Friends & Neighbors: Help Fund AALR’s 8+1 Symposium

Our friends at the Asian American Literary Review have recently let us know about their Kickstarter fundraising campaign in support of their 2011 8+1 Symposium.  8+1, which is the sequel to last year’s 8: A Symposium, will take place at the LA Lit Festival on May 7th, and will once again feature another exciting panel of respected Asian American writers.  This year’s lineup features:

Joy Kogawa
R. Zamora Linmark
Rishi Reddi
Kip Fulbeck
Reese Okyong Kwon
Hiromi Itō and translator Jeffrey Angles
Ray Hsu
Viet Nguyen
Brian Ascalon Roley

AALR is trying to raise $4000 by April 19th in order to help cover the cost of offering this unique literary experience.  As with all Kickstarter projects, the organizers need to be able to raise the full amount in pledges in order to be funded, so we encourage you to consider contributing to 8+1 sooner rather than later. (Not to mention that, if the satisfaction of being a literary patron is not enough, there are some great thank-you rewards being offered to backers at various levels of sponsorship, ranging from event posters to autographed book copies, to AALR subscriptions, professional SAT tutoring, original artwork, documentary film copies, personal editorial consultations—even the chance to attend a private dinner with the Symposium participants).

As we know from putting together even our little off-site AWP reading this winter, literary events (especially those of this scale) are not easily organized, let alone funded. AALR has been doing excellent curative work in its first year or so of existence, and we would love to see them have the opportunity to continue that work through events like 8+1.  If you have even a dollar or two to spare, please do consider donating to this very worthwhile cause.

Friends & Neighbors: The 500 Project

We are a little behind on our news updates, but in case you have not already heard of this amazing project,  here’s a little plug for “The 500 Project,” which is being co-sponsored by Bryan Thao Worra and our friends at Kartika Review.

From their web page:

“Can’t we find, among all of those thousands, 10 individuals who are passionate about Asian American literature, writer activists who will express without equivocation that Asian American literature matters?

For each of the 50 states, there must be at least 10 Asian / Pacific Islander Americans that answer yes. And thus Thao Worra, joined by Kartika Review seek out those 500. Why should it be so hard to identify them and build a vibrant, amazing network of readers and writers? How can a canon of contemporary Asian American literature be built if we cannot even find these 500?”

The 500 Project, accordingly, “seeks to profile 10 APIA individuals from each of the 50 States who answer YES.”

To submit your profile, respond to the items in their short questionnaire, and email your answers to 500project [at] kartikareview (dot) com.  Include the name of your state, and your own name, in the subject line.

We at LR, of course, heartily encourage you to submit a profile.  Take a stand for the importance of APIA lit, and represent your state!

More on the  history and inspiration behind The 500 Project can be found here, at Kartika Review‘s web site.

http://www.kartikareview.com/500project/

LR News: Send in your LR Postcards!

Participate in the LR Postcard Project!

A quick update and reminder to those who either picked up an LR Postcard Project card at AWP or requested one in the mail: please don’t forget to write your response poem and send it back to us!  April 15th (the postmark deadline) is fast-approaching, and the sooner you send in your responses, the earlier we’ll be able to feature them on the blog.

In the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns regarding how the project is meant to work, please do not hesitate to send us an email: editors [at] lanternreview (dot) com.

Looking forward to reading your postcard poems!

– Iris & Mia

Weekly Prompt: Specificity

Four wild daisies. (Not just flowers).

This week in my intro comp class, my students read a chapter from Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing Down the Bones, in which she urges aspiring writers to use specific language in their descriptions, arguing that, just as a person deserves the dignity of being called by the name that is unique to them, an object, an idea, or whatever it is that becomes the subject of one’s writings, also deserves the dignity of specificity (77).

I like this idea—that to write specifically is not only to render a subject more vividly, but it is to render that subject with an ethical hand: truthfully, respectfully, with acknowledgment of its dignity.  There is much talk in the arts of how to create ethically, with genuine concern for the dignity and humanity of the subjects that we handle in our work.  I like the idea that to write ethically involves more than paying attention to the greater political implications of our words; that such concerns are extremely important, but that as writers, in order to render these themes well, we also have a responsibility to pay close scrutiny to the elements of craft—if we are not paying careful attention to the colors and tonalities of our words, to the very palette with which we wield our art, then we are not honoring the subjects of our writing, either.  How that attention to detail pans out, of course, will be very different in every case (there is, in my opinion, no monolithically “correct” definition of, or approach to, solid craft).  But the idea that the attention and respect which a writer pays to his or her subject will be conveyed in the detailed inflections of his or her work seems very wise to me, indeed.

Continue reading “Weekly Prompt: Specificity” →

Weekly Prompt: Responding to Rankine’s Open Letter

Claudia Rankine | Photo courtesy of John Lucas

Today’s prompt is a bit unconventional in the sense that it won’t ask you to dig into a particular element of craft or technique, but rather to engage in a larger conversation that’s developed in the past few weeks about creative writing, race, and the difficulty of navigating the relationship between the two — especially here, in America, in the 21st century.

If you aren’t familiar already with some of the questions and accusations that have risen from the fairly controversial discussion between Claudia Rankine and Tony Hoagland… well, you should be.  Rankine’s personal website gives a thorough account of the back-and-forth between herself and Hoagland in the period leading up to AWP (just click on the link to “AWP” listed under “Criticism”), and the Poetry Foundation blog offers a succinct account of the conversation as well.

Take a moment to familiarize yourself with the conversation, then read the text of Rankine’s open letter:

Continue reading “Weekly Prompt: Responding to Rankine’s Open Letter” →

Event Coverage: Reflections on AWP 2011

Ken Chen speaks at the AAWW's Friday Panel

(A note: this post is a reflection on some of the on-site events that we attended during AWP this year. Mia will write more about our off-site reading in a later post).

It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly a month since AWP 2011 ended, and here we are—as usual—egregiously late with the update.  Nevertheless, this year’s conference was a colorful and thought-provoking experience for us, and we would be amiss if we did not share at least a taste of what we took away from it with you.  At last year’s AWP, we got our feet wet, so to speak, meeting and connecting with a host of amazing poets, and soaking in every bit of Asian American poetry that we could.  It was an exciting and effervescent time for us—we were just starting to get LR off the ground, and we were looking ahead at how our project might find its space amidst the community that was already out there.

Continue reading “Event Coverage: Reflections on AWP 2011” →

Becoming Realer: “Growing Sideways”

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

Kelsay at Grandma Rothert's house in 1988

After reading Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic last semester in Contemporary Nonfiction, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of artifice in my life. Bechdel’s father spent years creating a fiction of himself as the straight, happy family man and small town English teacher, and he arranged his Gothic revivalist home into a solid, real world representation of his artifice. It’s not merely artifice in the sense of having a duplicitous nature, but also the construction and presentation of a certain image, or identity, to the world.

It’s that kind of self-construction that I relate to not only in my own identity formation, but in my writing as well. We learn early on in our writing careers that whatever “self” we put on the page is not our actual, real world self. It is a fabrication , written with specific intentions for an audience. It is, in a word, performed. But in all honesty, when I look at my actual self, I still see the artifice. In any given situation, I find myself carefully constructing my self to look or act a certain way. It’s not just vanity that causes me to never leave the house without make-up, or to sleep in pajamas that are basically clothes so I could more quickly run out in the middle of the night if I happened to get an emergency phone call saying that someone is in the hospital. Although I am vain, it goes deeper than that. It’s about actualizing the idea of myself that I have in my head (heavily influenced by pop-culture and television) every hour of every day in order to make it true.

Performance eventually becomes reality? The symbol eventually becomes truth? I readily admit that my version of symbolism comes from a conflation of the literal with the symbolic. Continue reading “Becoming Realer: “Growing Sideways”” →

Review: KARTIKA REVIEW, Issue 8

Kartika Review | Issue 8 | Winter 2010

In this emotive issue of Kartika, the primacy of the first person is immediately apparent, and the “I” spotlights the issue’s family theme. Except for one second-person narrated story (which perhaps entreats the reader’s I), all the pieces here are borne from their speakers’ personal narratives. Fiction editor Christina Lee Zilka says her goodbye to the journal by telling a memory of goodbye. Matthew Salesses in “Slowed Time, Normal Time” develops a first-person fiction so deft and sincere it reads like memoir. David Mura’s memoir piece, “My Daughter At 18: Leaving Home,” uses first-person texts as a set of resonances: Mura narrates, and quotes from his daughter’s personal statement for college, in which she quotes not just her past self from a journal but also Mura’s description of her from thirteen years ago—all the I’s of which give an illusory choral effect. Like when you strike a guitar’s middle E and the other E strings hum sympathetically. The issue ends on an email interview with Sumeir Hammad (Woan was right in her editorial to guess, “Like me, you will probably turn to read her interview first”), and Hammad’s insights are given us by a characteristically uncapitalized i.

The two poems of this issue are also told from the first-person, and both pieces are occasions of identity. Rajiv Mohabir’s “holi lovesport stains (krishna-lila)” takes its stylistic theme from the Holi festival tradition of throwing colored powder at one another. From the first, syntactically blurred stanza, disparate bodies are conjoined and selves are multiplied:

Continue reading “Review: KARTIKA REVIEW, Issue 8” →

Weekly Prompt: Unromantic Love Poems

Portrait of Old Friends.

Valentine’s Day, with its often-saccharine greeting card verses and glossy commercial sentiments (not to mention its frequent misquotations of everyone from Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson), is at hand once again, and what better time of year than to give that tricky (and oft-abused) specimen—the love poem—a subversive spin?  I’m not talking about writing penny dreadfuls or anguished emo laments (we are not Death Cab for Cutie here).  I’m talking about defying expectation completely with regards to what a “love poem” is and/or should be.  In a sense, the love poem (as it is known in contemporary popular culture) is very much akin to the ode, in that the tone and subject matter of its address tends to elevate the “you” with the use of high language and often ornate imagery.    The purpose of the exercises that follow are to invite you to write against this sense of elevation while still retaining, in some way, at least a loose engagement with the intimacy, tenderness, or intensity of the close gaze in which the speaker of a love poem might hold the object of his or her affection.  To, in short, write against and across cliché and into something that is bold, surprising, and new.

Prompt: Write an “unromantic” love poem.  Some ideas:

Continue reading “Weekly Prompt: Unromantic Love Poems” →

Sulu Spotlight: A Conversation with Wajahat Ali

Wajahat Ali. Photo by Ayoob Syed.

After celebrating a year of presenting nearly 60 artists from the Asian and Pacific Islander Diaspora, Sulu DC rang in the new year with Christian folk rock band Saving Thomas, outspoken Indian comic Vijay Nathan, singer/songwriter Jay Legaspi, pop music trio conjen (who make “songs your girlfriend will enjoy”), and sounds by The Pinstriped Rebel. A new partnership between Sulu DC and DC APA Film launched with an on-stage chat between filmmaker Steven Mallorca and Franco Salvoza of DC APA Film to discuss Mallorca’s work and what to expect from upcoming APA films.

In keeping with Sulu DC’s vision to provide empowering and nurturing spaces for all Asian and Pacific Islander artists, each “Sulu Spotlight” aims to give LR readers insight into something unexpected, innovative and inspiring. This month’s light shines on Wajahat Ali, a Muslim American playwright of Pakistani descent. In January 2011, Sulu DC presented several excerpts from The Domestic Crusaders, Ali’s first full-length play, at the Artisphere. During the lively e-mail exchange that birthed this interview, Ali was honest and accessible, sharing with me his favorite poets, his creative education, and who’s coming to dinner.

* * *

The cast of Domestic Crusaders gathers for some biryani.

LR: The Domestic Crusaders began as a means to an end—quite literally, an undergraduate writing assignment—but has taken on its own life. Can you talk a little bit about why you were encouraged and inspired to transform the short story into a full-length play?

WA: The play began as a short writing assignment for my “short fiction” writing program taught by Ishmael Reed. He told me stop writing short stories and instead concentrate on writing plays. So, I had to submit the first 20 pages of the play to pass the class.

But, the process of creation is inspiring, maddening and addictive. It consumes your mind and soul. The characters start growing; they evolve; they develop personalities and voices, and they never shut up—you ultimately have to release them to the world.  So, I began the play for my 21st birthday and finished it as a present to myself on my 23rd birthday.

Continue reading “Sulu Spotlight: A Conversation with Wajahat Ali” →