I had a dream recently about a man I met in my early 20s. I haven’t thought about him in years, but he appeared in my dream and asked me whether I was still alive through a multimedia projection in some museum foyer. Dreams are strange and I have many, many strange dreams. And I am grateful for all the strange dreams I’ve experienced, just as I am grateful to still be alive after such a horrific year.

Last week was the anniversary of the first lockdown. It’s now becoming so clear that we’ve all lived through one of the most bizarre and terrifying experiences to occur, outside of war, to the majority of us. A collective trauma. I don’t know how you’ve been effected by it, either directly via personal loss or struggle, or indirectly through some form of existential crisis, but I know that we are all changed by this.

I recently noted that 2020 feels as if most of the year didn’t exist. There is this dividing line between the pre-pandemic months and this now we are living in that seem to almost be a blip. As if I fell asleep into a waking nightmare that lasted a year of my life. Did this really happen, I ask? Did this year slip away from us or was it only a dream? But no, it was very real. All the suffering we’ve witnessed was very real indeed.

One thing I want to note is that I’ve been feeling incredibly nostalgic for my younger, carefree days. Even though those days were not always the happiest. We can’t go back in time to correct the mistakes we made though, we can only go forward. One of my favorite songs reminds me of this.

I don’t often write here but I have been working on some interesting things. Announcements to come in due time.

In other news, it is world poetry day and I posted this a few weeks ago on my Instagram. It reminds me of who I was in my 20s living in London and in New York. We’ve all been that woman crying uncontrollably in the next stall. And yes, joy is coming to us all.

I spent the final hours of 2020 writing and applying to writing contests. Writing has been a place of refuge for me this past year. I’ve been able to channel all the chaos, fear, and frustration into the work I’m doing. This has been a great way to release it, even if that wasn’t my original intention.

Since the March lockdowns, I began writing approximately 3-6 hours a week (sometimes more, sometimes less) on a weekly basis at a regular time. It felt right to make the most of being indoors by being productive. I know many people were unable to do this, but for me it actually made dealing with the uncertainties of this past year easier. I treated these hours as work and blocked them off from other activities, unless I had a particular errand that couldn’t be completed any other time. I wanted to complete a project that I’d begun with a writing partner in the summer of 2019. We’d put it aside several months later after amassing several months’ worth of brainstorming and backstory. We had started this Google document for the preparation of this lengthy project. Happy to say that we now have three of these Google documents because the original one has reached nearly 300 pages (NOT double spaced). We still mine the ideas we poured into these shared documents for ideas, so the preparation part for this project – which I’d say lasted at least 4-6 months, has been and continues to be well worth it.

Jumping into the actual writing, we actually outlined everything extensively – thanks again to the preparation we had for this – and then went to work structurally. This is not my typical process. I’m usually a write by the seat of my pants sorta gal. I sit down and let the words come forth. That works for poems and can work for short plays or stories, but it isn’t good for lengthier works. Getting through the middle or coming up with a good ending doesn’t happen easily by pantsing your way through a long project. This process has taught me how to work on a long, lengthy project and get it done.

Last night, we finished the revisions (about 95% certain we are done) and it felt good to be ending the new year with this sense of finality (even if we end up back in the revision state once we get readers’ notes). I fully expect to be in revisions for a while in some form for this project until it gets to a place that feels ready to go.

Now, it’s on to the other projects I have that are in various stages of being written or completed.

Maybe 2021 will be the year that many of the projects I’ve been working on finally see the light of day. I’m hoping you all will one day get to read or experience them in person.

While I’ve grown to enjoy living in the bright and shiny meadows of Las Vegas in the heart of the Mojave desert, one of the things I miss the most are the torrential downpours that occur on a daily basis in the middle of August.  That’s not to say that I welcome the impending hurricane season that will bring more than one terrifying well-organized storm towards the Floridian peninsula.  It’s that I love the descending darkness, the tension, and the strange hush that builds right before the storm brings its orchestral climax. Storms in the desert, when they do occur, rarely crescendo in the same manner.

August is one of those dog days of summer months that bring with it the cruelest temperatures. It was once one of the slowest months of the year, because of the fact that its terribly hot in most areas of the country. In spite of this, and perhaps because of it, a new kind of productivity seems to have begun to spring up.  I’ve noticed that this August there are several ongoing monthly challenges such as the #Sealeychallenge, created by the poet Nicole Sealey, which is calling for readers to spend time each day reading one book (or chapbook) of poetry for the next 31 days.  Then there is the 31 Plays in 31 Days challenge, which offers writing prompts for you to complete 31 short plays in 31 days.

Because of all of these challenges in the midst of the most languishing month of the year and because I just finished CampNaNoWriMo and completed my goal while participating, I decided that August would be the perfect month to kickstart a writing group that offers various challenges for its members each month. Thus, WriteShop was born. Currently we have 9 members on board for this month’s challenge with plans to continue on with various challenges and opportunities to make new writer friends from all over the US and world.  And no, I’m not charging money for this, despite the fact that some organizations do this same thing by charging writers $500 each for a three month writing accountability group (I’m looking at you, Literistic).  I think we as writers and artists should be trying to get wealthy individuals and companies to pay to sponsor ventures like this, with no strings attached, instead of asking other hopeful writers and artists to pay up.  When we have finally established ourselves financially, then we can contribute back so that others can also take part in these programs. So many writers and artists have very little means. This is how an equitable and beneficial model for the arts works.

Besides starting WriteShop, which is allowing me to socialize with others around writing and holding me accountable to my goal of finishing the novel I started this past year, I’ve been gearing up to launch a side hustle business, polishing a chapbook I co-wrote with Sakurako Yamashita, a TASK 沖縄 colleague, and am also spending time seeking employment.  I’ve been working on my goals, both long term and short, and realize that while everything can look shiny and glittery on social media, the real work on projects, on writing, on the self, requires long hours spent in contemplation, in the pleasures and pains of writing and spending time with ones thoughts, or in diligent organizing mode. You can boast all you want and maybe convince some suckers into believing the hype, but if its a paper-mâché kingdom, it’ll crumble eventually. I believe the old adage is: all that glitters is not gold.  It takes long hours and lots of work, but if you put that work into anything on a daily basis, you will get to the goal that you wanted to reach. There are no real shortcuts to living a productive life.  It may take your entire lifetime to be recognized for the hard work you’ve done.  You may never be recognized in your life. But you’ve led a productive life engaging with your creativity, making new things, and contributing something back to the world.  Social media is important to get the word out, to connect to others when needed, and to stay informed, but it shouldn’t be where all your hours are spent as a writer or an artist (or as any individual, really).

August is the perfect month to take one of these challenges so that you can fill the well, use the hours spent indoors avoiding the heat to work on a stalled project, or begin a new project.  It is also the perfect month to spend as much time as you can watching the clouds roll in, marveling at the natural beauty this world offers to us on a daily basis

HIRE ME. HIRE ME. HIRE ME. HIRE ME. HIRE ME. HIRE ME. HIRE ME. HIRE ME.

PUBLISH ME. PUBLISH ME. PUBLISH ME. PUBLISH ME. PUBLISH ME. PUBLISH ME.

“I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing. That if it’s not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement. But usually I have no opinion, I can see that all options are open now, that there seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for somewhere to hide, to be written, to be read. That its basic unseemliness is no longer accepted. But at that point I stop thinking about it.”    

– from The Lover by Marguerite Duras

I’ve been thinking about the books we read and re-read that are as significant to us as any important experience is in our lives. One of these books that changed my life, and the way I write, is The Lover by Marguerite Duras. Originally written in French (its title is L’amant), it was made into a movie in the early 1990s.  I discovered the book through the film when I rented it after reading a review of it in a magazine. I was 12 years old and probably should not have seen that film at that age, but I did.  I remember blushing and turning the video on and off during its numerous steamy scenes (for fear that my parents would catch me watching what was, in essence, an erotic film). But if I had not seen the film, I would not have discovered Duras.  I would not have read her at the age of 13 and I would not have been influenced by her writing and her life.

The story of The Lover seems simply about a love affair between a wealthy Chinese man living in Vietnam and a poor French school girl whose family lives in France’s colonial Indochine.  The social and economic issues she writes about are not to be dismissed, of course. But Duras writing is much more complicated than that for the book is really about writing; the power, freedom, struggles, and failures in the process of writing.

I wonder what Duras would think about all the writing that we produce on social media sites and blogs.  I think she’d disapprove of the flattening of the self that happens when self hood is the commodity that drives products.  Having spent half of my life in a pre-social media era and a quarter of it within, I can say that I long for what Duras means by writing being “all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence.” Maybe I’m just lamenting what our current era has reduced writing to — and maybe it’s not just social media that has reduced it. The commodification of the self was happening before the advent of social media.  But I can remember when blogging started and how exciting it was to read about the inner world of others.  Now I think we’re in an era in which we are expected to bare all while seemingly reducing our complexity to simplistic labels in a system that increasingly treats the complex, interior life as suspect.  There is power in naming and mapping out the unknown via language.  What are labels but words?

This past year I began studying how language affects our thoughts and behavior in relation to distorted perceptions of the self and the world. Words are like fences in that they can bind us into something that may seem, at first, freeing or helpful but will inevitable be limiting in the long run.  That’s how defense mechanisms can be formed. They originally are created to help us, but eventually become what drives our suffering.

I think we aren’t spending nearly enough time thinking about language and the way it is both world building and destroying. What will our world become if we’ve turned all of our words inside out, slimming them down to a sliver, emptying them of their expansive depth, hooking them to big data’s algorithms and driving a particular world building around commerce?  If we’re spending all of our lives reading words that are closer to advertising in the way that Duras refers certain writing to be, what happens to literature?  What happens to complexity?  What happens to writing? What happens to the individual self?

I revisit Marguerite Duras’ work every so often because I want to go much deeper into the meanings of words, into their origins, into the crevasses of their sounds.  I do this when I feel exhausted by the artifice I see on a daily basis – in quotidian polite (or impolite) interactions whether online or in our real lives (yes, even that dichotomy deserves an enormous amount of introspection).  Our lives and selves are complex. I don’t know if we can ever know others because we barely know ourselves.  The self is endlessly shifting, and the words we use are one of the reasons for this.  I think this is what Duras means by the “contraries confounded.”  If we aren’t digging in deep into this “inexpressible essense” than why write at all?

It’s been quite some time since I even opened up this page to update it.  In recent years, I did most of my blogging at 英語の弁当 or Gluten Free in Japan, and even then the majority of my writing/commentaries went straight to good ol’ Facebook, the ultimate time waster and everyone’s favorite spot (besides Twitter) to do some gates of hell-style ego tripping.

Recently, I made the decision to separate business from pleasure and shut down my Facebook wall and start an actual FB page instead.  I was tired of people commenting on my posts as if it were a Yahoo news page comments section.  I also thought it might be a way for me to spend more quality time focusing on writing, except I started to notice that I still spent time surfing the feed for interesting information about poetry, writing (in general), performance, and film (among other topics of interest).  I been itching to post again about a number of really cool pages I’ve read recently, but I didn’t want to fall off the FB sobriety wagon. So I’ve decided to resurrect this page and shift it from an official ethnography of performance blog to a catch-all blog on awesome things in the literary and performance world(s), especially in the interstices where the two meet.  And of course…my thoughts on these things and on the writing life in general.

So, let’s give this one another go shall we?  😉