliness and its history. As a mixed race person, I feel good here. I respect the people who call Oakland their hometown; they’ve endured a lot of displacement. (For some local living history, give a listen to the podcasts “Hella Black” and “East Bay Yesterday.”) I had both my babies in this town; it is theirs now. So it is an honor to be listed with the poets in this anthology, a fitting last publication for Nomadic Press.
You can buy the anthology here.
A quick plug for two unique new works of poetry and imagery by Drop Leaf Press. Beautiful to hold and provocative to read.
All of It, Tinged is a curated juxtaposition of the photography of Asako Shimazaki and the writing of Diana Fisher. Shimazaki’s quietly charged images from her solo wanderings across Northern Japan reflect and inflect Fisher’s diligent poetic narrative about a novitiate and her convent absorbing the results of a catastrophic national election.
Belated Poem by Heidi Van Horn is a book-length sequence of text + image diptychs distilling landscape, color, and language into a poetics of interiority. Van Horn’s spare lines and arresting photographs are narratively linked yet marked by rupture, elusion, and unsettledness. Deploying vocabularies of intimacy and ephemerality as deftly as those of abstraction, physics, and geologic time (volcanic island-building; fault-block mountains), Belated Poem ultimately speaks in human terms: perception and consciousness, shadow states, and severance at the seam of Self and Other.
My story about a woman and her small daughter on a night flight home was published in the very first issue of Paperbark, a lovely literary mag produced in collaboration between the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Earth and Sustainability, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, and the UMass Libraries.
https://www.paperbarkmag.org/
Evan Karp over at The Write Stuff interviewed me for SF Weekly.
(I just learned that, due to budget cuts, all regular SF Weekly columns are getting the boot. This is a drag, because Evan’s work to connect the literary community through Litseen and Quiet Lightening deserves a wide audience. Thankfully, the interviews will still happen over at Litseen.)
I’m making maps with Stamen Maps.
There is so much space and sensory experience between what a map shows you and what the land shows you. Walking the studied land is disorienting. One feels that location and place should feel obvious.
I have pored over this territory.
I could guess how many steps are to the creek east of me and be correct.
Still, it feels strange.
Something vertiginous about the bird’s eye view.
Here are two maps. Both depict the city of Arcata, in Humboldt County, CA, to the left/west. As your eye roves east, you see Rte 299, a main corridor through the Trinity Alps toward Redding. (This is the setting for my novel – the path of escape.)
What is a river and what is a road? What is green, brown?
Sporty windbreaker, fitted pants, strap sandals, trader joe’s bag and a canvas bag, cane with a strap, large sunglasses
“Protect our fair streets of Oakland
Isn’t she beautiful, isn’t she fair
We must do something
She’s so beautiful
And those who die
Physically and mentally
Will be lifted up by the
Lord of the people
Into the hands of the Asian race
Except there’s always pussy
Isn’t it beautiful
It’s always pussy and
Don’t you think mine is beautiful
And Barbara
They thought hers was beautiful and
She’s in the prison
Locked up in a cell
San Quentin Santa Rita
Pussy isn’t remembered
We must do something for Barbara
Isn’t she beautiful
Pussy forgotten, cock stays around
We must do something
For Barbara
Locked up in San Quentin Santa Rita Napa Sonoma
From the streets of Oakland
Barbara isn’t she beautiful”