{"id":3057,"date":"2011-01-20T09:00:56","date_gmt":"2011-01-20T14:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=3057"},"modified":"2011-01-20T13:48:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-20T18:48:00","slug":"becoming-realer-going-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/20\/becoming-realer-going-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming Realer: Going Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR<\/em> staff writer, Kelsay Myers.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>
1854 Victorian Farmhouse \u2013 Photograph by Natalie Grumbles, Christmas 2008 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The older I get, the harder it is to explain what I\u2019m doing with my life. Thankfully, going home for the holidays is really the only time I need to. The Christmas and New Year\u2019s parties, family friend get-togethers and annual reunions with high school and college friends are exhausting, particularly when I\u2019m asked what I\u2019m doing now. Getting an M.F.A. at Saint Mary\u2019s College of California is cool but not specific enough, and writing creative nonfiction is not as self-explanatory as it sounds.<\/p>\n

I was making Christmas gift exchanges at Cach\u00e9<\/a> when a colleague of my mother\u2019s came into the store with his partner. After the general introductions and greetings, he asked what kind of writing I do. I explained that I do a cross between poetry and nonfiction. Then, he wanted to know who my favorite poet is. My answer was T.S. Eliot, though I internally debated whether to name Kimiko Hahn, Marilyn Chin, or Diane Seuss, all of whom have had a more formative impact on my writing and identity <\/span> so far but are not generally well known. The brief look of bewilderment on his face or nervous silence that would inevitably follow didn’t seem worth it. For conversation\u2019s sake, I said Eliot.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not long<\/span> after, my parents threw a dinner party for a high school friend of my mother\u2019s who recently moved back to Grand Rapids, Michigan. They asked what kind of writing I do, and I said the same thing: a combination of nonfiction and poetry, this time adding <\/span><\/span> <\/span>that I address <\/span>a lot of issues about race and social justice. And, since by that time I had warmed up to the question, I went one step further and said that I consider myself to be a modernist who writes li<\/span>ke T.S. Eliot in \u201cThe Wasteland<\/a>.\u201d At that point, I shut up <\/span>because I thought the comparison sounded a bit too pretentious <\/span>.<\/p>\n

Then again, in high school I compared my writing to Walt Whitman. My friends nicknamed me \u201cQueen Elisabeth\u201d because Elisabeth was my French name, and I was the most “elitist” of our group in terms of clothing, premium channel television shows and literature. Then, too, I had felt<\/span> <\/span>\u201cThe Wasteland\u201d to be a precursor to my style of writing while reading it last semester in Foundations of Contemporary Literature. I had<\/span> <\/span>even considered writing with footnotes from then <\/span>on since they could help people understand my writing more, but I find footnotes too distracting when reading a text despite the fact that understanding<\/em> seems to be a big deal for me.<\/p>\n

While writing about being a Korean adoptee, an Asian American activist, or the interracial and intercultural struggles I have with whiteness and Korean-ness, I am often thrown into a<\/span>n<\/span> <\/span>inner world that seems overwhelming and unstable. It makes me depressed. Last summer I complained to my psychologist that no one could understand<\/span> <\/span>the sadness I felt about the loss of my birth family and birth country. My grief was untranslatable. She told me that after losing a parent she too had felt<\/span> that<\/span><\/span> <\/span>no one could understand her grief, but that eventually it changed. She stopped needing to be understood, and it became enough that others<\/span> were there <\/span>to<\/span> <\/span>listen. I wondered how long it would take me to get over the need to be understood\u2014as an adoptee and as a writer.<\/p>\n

I’m<\/span><\/span> not there yet. Going home where I am asked continually what I do and what I write about makes that apparent. I feel compelled to explain, to justify and to make grand comparisons about my writing and what I want it to be.<\/p>\n

I want it to be what T.S. Eliot said writing should be in \u201cTradition and the Individual Talent<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n

Tradition\u2026 cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense\u2026 not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, my traditions are not derived from<\/span> <\/span>Homer and European literature, but from<\/span> <\/span>the Japanese zuihitsu<\/em>, the Korean sijo<\/em>, and Walt Whitman\u2019s free verse. There are Asian American theorists like Lisa Lowe, Grace Lee Boggs, or E. San Juan Jr., poets like Diane Seuss, Marilyn Chin, and Kimiko Hahn. But, as we discussed in my Foundations class last semester, \u201cthe whole of the literature of his [or her] own country,\u201d in our more culturally-sensitive, post-colonial world can be assumed to mean just that\u2014the individual\u2019s individual history and traditions. But there I go, trying to explain myself again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers. The older I get, the harder it is to explain what I\u2019m doing with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[391],"tags":[399,512,511,509,510,418],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3057"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3057"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3088,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3057\/revisions\/3088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}