Category Archives: My Book-in-Progress

The Next Big Thing: Blog Hop, 2013

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First draft small

Hans Ostrom has kindly tagged me in this year’s blog meme, a series of writers talking about their works in progress. (Thanks, Hans!)

What is the working title of the book?
I’m still playing with the title—but for now? Life After History: Talking to the Archives of My Dad’s Life.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
It started when my young daughters started to ask about my father. They knew he was dead, but they wanted to know more about him. My daughters will be children of the digital age, and I wanted to think about concrete ways to give them a sense of his presence. In trying to “restore” him for my daughters, I was struck by how much technology and communication has changed from the time of my father’s death (in the early 1980s) and our Facebooking, online lives now. So I started looking at the hard copy archives of my dad’s life: his unpublished book, manuscript his military records, his recipes. My sister’s a visual artist, and we also thought it would be wonderful if she could create a series of works that visually responds to the artifacts and his life (and death). She does some amazing work and I can’t wait to share it.

What genre does your book fall under?
It’s a memoir, although it will also include excerpts from my dad’s unpublished memoir and pictures of my sister’s artwork. Three voices for the price of one!

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
That’s a tough one, especially for a memoir; who do you cast as yourself? Lea Salonga, Tamlyn Tomita, and Suzy Nakamura are talented and beautiful Asian American actresses, and approximately the right age, but I am not sure I’d ask to cast them as me, precisely for those reasons!

For my dad? One of my grad professors, Steve Sumida, is an amateur actor, and looks a lot like my dad. I’ve gotten to know Ken Narasaki a bit, and he’d also be wonderful to play my dad at a few different ages. But actors like Sab Shimono are probably closer to the right age.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
It’s the story of two writers meeting on the page, and the results of that meeting: how I tried to restore my dad for my daughters by talking to the archives of his life, how technology helped that quest, and how I became a writer again through that process.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Still writing that first draft, going on two years now.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
There are so many sources, though of course there’s my dad’s book. He died when I was ten years old, and left (among his many other papers) an unpublished memoir about his family’s incarceration at Tule Lake during World War II. I’m also inspired by other Asian American writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Eugenia Kim, who have written works based on the lives of their families.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I’d love to see the book spark different conversations about the legacies of memory and history. So many of us have experienced sweeping technological changes in our lives, but we’re also anxious about the costs and benefits of these changes. What gets lost between page and screen? What gets restored from screen back to page?

If the thousands of registered users on Ancestry.com are any indicator, many people are interested in genealogy and their family histories. People who are interested in family history might also wonder about the archives of their own families, both digital and in print.

Some of the book is about grief; I had not really processed some of my grief about my dad’s death for over twenty-five years. I’d like to think about this book as a step in helping to move grief conversations from the self-help aisle and into other areas of the bookstore.

And of course I hope that people (both within and without the Japanese American community) who are interested in the World War II incarceration experience will find a great deal that resonates.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I’d love to find representation with an agent who believes in me and my work, and an editor (and publishing house) who feel the same way.

In print

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It’s been rather busy around here. I’ve got 3 very different writing projects going on, and they are stretching me in really interesting and unexpected ways. Something like yoga. But I had to share this picture, because this piece began here.

The same piece which began here, from this blog, has been reprinted in two different anthologies. A week ago, I got a copy of the anthology from the good folks at Heyday Press.  It was something to see publication happen online, but it was also unexpectedly wonderful to get a copy of the anthology, to see myself in the table of contents, and to see the piece laid out and professionally typeset. On paper.

I am very grateful to the folks at Kartika Review for publishing the piece first, in their Spring 2011 issue. Without their selection, I would not have been eligible for their Kartika Review 2011 anthology, or the Heyday Press reprinting.

I’m grateful to folks who read and comment here, especially to my dear friend Tara who insisted that I submit this piece somewhere.

I’m grateful to my family and friends, whose love and support make so much of my writing possible.

I’ll be back with more of the book in progress this week.

Legible (the diary, part 1)

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This month I have been thinking about what it takes for something, or someone, to become legible: clear enough to read.

And in thinking about legibility, I thought about grad school. In my first quarter, I had a grad professor whose unenviable job it was to teach us literary theory. We began in summer, actually, with one thousand pages of required reading from a textbook with fragile Bible-paper-thin pages. All this before we started the fall quarter. I think it was a tough class because I was so resistant to the ideas, but also because I was so incredibly resistant to the writing in the course readings.

Literary theory, which we could define very simply for now as a lens (or set of lenses) to read the text, can be painfully dense sometimes. My grad class was not my first class in literary theory, I’m ashamed to say. I say “ashamed” because it was the first theory class that actually “took,” where I actually decided to learn and absorb the material.

I’d taken a theory class during my senior year of college, but (perhaps I shouldn’t admit this?) refused to read very much. One of the biggest obstacles in literary theory—ideas which are supposed to illuminate the very texts they are discussing—is the density of the language. In fact, literary theory felt so dense that it felt like white noise, that raspy shower of ashes that used to come up when televisions still had antennae, before they went digital. When I used to start reading literary theory by someone with particularly difficult writing, my brain would just tune the words out like white noise, or maybe the spaces between radio stations. Take this sentence by the philosopher Jacques Derrida:

“To grasp the operation of creative imagination at the greatest possible proximity to it, one must turn oneself toward the invisible interior of poetic freedom.”

When I would read literary theory, especially by someone like Derrida, it felt something like when you are learning a foreign language and you only know a few basic phrases:

“To grasp the EEEEEE ERRRRRH at the AHHHHH to it, one must ERRRRRRH….”

And so on. It felt like paragraphs and paragraphs and chapters of white noise.
It was enough to make me throw the book against the wall, several times. It was as though some part of my brain decided to shut down deliberately whenever I’d try to read. “What? WHAT? WHAAAAT?” my brain would shout at the text, and I’d give up. Really. I’d reread, and reread, and fight the text the entire way. I really thought that the writers were doing it on purpose, and this really pissed me off.

So in my grad class, one of my professors gave me an interesting lesson in reading comprehension. He suggested that if we were struggling with a writer’s prose, we should take a page of their writing and write it out. We could handwrite it, he said, or retype it. But he wanted us to rewrite that person’s writing in order to understand them better. Only when we’d traveled the same path of commas and compound clauses and conjunctive phrases could we begin to understand how that person was thinking.

As I’ve been transcribing my dad’s diary (really, a diary of five years!), my professor’s lesson in legibility has returned. It’s one of those very old diaries with five years, a page per day, but organized only by the day rather than the year. Each page contains 5 years of the same date: five years of January 11th, on the same page. As a narrative, it makes no sense if you read one entire page and then move to the next. And my dad’s handwriting is so small because the spaces for each entry are so small. Tweet-sized, if you will. So until now, I haven’t actually sat down and read through the entire diary. Instead, as Josh suggested, I’ve been transcribing it.

This means that I’ve been writing my father’s diary in order to read it.

(Unless you’re a historian, how often do you read a long piece of text by writing it out first?)

It’s an amazing experience, an exercise in writerly empathy. And of course, it’s a metaphor for the entire book I’m writing: it makes me wonder what it takes for my father to become legible again. I’ll be taking the next post or two to talk about it.

Thanks to everyone who responded here and privately to the last post. It was very hard to write, and terrifying, but I’m feeling how necessary it was in the book-writing process.