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Belief and Philosophy Blog Hawai'i Health Self-help

Hawai’i: Friendship

I spent the ages of 13-17 in boarding school at Phillips Academy Andover. I say now that the only time I wasn’t competing was when I was sleeping. Andover was about performance, excellence, and achievement within the very specific parameters of the East Coast establishment.

In retrospect my journey in life has been highly influenced by the relatively short amount of time I attended that school. I lost touch with almost everyone I knew from that time, and as the years passed came to wonder if I had imagined the friendships I had cultivated there.

In the end, I concluded that the majority of the ways that we were taught to behave were in fact oppositional to how one cultivates friendship and compassion, and the relationships were primarily utilitarian. Adolescence is a difficult time, never mind if you are thrown into an environment that focuses on your believed potential. I deeply appreciated learning the profound lessons of literary analysis, and yes, the testing of one’s abilities is part of growing up.

But true friendship is rarely made of this stuff. It’s about kindness, support, and tolerance. It’s about the joys and foibles of a human relationship. Compassion. Foibles. Joys. Forgiveness. Connection of the spirit and heart. I would like to say that I developed a host of friendships from Andover, but truly, I did not. I’d say I had hundreds of acquaintances, some very close, but could rarely be myself, although what teen is herself? That’s the nature of being a teen! Figuring it out! I will say that if a true friendship was developed and survived from that time, it is likely to be real. Like many private institutions for the elite, it functioned as a place of networking.

For years in my adult life I avoided anyone having to do with the school. I questioned if I had anything in common with them, politically, emotionally, or socially. It was designed to be an environment of handpicked children who were anointed by the Admissions Office Gods as young leaders in the making. After I left, I didn’t feel I was leading in anything. Where was I supposed to lead someone? Why me? Who is leading? Can’t I follow? I’m tired! Where are we heading? This leading stuff is very not mellow! she said…in cowardice? With anxiety? When I did bother to check in on what was going on with most of the people, I noted how many of them continued to compete, and behave in a manner I deeply questioned for reasons of ethics and kindness.

 

During COVID I reconnected with my old dormmate and friend Catherine Cotins. We had seen each other once over a decade ago when I was in Boston for a conference, having found each other again on social media. We had lost touch since high school graduation and had gone on our separate paths, navigating our way through school, children, illness, deaths, work, marriage, divorce, and the long river of life with everything that it throws your way.

A few months ago Cathy Cotins came to Hawai’i. We talked, hiked, laughed, and went out stand-up paddleboarding and got tired shoulders. I met her son and she met mine. She went to dinner with mom and dad after all that time. Her son was older than she was when she had last seen my parents. She had spent the summer after senior year with my family while we toiled in my dad’s lab injecting rats with diseases (more on that later…I know how to swiftly break a rat’s neck, but uh, haven’t used that dubious skill ever since. Any science interest either one of us remotely had was dead by the end of that summer!). We couldn’t stop talking and sharing. What was both meaningful, reassuring, and exciting about meeting up with each other was knowing that I did have a true friend who knew who I was so long ago, and here we are, decades later, and we still have this connection.

 

She gave me this little book I Like You by Sandol Stoddard Warburg, illustrated by Jacqueline Chwast about friendship and inscribed these words: “…I hope we can always stay friends. We’re so different so much the same, and good compliments to each other all at the same time. We may not do that much together, but when we do something, it’s always so much fun no matter how small…The world isn’t such a bad place with friends like you in it.”

Andover was hard on both of us, an experience we wanted to forget for our own individual reasons. I’m so glad we are friends again and know I will know her the rest of my life. This is a fantastic feeling.

Cathy texted me after she returned, both of us so happy to have reconnected and said this about seeing each other, especially in the context of that hard time during school and what it did: I feel less broken.

That’s what a good friendship does—it heals and opens you through connection. It changes the future and present as it changes the memories of a place and time. By reconnecting again, the ending changed, and in this way, everything else ripples back and forth and flows with a different sense of meaning. We get better through knowing and sharing with other people. We need people to cheer us on in life, to empathize and to be compassionate with us. This friendship makes me so very happy. She’s thousands of miles away, but there are few people in life who get who you are and to know someone does! What a great feeling! I feel honored to call Cathy my friend!

This is all to say that yes, get in touch with that person you once knew, because there is a good chance that what you will find out is that you did know each other, you were friends, and that can make all the difference as you journey on discovering who you are. Because the way that someone knows you, if the person really knows you, is probably important and a reminder of possibility and dreams. You are there for each other. Connect. Reconnect. Friendship.

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Belief and Philosophy Poetry Self-help Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Adolescence and Clothing: Inner and Outer Selves

These patched retro Levi’s jeans are from my very early adolescence, fashion-wise–from that leftover phase of hippy rebellion. As someone from the GenX cut-off year, I was influenced by this era older than myself and the era in which I lived. At boarding school, I swapped three skirts for this pair of blue jeans that has small embroidered hearts in purple and pink on the back pocket. Thanks, Mary, yes, I still have them. I kept patching them, but of course, I never wore them after a period of time and they don’t really fit me.

I carted them around everywhere as an odd remembrance because it reminds me of a time when I was trying to define my interior self through clothing and all that is exterior. I don’t think about clothing like this anymore. But back then, one minute I would be dressed like X and the next minute like Y and clothing was pure costuming, fun, curiosity, rebellion, and celebration of self. I couldn’t bring myself to be something, so I wore the clothes that suggested I could be something. I am now rather utilitarian most days; I don’t think of clothing in that same way. I’m more in my body, but yet the body seems to occupy a more esoteric space. I recognize clothing as an avenue of expression, but don’t use it that much in this direction.

As I say often, this is all down to how we see death and self.

For me, the more I recognize my interior as an identity, the less I seem to get worried about the exterior. I realize that what we are in the exterior can be entirely artificial. As the membrane between the inner and outer becomes more fluid, soluble, porous, there is less to worry about. We are what we are. Life is rather short. We are temporal beings. Our body is simply our exterior shell.

Social media, avatars, the way we present can be entirely false or mystical and one can be always aware of the gap between what is seen and what is hidden. I think the easiest solution is to collapse the inner and outer. What you see is what you get. That patched jean self is carried within memory. Memory is one part of the inner self, but not necessarily a construct of the present. How I became who I am in the present, was influenced by the time I spent in these jeans, but yeah, but the cells have all regenerated. I am not that girl.

I hope this makes sense for people. For those who experience anxiety about outer appearance, know that the key is to bring the inner as close to the outer as possible. It’s a much easier way to live.

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Blog Passing in the Middle Kingdom Poetry

Passing in the Middle Kingdom: Out of the Depths

I have written and posted about Out of the Depths in a few places. It was previously published, in a different form in Vice-Versa as a prose poem. I wrote this poem in a fit of absolute despair? I wrote it quickly. I’m reluctant to act like this was some mystical act of writing because in the end, writing is about going to the page whether you want to or not. But this was an example of those moments where the words fly in. They do this now and then, only if you don’t judge yourself, if you allow yourself to be vulnerable to the impulse of feeling. I was living in Hong Kong. I was supposed to be working on on the dissertation. This choir program was sent around that time.

I was touched by this. It was sent via email from one I think of in many ways as my very first boyfriend in that the emotional pitch of that adolescent relationship was intense: during that time I experienced a myriad of feelings I had never felt prior. It was exciting. I remember thinking, wow, I get it! I understand what the books say, what love means in the movies! Older people forget and dismiss the feelings of young people all the time, but because the feelings are brand-new, they are intense, wonderful, miserable, and complicated. I was 17. He was a friend’s older brother’s friend. He was backpacking around Italy at the same time I was singing in a school choir and we fell in love. There was Florence and Rome. Sculpture. Art. Food. My senses were suddenly awakened, to love, to beauty, to an environment that was unusual and lyrical. I think of this time with fondness. It was funny and lovely that he had kept that program all of those years. We have not seen each other in decades and like most people, now and then chat on social media.

At the time this was sent to me my marriage was more or less, emotionally over. There was work. Obligations. It was a time of severe unhappiness because I was hoping for a revival, an awakening for a moment that would ultimately never come, and I had, I think, suspected that it would remain in this state and it was driving me mad. This was the poem. It was the last time my ex would see me read a poem too–rather fitting, in hindsight. A lot of young women approached me after this reading. Memory. Heartbreak. Hope.

I also find it interesting that this was a choir program and it got me thinking more recently about how I used to like to sing. Then for years I went into silence. I stopped all song. I sang to my child when he was little, but by the time of this poem, I had entered a phase of  quiet. He was slightly older. Silence reigned. I’m not singing yet, although I am more inclined to do so these days. Hula taught me to smile. Singing: defiance and joy. I was inclined to write in a peculiar space–something I can think of as akin to snow.  Too many words to fill the page. This was written in that space.

I added a phrase long after the poem was done: Madness suffocates the heart. I took out the date, 1982 that was in the title because I wanted the poem to float more in time.

I had begun to make a lot of connections between past and present, an idea of traveling and finding love in an unpredictable geographic space. How we disappear and move. The why of hope and memory. How we become what we dream and how we persist in dreaming. Death. We ferry to the end. How desire brings us to our knees. A longing for intimacy beyond the violence of indifference.

 

 

 

Out of the Depths

 

I learn to sing for love: St. James Church, Florence, Italy, 1982.

Out of the Depths. Aus der Tiefe.

Bach knew voices peel notes before gods.

In foreign lands, terrain is the body.

Journeys: autumnal kiln walls,

cobblestones beating boot leather,

dust of clay and time.

An alabaster youth towers,

crowds gather, transfixed.

Madonna’s electric blues,

her child’s peach fists,

halos, halos everywhere.

This air shouts love and belief.

Passion: a cigarette nipping dusk,

March cold whipping the back of my knees,

a quiver and kiss, a penance for longing.

The hope and embrace of supple flesh,

passion so wide, skin barely holds it.

Memory is now.

What is Love,

but an ancient bridge over an ageless water,

flocks of birds that hurry to heaven,

skies that echo eyes?

In youth one knows its purpose:

the creation of memories, urgent, desperate, alive.

 

Such things follow me to China.

Here, continents and decades away,

I push back memory’s cloying scent

to stay alive.

What now, but to sift and store

my love from the past

remains in a box I always carry:

This is what it means to have innocence.

What of love now?

A familiar traveler,

a wanderer,

a man of rage and longing,

a rough rock of intelligence.

Madness suffocates the heart.

Poetry is difference, the unknown.

We unfold like origami—lines remain—

to create the map I came to follow.

*                      *                      *

The compass rose blooms and points,

directs us to deserts and possibility.

I know the gravity of love,

how it breaks and mends,

its flowers and soil,

the cracking of its perfect wood,

its thirsty jagged roots,

a light it demands and gives

or Death: this ocean comes.

I have moved countries again.

Again.

 

Time, time, from one cradle to another.

Love—bound in a man without a country,

began in the hiss of summer’s heat,

through the eye of an Empire’s possession.

This East swallows: I am one of its minions,

a snack, a witness, nothing more.

A boat ferries me over water

delivers me on hands and knees

to anchor dreams

that sweat from my flesh,

to love that awakens again.

Again.

 

 

Categories
Belief and Philosophy Educators Reading & Writing Teachers

Adventures in Teaching and Girlhood

In the spirit of uploading content on a daily basis my recognition that this will take more than I had planned out, I will be excerpting my manuscript Passing in the Middle Kingdom, explicating the story behind the poem in hopes that people might be encouraged to scribble their own. I’m a believer in creating text and how this can change your life. I began writing this collection of poetry/prose, a type of hybrid work, honestly, in 2008. That’s right. It’s not 2021. It’s been rejected by many people. It also has had nearly all of the content published and the manuscript itself was a finalist for the Wilder Poetry Prize.

I’ve taken one poetry workshop, but my most acute memory of studying poetry was in high school. The most intense moment from that class was writing about my racial identity, a poem called Barbie Wish, and me praying like anything as the teacher read the poem out loud that people would think it was the other Korean American girl. Not me! LOL. I have a lot of fondness for that teenage girl who wrote that and know what it takes to write that stuff. When teenagers write their truth to power, faculty should stop shutting them down. I can’t even tell you how many people shut young students down.

Adventures in Substitute Teaching

I had the opportunity many years ago to substitute teach at an orthodox Jewish girls school. The girls were pretty out of line–I’m not sure where you get the ideas of behavior drawing down ethnic lines because these white wealthy Jewish girls were standing on chairs, shouting, being totally out there! I had them write something creative and this is when it got interesting.

They were sharing and reading it out loud when the headmistress came in for a visit. One girl was reading her story which involved working as a spy, parachuting from an airplane. She apparently spent the summer living a life straight out of a Bond movie. It was fantastic. All the girls listened: glued. Headmistress walked in to listen. After it was over we’re clapping and headmistress yelled at the girl for LYING! She said, you must tell the truth! The truth is that you went to heritage camp and met other Jewish kids and sang around a campfire. Or something like that. The class went silent (myself included, I was smiling and enjoying it the entire time, until Bummer Boss Headmistress walked in).

I was very sad for that girl. After school I did a brief one-on-one meeting with the headmistress who complained that the girls were so out of line she couldn’t get anyone to take the full-time job because they kept quitting. She was so frustrated and said that thank god, that after they all got their periods they calmed down. Or is it that the community further squashed their lives to the ground? Hard to say. I could see the big thumb smashing that girl’s imagination out of her brains right then and there! You think headmistress might see the connection between silencing the girls and the girls jumping on chairs. They were running around in their ankle length skirts and yelling outside having fun. But it was clear that once they got their period, the big headmistress rules would reign. People make excuses in the name of culture, but they need to cut it out. All cultural expectations and rules are rooted in patriarchy which is tied to silencing women. Don’t dream! Don’t make up stuff! Don’t imagine a new world! What a great imagination that young girl had. I’d be surprised if she was able to rebel, but part of me hopes that one day she will think about that huge tale she spun that day in class, the headmistress yelling and just maybe, think about what she used to dream about–jumping out of planes, working as a spy, living a life that everyone around her wanted her to deny.

I hope that parents register their daughters for girls’ creative writing classes this summer with Reema Rajbanshi grades 11/12 and

Ishle Yi Park grades 9/10!

My desire to see girls respected and their imaginations encouraged was partially a result of what I used to see in classes. These are fantastic women authors and writing instructors who will encourage your daughter to write imaginatively and beautifully.

Register at drstephaniehan.com

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Belief and Philosophy Blog Educators Reading Reading & Writing Teachers Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Names and Titles

I thought it would be good for people to know the general story of why I use the title “doctor” professionally. Many people who have PhDs in literature do not go by this title. Creative writers who have PhDs don’t use it much either. To do this, I have to do a bit backtracking in terms of my educational journey.

PhD Journey

I started my PhD by default. I was supposed to be hired to teach in an MFA program. The head of the division had said this based on my publication credits and awards and promised me the job. The chair of the department vetoed this as I did not have a book out. As a carrot, the division head offered the chance to pursue my PhD, to be the first student from this program. He promised me money, full ride, money for overseas travel, and a professor imported from the West. I did my PhD in Hong Kong.

It was a win-win in the end. As a candidate I didn’t require a lot of ramp up as I was older, already teaching, and had basic writing chops down. I had cut my way already through most of the literary canon as I’d been writing for a long time and so wouldn’t be grinding it out in that way. They needed seasoned teachers to teach undergraduates. I had a US passport and in Asia this carries more weight than those from many Asian countries. Still, I had an Asian face, passing as I did, in the Middle Kingdom, which subsequently became the title of a manuscript kicking around: Passing in the Middle Kingdom. They needed a first student who would be able to work with a new single faculty hire and a student who would complete the program. I didn’t want to go to school anymore. But I mulled it over for a few days and accepted. It’s now some period of time, so I feel I can be rather candid about most things like my schooling.

Schooling History

As a Korean American, even if I’m 4 generations in on one side and call Hawai’i a type of ancestral home thanks to Christianity, pineapple plantations and general colonial expansionism, I grew up in a heavily Confucian household thanks to my father who embodied, back in the day, all elements of old style Confucian elitism. There were yangban. There were sangnam. We were yangban. Dad called me sangnam if I neglected to take off my shoes in the house, longing as I did as a child, to fit in with my peers.

I was in my late 20s before I understood how people walked around with shoes in their house. A raconteur used to tell me stories about traveling and parties at Peggy Guggenheim’s back when I was working as a film producer’s assistant. He explained you take off the outside shoes and then you wear slippers in the house. But you could also wear your shoes around the house and then have different kinds of indoor shoes so basically, you’re just in shoes the entire time you are in the house. It was enlightening, but I thought to myself, very uncomfortable: who could keep track of all of these shoes?

I digress…

To my dad, there was Kyung Gi High School and Seoul National. There were MDs and PhDs and that was that. Period. JDs were also okay, but the only time I ever heard my Korean speaking grandfather comment was when I said I wanted to be a lawyer and he replied shaking his head: “Wheeler Dealer”. So much for law in the eyes of the Ancient Yoo Clan. My father was an MD at age 24 and the sole winner in his nation of a scholarship to the PhD program of his choice. He got his PhD in biophysics at U.C. Berkeley. The clan was exceedingly scholarly and this extended to the women. My aunts in their 80s and 90s sat faculty as university professors and one was the first Korean to graduate from the Paris Conservatory. High level academic achievers. I can’t say they were a joyful bunch. Or cheerful. Or happy. But they believed in credentialing. Dad was the living example of someone who would have done great in the Imperial Exam system, and so I was really shaped by this framework.

Alas, I did not have this tenacity as demonstrated in this fashion, inclination-perhaps, nor this brain style.

Phillips Academy Andover and U.C. Santa Barbara

On my own accord, I went from Iowa to Phillips Academy Andover, a school that I thank for many aspects of my education, it fundamentally shaped me, but one that I have come to see, caused much trauma. (I basically cut off all ties from everyone from that period of my life until a few years ago). I have a lot to say about this experience and write about it periodically and believe it was connected to my long tenure teaching prep as an adult. This school threw me into the fire of European American ideas of achievement, supremacy, intellect, and values. I thrived and survived and hobbled out. I had to relearn and deprogram a lot and came to see it finally came full circle only in the past few years. Prep schools are primarily designed (whether they realize this or not) to support the hegemony of existing attitudes. It’s hard on young students of color.  Anyway, I went onto Barnard College, completely burned out from boarding school. Depressed. Dropped out. At one point in the summer, I took a class at City College of New York. Years on, I started taking classes at the University of Memphis.

I transferred into U.C. Santa Barbara as it was near Los Angeles where I had been living and I had liked it on a weekend jaunt I had made there with a boyfriend and U.C. Berkeley wouldn’t take transfers in January and I would not wait another 4 months. Classes were great at Santa Barbara, I loved my classes. I did the extra reading. I finally did well on history exams–I had basically skated by in high schools with C’s, but by my late 20s the frontal lobe parts of my brain were dropped in, so I could make the connections and analysis. Late bloomer much. I was slow out the gate, but per an earlier post, you are talking about someone who didn’t learn the alphabet until age 6. Again, this was not because I was a bilingual Asian wiz kid at all. My brain just didn’t kick in that stuff.

I had wanted to study in a specialized writing program at Santa Barbara, was told to seek out this opportunity, but when I went in for a faculty interview and told her I got a grant from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and wanted to study poetry, she made fun of the fact that I hadn’t read the Romantic poets, mocked me for reading Joni Mitchell lyrics, and laughed out loud at me. She was those types who kind of rattles around thinking she is smart for saying mean things. She’s probably still on faculty. I didn’t bother applying as this is the person who would read the application. Yet there were some key faculty that gave wonderful classes in other departments and I really enjoyed my time there, unlike most of the classes I took at Barnard and Columbia as I took at both colleges.

The students at SB were equally academic, but they did not think of themselves as elite. So what happens is that sometimes people don’t take themselves quite as seriously. What private institutions in the East do is train you to think of yourself as someone who will TAKE OVER THE WORLD hahaha while everyone else, any public university grad, in particular, will yes, grovel and cower at your feet. You think I am joking? I have taught and taken classes now at SO MANY places I can be very honest about this. Even the most middling level private school/university students often feel themselves to be infinitely superior to the riffraff of public institutions. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I’m being honest here–that’s how people think.

San Francisco State University and University of Arizona

To continue: I got onto PEN Emerging Voices fellowship–that was fantastic. Life-changing. My most meaningful creative writing knowledge experiences were not within the context of my MA or MFA program. Later, I went onto San Francisco State University where I had wanted to do the MFA. One of my supposed mentors of the program ‘accidentally’ signed my rejection for the MFA because she had a stack of papers she was inking and didn’t even bother looking at the names. She said, “I’m so sorry, if you had told me you were interested…I never read any of the names of the papers.” Wow. Good to know teachers pay attention. I hung up the phone on her and haven’t spoken to her since. No hard feelings at this point, but no delusions either. I learned a few things from her as I have from every teacher. What I really liked from this program were the lit classes. Very good professors. I got the MA. My lit professor said, don’t let anyone stop you. I thank him for that. So I then went to VONA–a reassuring experience and was highly encouraged to get the MFA. I am so grateful and am thrilled that some of my students are VONA students. VONA changed my outlook. With this boost of confidence, I decided to go to the University of Arizona after turning down a free ride at ASU that was offered after I won a writing prize, and then rocked up to find I had no funding (my fault too, had no idea there would be official letters and promises and all of that) and was told by the then chair to look in the Yellow Pages for a job! Talk about a bad way to start off a relationship? Bad vibes much? Gee, what a piece of advice. Yet, I believe that some of the classes I took there changed my writing profoundly and I remain thankful for certain instructors who went out of their way to make sure I had some guidance. I also met some role model women through a Women of Color organization who have sustained me to date and my kid’s godfather! And the UA Asian American Faculty Staff and Alum Association came through with the money and that’s why I got through. $$$ matters. I have given money back to them and will do so always as a result. In short, my relationship with education, despite all of my teaching and reading and writing and time in such institutions was never that easy. My school relationship and the world it is has been my life in so many ways.

City University of Hong Kong

At the time I started my PhD, I was in Hong Kong and I was teaching part-time. The Kid was about to start preschool. I was not certain of what I was going to do, but had wanted to sit faculty for creative writing and thought, okay, at least I can get the PhD and the division head had said, Listen, Steph, it’s a terrible time in the economy, you may as well do this–finish the degree and eat your ramen noodles and why not. Haha, he said. So ramen it was.

This was how it began. My decision to do the program was met by resistance from my ex who had previously wanted to do a PhD and who then told me when I told him that I would do it that to never ever forget that he was a better writer than I was. (Competitive, much?) There were no pep talks in the household to do this PhD to put it mildly. But I did it anyway. One of the biggest bonuses of the program was my ability to recruit my former student to join the program and he did! Hooray! He’s a solid writer and teacher. There was stupid political stuff as there always is in PhD programs, probably because the stakes were seriously low. People lied. Obfuscation ran wild. Mentoring and the like was sporadic, inconsistent, and random. When and if it did appear, I was so glad because there is nothing more lonely than reading literary theory on your own in the dark, which is, let’s face it, a lot of very interesting ideas written very poorly. Later I found out that one of my supposed mentors had used me in some overthrow maneuver to oust someone from the department and then another didn’t tell me about a job because a spouse wanted it. Then somehow they were in cahoots together. Really? I mean, stakes small or what? Creeping around for that? Anyway, they were helpful in their own ways, but no love lost. Those were early days of that program. I had some solid colleagues in the trenches and really learned from their research too. Despite this kind of petty nonsense, it was an important time in terms of how it allowed me to move into a different way of critical analysis and gave me a vocabulary and lens. I wrote a good dissertation. I stand behind it. I recast the definition of Asian American. I defined Asian American literary aesthetics in the novel and yes, if you pull out the dissertation filed in 2014, I predicted trends we are now seeing. I’d say, I know my stuff and that’s a good feeling to have.

PhD and Writing

I began to use the title as I could see that “doctor” which I started kept people who might have challenged my existence, particularly in educational institutions, in the name of race or patriarchy, slightly at bay. As an Asian woman of small stature there have been countless times I have been dismissed, belittled, discredited, or ignored. I don’t like having to defend my existence. This stopped some of it.

Interestingly enough, I’ve also had people slag off (ever so politely, surreptitiously, or yes, sometimes obnoxiously) the fact I have a PhD in literature. OK, I’m gonna say it: this often comes from fellow creative writers who have MFAs. Really? Why bother? Come on, people. PhD or no PhD, MFA or no MFA–writing is writing and credentials are deeply exterior markers that don’t reflect depth of thought, but reflect instead a certain experiential happening which is absorbed or not, dependent on the individual. I’m critical enough about my writing to say this: some of it is good, some of it is mediocre and some of it is just plain bad. There are plenty of people who have no degree at all who are far superior to me in craft and knowledge of literature. And there are plenty who are not.

Did you get the memo? There are no winners in art.

There may be superficial temporary winners in the game of accumulating capital, but in the end we all die and that’s that.

Everyone comes to writing differently and the writing expectations from either field also vary. All good. I say this politely. Impolitely, I say this: Come on, get over it. We all learn from each other. Again, we’re all going to die anyway.

Dr. Stephanie Han

But back to doctor….Having taught many young women, I thought Dr. Stephanie Han was also good to model academic achievement. Or as my journey shows, the meandering ways we acquire knowledge and struggle and still persist. It’s also gender neutral in the sense that I was always called MRS. overseas. In Asia, people don’t use MS. only MRS. and MISS and now there is MX, but good luck with that being used around the globe in my lifetime. In general, I can be Dr. Stephanie Han and then once people are in class over the age of 18, I can be plain old Steph and that suits me fine.

And so, that’s the reason for Dr. Stephanie Han and drstephaniehan.com. Questions? Comments? Please feel to raise them.