What a Rush!

#110: Here & Now, Work, Elsa Valmidiano, Art, Chinatown Art Galleries, Laura Eccleston, Mark Young, Kazu Haga, Embodiment Project, Andrew Tuan Nguyen, Loose Ends, Untold Disco, and Car Alarm Music.

HERE AND NOW

Last week culminated with a BIG RUSH to get out a grant submission and a nonprofit newsletter. So I’m running a day late. As for the “here and now,” I’m shifting to a slower place and getting back to my reading. Still on a run of fantasy trilogies, and three-quarters of the way through Daniel Abraham’s Blade of Dream [note: even some of my favorite fantasy novels have the worst titles] and now I’m also reading Kazu Haga’s book on Kingsian nonviolence, Healing Resistance. In the meantime I’m nurturing a bunch of nasturtium seeds in the little patio garden in front of the cottage. It’s so heartening to see those little “nasties” sprout up under the chicken wire (set up to keep the birds out).

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WORK

Now and then I mention work because it’s a big part of my life. But I rarely reveal what I’ve been working on. After about fifteen years of copyediting and editing, I seem to have found my niche in the freelance world: working on Asian, Southeast Asian, and Asian American and Pacific Islander nonfiction writing. Here are the products of several recent projects:

• Smithsonian Asian Pacific American History in 101 Objects (developmental editing). By Theodore S. Gonzalves with essays by AAPI scholars and curators.

The book was especially interesting to me because of its focus on the stories behind objects in a museum collection. I am the staff writer for a nonprofit project that’s in the process of creating a community cultural center and museum for Salinas Chinatown:

• Our Salinas Chinatown (edited, wrote introduction). A collection of short essays by people who lived and worked (or still work) in Chinatown:

• Borneo Ikat Textiles (copyedited). Forthcoming by Traude Gavin. For Tracing Patterns Foundation, a community of international scholars, educators, and textile makers who contribute toward building a body of research on traditional practices related to fiber and textiles around the world.

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THE BEGINNING OF LEAVING

This last one is not work, but something I was happy to do. I’ve written the foreword to Elsa Valmidiano’s excellent and moving new collection of essays, The Beginning of Leaving. The book is now available from Querencia Press.

“There are many powerful moments in this book, embodied in the author’s writing-to-understand how the colonial encounter is passed on through generations in our bodily experience; how trauma is dealt with—through suppression or empathy, projection onto others, or via exploration and the curiosity-driven work of writing. Just as powerful are the processes of healing, which I think these essays represent.”—Jean Vengua

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ART

Two small ink paintings on handmade paper:

Ink on Khadi paper. 7/2023. By Jean Vengua.

Ink and graphite on handmade paper. 7/2023. By Jean Vengua

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RABBIT HOLE

• Exploring Chinatown Art Galleries:

• Making a tiny art gallery and finishing miniature paintings—by Laura Eccleston:

• Issue Seventy of Otoliths: the Magazine of Many E-things is out, edited by New Zealander (currently in Queensland) poet and author Mark Young. I co-edited a couple of collections of hay(na)ku poems

  ¹
  with Mark some years ago. Otoliths has been presented on Blogspot for many years, and I give Mark kudos for that. He’s never fallen for the siren call of the flashy website platform. It is what it is: a great offering of innovative writing and art.

• “Death Doula-ing a Dying Empire,” a talk given by Kazu Haga:

• The Embodiment Project – Dance as a form of healing:

• Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Graffiti art and rebranding Vietnam:

• The Loose Ends Project—if you’ve got knitting or crocheting left unfinished when a loved one died, this may be for you.

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SOUNDINGS

• As told by Polyphone, “The Untold History of Disco” begins with the Stonewall riots:

• From Tony Ann – “my neighbor’s car alarm” (or what you can do with what you’ve got):

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Hay(na)ku

is a

Philippine diasporic poetry

form

invented by

author Eileen Tabios

1.