DEAR —

“Dear—” is a community-based correspondence Project and chapbook. It was created in 2019.

This project was created with the support of: an Artists Initiative grant from Densho, a grassroots organization dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans to promote equity and justice today; the Santa Fe Art Institute’s (SFAI) “Truth and Reconciliation” residency; and the College of Arts and Humanities at California State University, Fresno.

If you’re interested in acquiring a chapbook, please contact me.

Special thanks goes to initial readers/responders Jaime Rodríguez-Matos, Valarie Kaur, and Traci Brimhall. Much gratitude, as well, to my fellow artists-in-residence at SFAI for your colleagueship in the summer of 2019. Huge thanks to Aldea Mulhern, Jaime Rodríguez-Matos, Joseph Cassara, Venita Blackburn, Janelle Saito and Melanie Hernandez for helping to print and hand-sew these books.

Deep gratitude to Gregg Saito, Janelle Saito, Leigh Saito, Marion Masada, Saburo Masada, Nikiko Masumoto, Valarie Kaur, Brandon Shimoda, Devoya Mayo, Akiko Miyake-Stoner, Naser Nekumanesh, Tess Taylor, Lee Herrick, Lisa Lee Herrick, Nohemi Samudio Gamis, Samina Najmi, and Amy Uyematsu for engaging in correspondence with me. 

Thank you, Dave Lehl, for the photographic portraits of my family and community.

In the letter for my grandmother, Alma, “Empathy is a smooth stone that cuts sometimes” is quoted from Sara Konrath. The subsequent metaphors were co-written with Traci Brimhall.

In the letter for my grandfather, Mitsuo, the Italicized lines are from Adrienne Rich’s poem, “VII,” in Twenty-One Love Poems.

In the letter for my mother, Janelle, John Berger’s quote ("She was now the center of what surrounded her…”) is from Bento’s Sketchbook.

In the letter for Valarie Kaur, italicized lines (unless noted below) are from Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems, 1962-1972. Joy Harjo’s quote is from a lecture on Native American women writers delivered at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (thank you, Josh Rios, for this resource). “Not knowing is the most intimate way” is from the Zen text, The Book of Equanimity. “Truth-seeking is a creative act” and “Healing is resistance” are quotes from the community garden outside of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, NM.

In the letter for Nikiko Masumoto, quotes from Joy Harjo are from Laura Coltelli’s The Spiral of Memory: Interviews. Thank you to Will Freeney for sharing these with me.

Thank you, at last, to my elders, my ancestors, and our ancestors of the future.