Aloha! Time for Monday books! Frameless Windows, Squares of Light by Cathy Song is rooted in the lyric. This work sings. Song is from Hawai’i and is of Chinese and Korean descent – one of the first to bring the words, stories, and feeling of Asian Americans to mainstream literary poetry audiences. She writes with a profound understanding of the significance of story. She has written many poetry books, beginning with Picture Bride, a Yale Younger Poets series award winner, but lately, I have been rereading some of her poems in this book which speak to parenting, childhood, and the intimacies of family.

As a young Asian American writer, I was always looking for narratives, voices, poems, anything that featured the work of those who shared similar experiences to my own. I remember when I flipped open the Norton Anthology and saw Cathy Song’s poem ‘Leaving’. This poem is set in Waihawa, near Kunia Camp, the plantation where my mother was raised. My reaction was this: OMFG. AT LAST! Not everyone frolicked with the daffodils in the blustery countryside wearing flouncy sleeves to cover up their bleeding by leeches. The Greatest Hits canon is great, but words that speak to our time and experience also matter.

Read writers who have come before you, but also know that you can VALIDATE your own life and truths by writing your narrative. Your imagination matters.

Learn craft and process and sign up for class starting in January 2021 at drstephaniehan.com.

Aloha, it’s Monday books! I want to recommend Enter the Navel: for the love of creative nonfiction by Anjoli Roy. This is a slender volume downloadable for free by Creative Commons and also available in paperback. I assigned it as a class read. This is a lively, funny, and playful fast read, elicits great discussion, and the range of material about the belly button (personal anecdotes, myth, scientific analysis) was like going down the rabbit hole and made for an absorbing read! I thought, OMG, then YOU ARE KIDDING ME, or WEIRD! Admittedly, I thought: I’m SO GLAD I have an innie! (I got rather involved with navel issues lol) Balinese view their sacred Mount Agung as navel of the world, and the link between Indonesians andPacific Islanders is real, so yes, ideas travel.

Roy follows in the longtime tradition of women creative nonfiction writers as demonstrated by Sei Shonagon (960 AD) and her recording of court life. (She was accused of navel gazing.). Creative nonfiction can be traced to 10th century Japan—to an Asian woman writer. It is awesome that Roy writes, adds, and subverts within this tradition. Storytelling, narrative, description, the details of how we live and the beauty and wonder of our lives – women have forever engaged in this process. A wonderful book. Read it!

~empowering women through narrative~

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January 2021 classes are now listed!

Aloha, time for Monday books! There are certain books that speak of place and time, and yet, can resonate well beyond the initial publication date. I would place Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s excellent book of poetry Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) in this category. Yamanaka says this book was “uncensored women’s voices” and this is the book’s power.

Yamanaka’s writing is brutal, funny, raw, and filled with pathos, and her work never fails to engage young people. If you have bored students in your class (there’s always one!) then I’d recommend her poetry or fiction. I taught her novel Blu’s Hanging a few years ago; students are highly responsive to her work. She has a unique and powerful voice. 

Saturday Night is written in Pidgin English, part of the family of World Englishes. Suffice to say that there is no single correct pronunciation or style of English. In other words, Singaporean, Pigin, or Indian English is as valid as Australian English. My Dear Reader who insists that the only correct English is British or American (BBC/CNN), sorry, but you’re wrong—go down the JSTOR rabbit hole and research World Englishes. Fun fact: if you go to court in Hawai’i, you can ask for a Pidgin English translator if that is your primary language. The diction in this book makes for great discussions.

This book presents girls and women who are often dismissed—for their loudness, physicality, truth telling, anger, passion. I highly recommend this book.

#drstephaniehan #womenwarriorwriter #asianamericanwomenwriters

Aloha! It’s time for Monday books and I highly recommend MINOR FEELINGS by Cathy Park Hong. I have posted about this book prior, but having now witnessed the transformational discussions it inspires in my own class, I believe this book to be one of, if not the most significant piece of writing TO DATE about race and identity, and the lives of Asian American women. 

Essays are straightforward and the prose is intelligent, angry, vulnerable, hopeful, and passionate. The writing grabs you by the shoulders and says: READ THIS NOW! Hong’s honesty and humor are a delight. Read this book to figure out who you are, who your friend is, and how to move the discussion of race beyond the black-white dialectic. Hong writes her truth to power.

This is about how we tell the story of who we are as Asian American women and the fight to be seen—by our own selves and by others. We are the narratives we dare to dream and our ferocity is real. These words speak to where we’ve been and what we hope to be. Read this book.

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Aloha, time for Tuesday books! Totem: America by Debra Kang Dean, author of five collections of poetry, reminds us how poetry opens us to feelings that are often too complicated to express and gives us the words we need to heal and live. Born in Hawai’i and of Korean and Okinawan ancestry, Dean is a serious practitioner of taiji, a master of lyricism, and writes of grief, connection, color and story. She guides the reader with narrative and sharp descriptions that oblige the reader to reframe the ordinary. 

She lets us in. What sensory moments linger with us when faced with the fading of people and memory? I thought a lot about how the very sharp fragments are often how we make meaning and the choice becomes this: which moments do we move closer to in order to make our lives cohesive?

We go to poetry to ask: what should I note? WHY? As with all writing that moves one to a space of deep contemplation, Dean obliges us to ask this question (as I’d be inclined to casually say): HEY, YEAH, SO WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?

Apples, Elvis, sky and words. Grief. And the HAN comes through—this is the Korean word that has no direct translation—of resilience and pathos, memory and loss—a binding to a feeling rooted in sorrow.

Kang writes poems we read once. And then decide, (in my case) a day later, to read again!

I also appreciate the references of place and experience. Poetry is both universal and specific, and for me personally, having grown up in Iowa, but having come to HI for family, there are certain cultural aspects that resonate. This is also very teachable poetry, and so teachers out there–I would pick up Totem: America or Dean’s other work. Dean writes her truth, and we nod in agreement;)

From ‘An Open Eye’: “I know that Death, like God,/wears many faces,/ but the heart, indiscriminate,/ only hammers out its/one note.”

Debra Kang Dean will be visiting Women’s Creative Writing Workshop on Wednesday 10/21! So excited to have her zoom in!

~teaching women the power of narrative~

Women’s Creative Writing Workshop begins 10/24

Register here.

Aloha, time for Tuesday books! The Birth of Korean Cool (How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture) by EunyHong is a funny exuberant read and will inform people about the basic hows and whys of Korean culture and the machinations of global K-pop culture. I believe that this book is highly relevantgiven the anti-Asian sentiment due to COVID, the Black/Asian dynamic in the US, and the truth of polyculturalism. K-pop embodies an idea of polyculturalism and how the point of exchange is crucial.

I’m not a big K-pop fan because I’m rather ambivalent about a lot of pop culture, yet STILL I found this a fascinating read. Nation building through pop culture. I confess: I have a HUGE BTS blanket. A gift from Dad who informed me and The Kid that BTS was Korean World Famous Important Group Everyone Like. It’s thick and soft. I live in Hawaii.

How are we connected? What are some key facts about Korea that might be relevant about this nation on the global stage? We see Korean culture at PLAY. This book reveals insights applicable on a smaller scale to arts administrators. It’s also a lesson about humor: control the narrative with humor and you can say whatever you want to say. Whip-smart accessible writing. I was disturbed. I laughed. Always a good combo.

~teaching women the power of narrative~

Women’s Creative Writing Workshop begins 10/24

Register today.