One of my happy places: Elliott Bay Books in Seattle

“If I were reading you like a novel, it makes perfect sense.”

My friend Megan was trying to comfort me; I’d been lamenting about not-writing, again.

“You reached a solid point with your book, and right now you’re taking a break. Things need to percolate. Or maybe think of it like this: it’s like braising. You’ve seared the meat, and sealed in the juices, and now it’s time for the long, slow braise.”

She was speaking in terms of books and food, which helped.
*****
Over the last couple of months I’ve stepped away from the book, and I’ll probably be away from it for a little longer. I took a day job, a short-term contract gig for a few months. It’s a big project, but it’s interesting, and it uses my skills and background from higher education. I’ve been lucky enough to only take freelance gigs for organizations and causes that I support, and this is no exception. The job is flexible and remote—meaning, I get to work from home, or a cafe, which is where I am now. It works particularly well with our family life now, where Josh is working in Seattle, the girls are at various schools, and I’m at home keeping domestic and culinary wheels running. I get to work with the college staff, who are clearly dedicated to the college’s mission. As I think many community colleges do, this college walks the talk of accessibility and diversity. Though I’ve had to step away from my own book, I’m also comforted a bit by the prospect of bringing in a paycheck, as small as it might be. I didn’t realize how much I wanted to contribute to our household income, and how that contribution satisfies part of me.

And yet. I haven’t been working on my book. I’ve been collecting links for the book again, about how we read on the page versus how we read on the screen; about how the jail at Tule Lake (where I think my grandfather may have been held for a time) is being renovated and restored. I’ve added a few book-related books that I want to read, especially Deborah Miranda’s memoir, Bad Indians, which works with some of the issues in my book: intergenerational trauma and revising history. (I recently got to meet Deborah and it was wonderful.) Not much writing, though.

The good news? My dreams have been working hard in the emotional territory of the book.
*****
When I say “my dreams,” I mean the kind that happen when you sleep, not the fluffy pink and gold dreams that appear on inspirational posters. I’ve been dreaming again. I’ve been sleeping the kind of sleep that’s less interrupted. I’d always been a pretty good sleeper until things started to fall apart a couple of years ago. Then I began to expect my 3AM wakeups, lasting for at least half an hour or more. Eventually, I’ve started sleeping better, and I’ll tell you this: better sleep has meant better dreams.

When I say “better dreams,” I don’t mean happier dreams, necessarily. But they’ve been vivid dreams, realistic dreams with a dash of fantasy, where I can see and hear, and where I’ve told people—within the dreams!—that I’ve had dreams about them. I’ve woken up trying to remember enough to write them down.

Each time I wake up from these dreams, I am scared or surprised or shaken, and sometimes all three. Each time I wake up from these dreams, I find the same message blinking in my mental inbox: my subconscious creating dreams is a path to writing fiction. Dreams contain elements of what might and what might not happen, based on familiar characters and unfamiliar settings. (Exhibit A: a dirigible appeared in one of these dreams, followed by a record store. Nope, I’ve never been in a dirigible. Unfamiliar. But I haunted Tower record stores for almost 10 years while Josh worked there. Very familiar.)

The subconscious piece explains, at least in part, why I’ve been terrified of writing fiction, even though writing novels represent my ultimate fluffy pink-and-gold dream. To write fiction I will need to venture into territory that’s even more frightening than memoir. This vivid place, this subconscious place of the visceral, the physical, based on a combination of real-life scenarios (scenes, details, conversations) and what may never be…that is where I am already writing fiction. If I am stuck thinking about stories as moments, just moments, rather than the series of moments which lead up to moments…well, maybe that’s the trick to rethinking my approach to writing fiction.

If my subconscious is already writing fiction, surely my conscious mind can write it too. I am terrified of writing it—I’ve never taken a class in writing fiction, although my friend Ann insists that my reading novels has been my class in writing fiction. I am terrified of the necessary, repeated failure that is bound to come with creating something new. I am terrified of the inevitable gap (as Ira Glass puts it) between the quality of what I want to write and the flabby, shitty first drafts that will emerge as I write fiction.

I am going to disappoint myself, over and over. I just need to keep my head down and commit to the work. Fiction is writing based on endless possibilities—which terrifies me the most—and it’s writing with the most freedom.

If I had a new career goal, that might be it: to write, and embrace that kind of freedom.

*****

Latest Writing News and My First Giveaway!

Since I last wrote a post, one of my essays was translated and reprinted in a few countries—an unexpected and lovely gift, thanks to the Discover Nikkei Project of the Japanese American National Museum. I’ve also been reprinted over at Avidly’s series about the writing life, a wonderful online magazine about loving things “with intense eagerness.”

Last but not least, I was happy to write a blurb for the latest edition of New California Writing 2013, where the nice folks at Heyday Books called me (squeal) an “author and food writer.” As a thank you for the blurb, Heyday sent me two copies of the book, one to keep and one to share. So, I can give one away. It’s a wonderful collection of some of the best recently published writing about California. Here’s what I said about it:

This edition of New California Writing has so many things that I miss the most about my home state: a vision of beauty from the redwoods and Point Reyes to the desert; an awareness of the abundance and the human costs of agriculture, through winter deserts and peach orchards; a wicked delight in probing the geographies (and faultlines) of diversity, from Mojave Indian Barbies to sushi and black-eyed peas. Established writers like Joan Didion, Robert Hass, and Julie Otsuka inhabit the same space alongside emerging voices. Each page-turn gives us another rotation of the maddening and breathtaking kaleidoscope that is California.

Giveaway rules: Leave a comment below if you’d like the “to share” copy and I’ll draw a name via the Random Number Generator on May 15th. Fill out your e-mail address in the form–you do not need to include it in the comment box, though. For now, I need to limit the giveaway to the US. If you are under 13 years old, please ask your parents to fill out the comment form. One entry per person. The deadline for entries is May 15th, 2013, 12:00AM PST. I will post the winner (and contact them for a mailing address) on May 16, 2013. I was not compensated to give the book away.

Near the crosswalk where he used to stand every day, the cherry tree planted in his honor should be blooming soon.

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.

Though I still jog occasionally, I’m sold on the urban hike. A walk, rather than a run.

Mornings are best. A few weeks ago I read a helpful rule to fight procrastination—“do the hardest thing first.” Apparently, exercising is that for me, and so to help maintain my exercise habit, I often walk down the same street. It’s one of the loveliest streets in my city, and it leads to a lovely old (and recently renovated) park. The setting, the routine, and the time of day all tell me physiologically that it’s time to exercise. I’m off before I quite know it.

Now, this street really is something special. There are decorative guard lions, statues of angels and dancing ladies, waterfalls and fountains.There are tall horse chestnut trees with huge leaves; the leaves can grow as big as my head. There are stunning views of the water. There are fantastic carpets of fungus and trees with petticoats of moss.

There’s one house with Miss Havisham (or, Miss Piggy) scalloped lavender stage curtains. Another house has a converted real estate flyer box outside, urging passersby to “take a poem or leave a poem.” Sometimes I’ll notice the patterns that  different leaves have left on the sidewalks, other times I’ll look at paint colors, and still other times I’ll look at  patterns of tree bark.

One morning last month I am on my walk, somewhat grudgingly. A grumpy gray cloud voice says, Oh, well, here I am again. The weather’s dismal, the fall leaves are gone, and there’s not very much to see. Then another relentlessly chirpy voice kicks in: You go down this street all the time, but I bet you can see something new. You just have to look hard enough. You just have to reach.

(I know both voices are mine, the grumpy one and the annoyingly chirpy one: they’re the two sides of my self-discipline. Self-discipline’s never really been a problem for me. What has been a problem for me is the high level of self-flagellation that can go along with a high level of self-discipline. Relentlessly Chirpy Voice is a great cheerleader, but also a surprisingly hard taskmaster.)

There are the same trees, the same pretty houses, the same real estate signs, the same leaf blowers near the bed-and-breakfast. The grumpy voice is ready to take a nap. Yet the chirpy voice keeps going: “I bet you can see something new! You just have to look!”

About a quarter of the way through the walk, there is this two-story brick house with a sign outside.

Oh, wait, no: real estate office. There’s a sign hanging on a pole outside the building. So I had always thought it was a real estate office. The curlicue writing on the sign says something about realtors…must take a look…

Oh, wait, no: apartment building. The sign tells you to contact a realtor office if you’re interested living there. The building is dark, with white columns by the front door, rose bushes, statues.  A fountain in front. More bricks on a path that sets the building pretty far back from the street. The sound of the fountain actually distracts me—it makes me think there’s nothing else to see. But wait, there’s an ironwork fence curves around a mess of greenery next to the building…

Oh, the fence. I hadn’t really looked at the fence before. I look harder at the ironwork fence: the ornamental scrolls and flowers. I look harder at the plants just behind the fence…and then, I see it.

A swimming pool.

As if I am behind a movie camera, the landscape behind the fence zooms away from me. Shiny silver handrail, shimmering green water.  The horizon, my very field of vision, expands—and there is, improbably, a pool.

(Who has an outdoor swimming pool in the Pacific Northwest? No one I know. Surely, there’s a story there.)

I’m telling you about this swimming pool because I want to remember it as a metaphor for the writing life and its rewards. To look harder, to keep reaching, until the horizon expands and something gorgeously unexpected appears.

That’s how I found this year’s word for myself: reach.

Hi there, and happy new year. My name is Tamiko, and I just used Pinterest as a writing tool. Still with me? There is, as always, a back story.

My sister asked me to join Pinterest so I could look at some images that she’s got there. So I rejoined, having lost my original account when the whole deal was still in beta. Friends from Facebook started finding me on Pinterest, and my e-mail started pinging with notifications. I asked my Facebook friends to be patient with me, since I really had no idea about what I was doing there. I asked them for tips on how to work with Pinterest, or if they enjoyed it, or how they liked to use it best.

Some of my Facebook friends described Pinterest as “more addictive than Facebook.” I have also heard some describe it as the least stressful, lowest-maintenance form of social media, because you don’t have to interact with anyone (necessarily) or gain followers or start conversations. The most appealing descriptions made it sound like a place to arrange your own bookmarks, save recipes, or daydream visually. One friend said that she had a vision board there. Those descriptions sounded fun.

I started “pinning,” or (for the unPinitiated) adding images from sites that I liked, to different “boards,” or subject areas that I created. And oh, it was “luscious,” as another friend put it to shop through different lamps at Cost Plus, and think about the things that I would like to buy for our living room. So pretty! So sparkly! And I liked looking at all the colors together on my boards. I keep wanting to integrate more color into my everyday life and surroundings, and looking at my Pinterest boards does make me happy.

There are aspects of Pinterest that concern me, for my own personality and habits. It can be addictive, another form of fracturing my attention. Already I can feel myself thinking, “Oooooh, I can pin this on my ___ board”—after I update my blog (so 2000s), check my Twitter feed, add books to my Goodreads account and update my Facebook status. I’m not sure I need another thing online to monitor and update. And as a book writer, I need longform attention to read, to write, to think beyond 140 characters or 320 pixels. When you get to the Pinterest home page, you are greeted with more images to click, and when you get to your own home page, there are even more of the same from the people and boards that you are following. It can be overwhelming, unless there is another way to monitor and organize the “boards” that you follow from different people. (There could be. I don’t know yet.)

And so much about Pinterest that I’ve seen (thus far) is about desire: things you’d like to buy, projects you’d like to make, recipes you’d like to test, places you’d like to travel, wall decor for your bathrooms… I should mention that I do have a friend who has created a board of “pins completed,” which sounds like a useful way to keep yourself a bit more accountable instead of adding to an ever-increasing to-do list of pins. I could see myself creating a big list of recipes to cook that I hadn’t cooked yet, and a list of house projects that I hadn’t started (or finished) yet, and feeling pretty terrible.

What worries me the most about Pinterest—again, for myself—is that there is very little space for appreciating what I have. As far as I can tell, the Pinterest gaze looks outward and forward, rather than inward or backward. After a while it felt like looking for my own reflection and having to search for it, over and over again, in the mirrors of other people’s houses. Something like the rabbit hole or funhouse of the Internet search itself. (Alexander Chee, who writes some of the finest online essays I know, has a short one about distractions, writing, and the Internet.  One of the best passages:

“The next time you find yourself helplessly in the grip of some internet rabbit hole, take a slight step back, and don’t stop yourself, but ask yourself what it is you are really after. What are the feelings you feel?…[and] whatever it is that is so distracting, would you write more if you wrote about it? Does it want, in other words, to be your subject?”

But one of the Pinterest things I decided to try, on a whim, was to create a “board,” a collection of links and images, for the book I am writing. And, wow. I actually want to keep this board around, and I hope I’ll be able to save it elsewhere somehow, with the other book-related materials. The part of me that keeps jumping ahead to publication says that this Pinterest board could even be part of a marketing tool for the book. Readers might want to know more about certain pieces of the book, and they could look at the board for more information. You can see the entire board here. (I don’t know if you have to be a Pinterest user to see it, so let me know if you can’t see it and you really want to. [Not that any of you need more things to see. I know.])

I started with an image of the place in Northern California where my dad and his family were incarcerated, Tule Lake. I made that the cover image.

Other images followed from sites that I’ve discovered while I’ve been writing and researching the book. An interview with the current poet laureate, Natasha Tretheway, about history’s erasures and memories. A Rumpus article about grief memoirs, another about the genre of memoirs. An Atlantic article about photographers using technology to bring together separated families on the same page, in the same picture. An article on Yoga Journal about a woman who created a yoga workshop specifically for those who are grieving. A national resource center for children and teens who are grieving. A post from my own blog (ooh, I can pin my own content?) to remind me of things that I discovered while writing about grief.

The library where my dad worked for so many years, at Cal State Sacramento.

And an image of my sister’s incredible artwork (which I  want to include in the book) of my grandfather’s funeral and the mandala she created over it.

The work of putting the images together was partly frustrating, partly satisfying. Frustrating because as much as I loved working with these images (I usually work in text), there were sites that are important to me and my project. And because there was no image to be “pinned,” I couldn’t add them to my board. There are sites with important paragraphs that I want to read over and over again, and the images were not usable or interesting. I went back through my book journal and tried to find pinnable sites for the board; some worked, others didn’t. It would be nice to have a place for all of them, on a virtual visual cork board like this one.

The satisfaction, though, was the surprise. For example, I don’t know if I ever would have searched for an image of the library where my dad worked. But now, every time I see it, I think about all times I went there, visiting him at work. He used to take me and my sister to every single floor of the library, showing us around, and (yes) showing us off to his co-workers. Just seeing the image made me remember all of that. So it was a good reminder of what the image can do, and how the image lets us viscerally access what text does not.

Captioning each image helped me to do some unexpected short writing assignments for the book. Sometimes I wrote important quotes from the interviews. Sometimes I wrote notes about what the images meant to me. Sometimes I wrote and actually discovered something new about the image for myself. I grabbed an image from the book I’ve been meaning to get, Colors of Confinement, an extraordinary collection of color (color!) photos from camp. As I wrote the caption, I thought about what it means to see camp in full color, when we’re so used to seeing and thinking about camp (at least in the present) in black-and-white, the somewhat distant historical past.

I thought about how seeing camp in color brings camp dramatically into the present, even if only for a while—and that move is something like the move I want people to experience when they read my book.

And perhaps most importantly, my Pinterest board for the book got me out of my writing rut. It inspired me to go back to the book again. Looking at the images together made me click into a looser, freer, right-brain mode of creating. It was a way of playing with the material that I’d like to keep, if I can.

One final surprise, though: it was shocking to see how much that Pinterest book board contrasted with the others. This board has so many black and white images, so many photos of people and paintings. The other boards contain a lot of landscapes and still lifes and objects. To see the book in terms of representative images showed me another way to see its prominent threads. I got to see my book again: it is about loss, and history. It’s about how we use technology and memory in order to recover. And retrieve. And renew. And heal.

A Few Writer Takeaways for Pinterest:

• Use Pinterest as a way to play with the material from your book-in-progress. Create a “board,” or collection of links and images, just for your project. Think about it as a vision board or cork board for the book. Move the images around. See what the collective images on a board tell you about your project. Seeing your text-based book in terms of representative images can unlock some of the material or emotions that “just” writing might not.
• Unless all of your links have interesting, relevant, and usable (“pinnable”) images, Pinterest does not work as well as a place to save all of the links for your book.
• Use the 500-character caption function as a way to do some short writing assignments about each image for your book. (It’s another way to approach Anne Lamott’s famous “one-inch picture frame” assignment in Bird by Bird.)

Have you used online images as a way to spark your writing process? Have you used Pinterest for your own artmaking or writing? Do you have any Pinterest tips? Please leave them in the comments below.

Update, 1/17/13: Laura Harrington has written a similar post about using Pinterest for novelists, here. More useful tips!

It’s taken years for me to adjust to the Northwest light, but I think I got closer to fine this year. We bought full-spectrum light bulbs, and I started using them to help me wake up at my bedside table in the mornings. We painted our living areas sky blue and cheery yellow.

More importantly, the grayer the skies became, the harder I looked for color in my everyday life. Looking back at my photos from this year’s autumn,  I can see the patterns that a windstorm will create in the fallen leaves on the ground. I can see how luminous the dahlias are in September, how the pumpkins in October just glow in my daughters’ arms, how the filtered sunlight enlivens the red and yellow maples, just so.

This year’s photos showed me color, light, life. You couldn’t really see how gray and dark the skies had become.

Or, since color is relative, the colors were that much brighter because the skies were so gray and dark.

This year I finally learned the lesson of the solstice: it’s not about raging against the dying of the light. It’s about reaching for as much light as you can, every single day. When mid-December arrives, It’s about welcoming the return of the light, each minute by sunlit minute.

I’ll be back next year. I hope you will too.

(P.S. My essay about my family’s sukiyaki recipe was chosen “a very close second” in Discover Nikkei’s Itadakimasu series. You can read the essay and the generous comments from the Editorial Committee here. Happy New Year, everyone!)

It’s like the proverbial lonely tree falling in the forest: if you write an essay and it’s not published anywhere, does it count? (For what?) What does publication mean in a digital age where publication can be as easy as hitting a button?

*****

A few weeks ago, I wrote something, and showed it to Josh. He knew that I was still doing my song-and-dance around the scary stuff, around the difficult and true place where I have to go for the book. I knew that I’d have to go farther. He was right. So I did. I went farther down the path where I was supposed to go: towards the gut-clenching, the cold hands, all of that. I did it, and I think I wrote a good piece. It feels true.

Here’s another way I know it’s true: I had to detox afterwards, perform a sort of exorcism by doing things that make me happy: singing really loud to show tunes and 80s pop songs, baking some brownies, cleaning my kitchen. (I think cleaning my kitchen now actually does make me happy: it’s cleaning another workspace.)

While writing the essay, I kept thinking, “Nobody will want to read this.” “No one will want to publish this. It’s a niche-market piece.” There are things that I’ve written in the essay that I believe somewhere beyond what I consciously want to believe. There are things in the essay that scare me, and I think it’s because those things are true, but I don’t want to believe them yet.

And after that, I got stuck in the book process again. I wasn’t sure what I need to write next.

*****

Writing the essay, but not publishing it, or even sending it anywhere to be published, made me think hard about what I want out of this writing process, really: do I write just for the publication, so someone else can hear what I’m saying? Of course I don’t. And somehow…I’m in this funny place. I’ve written something, and I think it’s good, and it scares me, and I don’t know what people will say about it. In this age of near-instantaneous publication and reaction/comment, I wanted someone to read the essay. And yet I’m terrified at putting it up in a public forum. I did have some very specific people in mind while I wrote it. It is part advice column, part meta-narrative, part confessional, part literary game, part thank you-letter. I sent it to a few good friends, who liked it. But I felt stuck.

Then last week, Josh took a look at the list of what I’d written (or planned to write) so far, and we agreed. About a quarter of what I’ve written so far is going into another book. I may publish that material when I’m in a place that feels more emotionally healthy, where that particular grief is not as raw. It will take a few years, probably.

Yet I know the decision was right. I felt so relieved, ready to go back to the book about my dad and his book manuscript. I made yet another outline of the book, draft #5. Now that I’ve decided that my voice will be the primary one in the book, that it will be in the skull and the vertebrae and the legs of the project skeleton, I know where I’m headed.

(At least for now. It’s writing, after all. I’m learning that these pronouncements are, themselves, up for revision.)

Then something new happened: I stitched together a couple of pieces that I’d been working on for a while. I transcribed some of my dad’s book into the project for the very first time. I’d been transcribing his diary, but I never really thought that transcription could be so intimate. Typing his words on my laptop, thinking about him typing the same words on his typewriter: a daughter and her father, across time periods and technologies, meeting back on the page as writers. I dove back into the book.

I wrote the longest piece that I’ve written for the book, to date. I’m going to call it my first full chapter. Onward.

****

Maybe it’s not trees I need to think about, but birds.

One morning I woke up and heard a small thump, saw the shadow of a bird silhouetted against our bathroom window. I don’t think the bird flew into the window, because it was still able to fly.  I remember hearing the raspy flutter of the bird’s wings, the urgency I felt when I saw it.  And I remember how beautiful it was in that moment: wings outstretched, scared and stunned and shaken, but flying away.

Fall has always been the season of transitions to me, more than any other season.

(Sorry, spring: I love your flowers, but I have terrible allergies.)

Maybe it’s because when I was teaching, I always felt the pull of the old and the new each autumn: brand-new school supplies and clothes shopping; older, deeper colors of the leaves on the trees; colder and cloudier weather; new faces to learn and new students to teach. Fall was always the place to take on something new and gracefully let go of something old.

This fall, though, Josh has a new job. It’s a big transition for all of us. He’s been at UW for over 10 years, including the years of his doctorate. He’s now working in downtown Seattle. We’re all excited. But we’re also waking up about half an hour earlier. The girls like to take him to the bus stop in downtown Tacoma. So we’re all out the door in various stages of readiness by 7:05AM. The girls are sometimes yawning, and they’ll bring their bedtime snuggles or lap blankets in the car. Josh also comes back later in the evenings. We miss him, but it’s a huge relief to have him working happily at a place where he has (among other wonderful things) a window with lots of natural light. I can’t wait to visit him and go out for lunch. It’s close to PIke Place Market.

As for me, I’ve been trying out new household routines: ways to keep things a bit cleaner so we can welcome more people more frequently to our house. I’ve added one task a day to my everyday housecleaning, which is mostly kitchen-cleaning (doing the dishes, emptying the dishwasher). I’ve been trying a new way to plan meals, where each of us gets to pick a meal that all of us will eat (or at least try) each week. I’ve gone off the foodie deep end: for breakfast, I’ve been making homemade granola bars for Josh to grab in the mornings. I’ve been trying to incorporate more exercise into my week again: more frequent yoga classes, longer walks/runs.

Of course, not all of these new routines and resolutions are working smoothly all of the time. What’s most important, though, is that I am slowly learning to be very nice to myself in the middle of all this change. The girls eat mac and cheese twice in one week? That’s okay. I didn’t get to my daily cleaning chore? Oh, well. Tack it onto the weekend. I’m learning to shrug and keep trying the next day. Or the next week. I’ve wasted far too much energy beating myself up for not meeting my own ridiculously high expectations. Really. Who needs it?

And the book—I am beginning to understand why authors are cagey when they’re asked, “How’s the book going?” Because my answer is that I don’t know, exactly. It makes me sound lazy, or decadent, or indecisive, the quintessential directionless artist. Before I started writing this book, I wanted to think that it was such a linear project: “Well, I’ve gotten half of the book done, and I have an outline, and I just need to write two more chapters and I’ll be done.” It would be so nice to have a clear, concrete status report. I can say that I’m writing pieces, and thinking about where they might fit in the book. I’ve been getting to some important pieces, and in the last couple of weeks I’ve written some things that will scare the crap out of me if they ever get published. They feel scary, and therapeutic, and necessary. I’ve thought too much about how these pieces will be published, and where. I’ve worried that the book is too much about me, and less about my dad. And I’ve thought about how much I like being published in an age of near-instantaneous publishing, and how it can be a heady sensation to want those “likes” and retweets and page views in response to something I’ve written. I don’t want to be addicted to that form of publishing, right? There has to be another reason why I write.

Right now the book feels like an archaeological dig: there’s something! I think it’s important! There are bones! I don’t know what it is yet. I need to find the right tools to brush away the dust and debris. It’s taking shape. And I’ve been thinking very hard about something author Cheryl Strayed said a few weeks ago, as quoted by my friend Christine—“to lean hard into the work and not anxiety.” So I’m going to keep leaning, keep writing.

Fall in the Northwest has taught me that when the days turn gray, we just look harder for spots of bright color.

Fancy Autumn Meal for Josh: Polenta fries, Balsamic-glazed mushrooms, Garlicky Swiss chard
It’s been a while since I did a recipe post, and this one’s going to be short on pictures, unfortunately. But I posted this meal as my Facebook status update, and a few people asked for the recipes.
We had a superb time with the polenta and the mushrooms, and chard on the side. But you could mix them all together. You could add some goat cheese on top of the polenta. You could grate some Asiago or fresh Parmesan on top. You could add fresh cracked black pepper. But these 3 things together were just fine, all by themselves.

I had some versions of this meal wandering around in my head, as I was shopping at the farmers market. Mushrooms? Yes. (I’m a late convert, and I still don’t like them raw or on pizzas, but sauteed or stuffed, yes.) Chard? Always. And polenta…definitely. Since the weather had turned chilly, I’d been hungry for polenta. I made the polenta the night before, and fried the polenta the next night, Monday. It was a super-busy day, with school, C at ballet and then M with swimming right afterwards. Last Monday, because of bus schedules and swim lessons, we couldn’t pick Josh up downtown. I grabbed a few bites of the polenta and mushrooms before we headed out the door. But when he came home, he found different pieces of the meal simmering on the stove, with a lovely bouquet of smells to greet him when he walked in the door. We ate more together when I got home with the girls. That made me happy. I think we’re all going to like it here.

Part 1: Polenta Fries/Grit Cakes, adapted slightly from Matthew Amster-Burton’s Hungry Monkey
I used to be intimidated about cooking polenta, but not any more. Many recipes call for frequent stirring, stirring occasionally, and so on….for 45 minutes! But I found this recipe in Matthew Amster-Burton’s great book Hungry Monkey. If you have a kid (and even if you don’t), Matthew’s book is a fun read, but it’s also got some yummy recipes that I’ve tried and liked. I’ve been (and probably still am) a picky eater and I have liked so many recipes and ideas from this book.
The hardest part about this recipe is remembering to make the polenta and chill it overnight first before frying it the next day. Really. It’s pretty easy.
1 1/2 cup grits or polenta, preferably stone-ground (I use Bob’s Red Mill polenta)
1 1/2 cups whole milk (our family’s lactose-sensitive, so I used soy milk—see more details below)*
4 1/2 cups water*
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
*Because soy milk is thinner than whole milk, I used less water and more soy milk. I reversed the proportions of water and soy milk, so 4 1/2 cups soy milk, 1 1/2 cups water. Cooking the polenta in more milk rather than just water helps to make it, well, creamy. And more flavorful.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Combine the polenta, milk, water, salt, and 1 tablespoon butter in a large saucepan. I used our cast-iron skillet, which works well, but then I have to clean it out in order to fry the polenta the next day.
3. Place in the oven and bake 1 hour. Stir after the hour.
4. Place the pan back in the oven and bake another 15 minutes until the polenta is thick and creamy. Add the additional 1 teaspoon butter and stir well.
5. After the cooked polenta cools down, place it into a loaf pan (or even an 8”x8” pan) and refrigerate it overnight.
6. When you are ready to cook the polenta fries, cut the polenta loaf into half-inch slices, or batons for fries.
7. Using a nonstick or cast-iron skillet, fry the slices in butter (or butter plus olive oil) over medium-high heat until well-browned and crispy on both sides. You don’t need very much butter—just enough for a small coating of the bottom of the pan. Don’t touch the slices for the first 5 minutes, but each side can take up to 10 minutes to brown.

Part 2: Balsamic-glazed mushrooms
You might be tempted to add oil or butter before you do this, but don’t. Trust me. You want the mushrooms to release their liquid first and let that evaporate, then add the other flavors so that the mushrooms will absorb those instead of repelling them with water. I think I adapted this recipe from the Cha Cha Cha cookbook (Cook, Eat, Cha Cha Cha).
1 lb. mushrooms (oyster or cremini or portobello would be good), lightly rinsed and sliced about 1/3” thick
2-3 cloves fresh garlic, minced
1-2 tbsp butter
Balsamic vinegar, about 1/8 cup or a generous glug
About 1 tsp brown sugar, to taste
Fresh cracked black pepper or red pepper flakes, or both, to taste

1. Place a cast-iron or large regular skillet over medium-high heat. Once the pan is hot enough for a few drops of water to dance across the surface, add the mushrooms.
2. Cook the mushrooms, stirring occasionally when they start to brown. Wait for them to release their water, and cook away the water that emerges. Once the pan is mostly dry again, and the mushroom liquid has evaporated, add the butter and the minced garlic. Make sure the garlic doesn’t burn.
3. Then, turn down the heat to medium and add the balsamic vinegar. (It will splatter if you don’t turn the heat down.) I don’t own very fancy balsamic, so I cook the vinegar, reduce it a bit and then add a touch of brown sugar.
4. Add fresh cracked black pepper, if you want it, or some red pepper flakes.

Part 3: Garlicky Swiss chard, another recipe adapted from Matthew Amster-Burton’s Hungry Monkey
I just got used to liking spinach, fresh and in things. Started using kale in soups. I know kale’s the darling green of foodie and health folks these days. Started using chard in lasagnas, soups, other places where I used to use spinach. But chard and I are now BFFs. I buy a bunch at least once or twice a week and cook it this way. I Love Chard. Who knew? Thanks, Matthew.
1-2 bunches Swiss chard leaves (red, white, rainbow, whatever works for you) (reserve stems for another use)
1-2 tbsp olive oil
1-2 tbsp unsalted butter
Salt to taste, about 1/2 tsp to start
2 cloves garlic, minced
Pepper, if you want it
A splash of lemon juice

Heat the olive oil and butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the salt and the chard leaves and stir until wilted. Add the minced garlic and stir. Cover, reduce heat to medium, and cook for about another minute. Add pepper, if you want it, and lemon juice.

Almost a month ago, I went to a gathering where I saw so many friends from my former life.

It was mostly lovely, a joyful occasion in honor of a friend’s daughter. A few friends had stayed in touch with me, so they didn’t need the full recap of my year. Sometimes it surprises me that it’s been more than a year. Hard to believe that I don’t measure my professional life in school years now, although my daughters still mark that calendar for me. I say the afternoon was “mostly” lovely because it was also a little hard to see these friends from that part of my life–it is now a former life.

There were the few friends I hadn’t seen in almost a year, the ones who didn’t know what had happened to me since I left. For a while, it felt like I didn’t know how to answer the question, “What have you been doing?” For months I kept saying, “I don’t know yet. I’m figuring it out.”

That was hard, since for most of my life I have known what I’m going to do, and planned my life in Capricornian ways: when I was going to get engaged (after my fiancé finished college), when I was going to get married (sometime early in grad school), when I was going to get my degree (which became multiple degrees). I still consider the timing of the births of my daughters as luck, but somehow both times I was pregnant over an academic year, home with them as babies during their first summers. I still love calendar books, to-do lists, milestones, and concrete steps. (Really, I can still be fun at parties. I bring kick-ass snacks.) So it was hard, somehow ridiculously shameful, that I had to respond to “What have you been doing?” with the answer, “I don’t know.”

I felt the same way when I was starting to write this blog, too: it wasn’t really a food blog (not enough of my own pictures and recipes), it wasn’t really a teaching blog (I was leaving that life), and it wasn’t really a reader’s blog (not enough book reviews). I kept wanting to introduce myself to new people by prefacing it with a description of what I used to be.

And yet at this gathering last month, there were the friends who asked the question again. This time, however, I was able to answer, “I’ve been writing.”

Now, the frequency of my blog posts doesn’t reflect the frequency of my writing—you’d have to check out the “Other Places” page here to see more of the writing I’ve been doing over the year. I’ve been writing all kinds of writing: volunteer recruiting letters, nonprofit grant writing, web pages, social media community-building, author interviews, storytelling discoveries, personal essays, book reviews.

But! I haven’t really been writing my book at this point, which probably means that I am dancing too much around something that will take me somewhere deep, and painful, but true.

Instead, I’ve been not-writing a lot. This disappoints me. But I’m trying to take this picture’s advice and just finish something, not beating myself up. There’s enough old-school ex-Catholic guilt there, passive-aggressive as the awesome Twitter account “Your Chinese Mom” whose tag line is “Why Don’t You Call More.” Not-writing looks like this:

• Link-collecting, especially relevant links that I want to use for the book proposal (See, people really are interested in this topic! But I still worry about marketability—is the book just going to be too sad?)
• Epigraph-collecting, finding quotations that I think are useful. I’m thinking about not just an opening epigraph but several, and several different ones that will open the sections of the book.
• Cutting and pasting of other people’s words in order to make it look like I’ve been doing something. Something like hiding the childhood vegetables I didn’t eat under my napkin.
• Reading articles that explain my procrastination
• Reading other memoirs and comparing them to the persona and structure of my yet-to-be-born book
• Reading writing books (lately I recommend Tell It Slant, The Business of Memory, and The Art of Subtext for nonfiction and fiction, respectively)
• Meeting with a therapist friend to talk about the impact of storytelling in trauma therapy

Oh, of course I know these are writing, too. The part of me that calls this process “not-writing” is the part of me that’s relentlessly linear, that part that loves calendars and lists. And yet the creative process, at least as I’ve come to see it, is anything but linear. There are days when I think I’ve solved the structure problem of my book, and all I have to do is just give myself short assignments until I’m done. There are days when I think I’ve healed enough to write the story of my losses without being brought to my knees (emotionally, at least). And then there are days when I know I could not walk into a room with certain people, when I know I could not walk to certain places on this earth and not feel devastated. Still. Who wants to feel devastated? Writers, that’s who. (And artists, poets, composers, dancers: anyone whose work takes us to places we don’t want to visit, but absolutely must.)

What my twin personal griefs have taught me is that so much of life is not linear. And yet I keep wanting to force grief and healing—and thus my narrative about these things—into being linear. That’s the structural problem I’ve been wrestling with for so long. Today’s a day when so many people in the U.S. are grieving, but I still struggle with this national(ist?) form of public, and sometimes too-transient grief. At the high point of my idealism, I think that one of today’s lessons is that I may need to be share my grief and even mark certain days for it. I don’t know if the idealism will win out.

For right now, all I know is that the month that I have not-written has felt worse than a month of writing. I’ve gone to yoga and gone running at least once a week for several years now. A huge victory for someone who was never that athletic, who was always intensely cerebral. I now get ridiculously cranky and tense and tight when I haven’t done any of those things. And now my mind feels that way about writing. When I haven’t written in a long time, my mind gets cranky and tense and tight. Writing is what loosens up my mind, although I have had to train it to feel that way for over a year. Writing is now that mental conditioning: not so hard to maintain, much harder to regain once you’ve been away for too long.

This post is partly for a former student, a brilliant one from my former life, who recently said, to my surprise and delight, “I’ve been reading your blog about writing!” It’s for those who read here but might not comment, but still want to know how I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing. I can say now that this is a writer’s blog. And I’ve been writing.

How do you not-write? And what helps your creative processes out of a not-creating rut? 

J Peligen

Yesterday, Ichiro Suzuki left the Seattle Mariners and was traded to the New York Yankees. I wrote this short personal essay for The Seattle Star, “Why Ichiro’s Departure Makes This Nikkei Girl Sad.” It wasn’t an essay about his baseball career (the 2001 team, the All-Star appearances, etc.), but what he represented for me as a Japanese American who had also just moved into Seattle, and as a student of the region’s history and literature.

The news happened very quickly, and I didn’t take very long to write the piece. However, I’m starting to see how I might approach a longer personal essay, and I’m starting to think about what essays that are not lyric, and more “traditional” essays, might look like.

8/2/12: Update: the piece has been reprinted on Discover Nikkei, web project of the Japanese American National Museum. I’m thrilled and honored.