Writing Practice

Thank you, guest reader, for spending this time with me this week.

It’s been fun to share a bit of my world with you and to keep on practicing my writing.

I didn’t come from a very spiritual or religious family and I don’t always connect as easily to the spiritual. I was skeptical when a former teacher, liz gonzález, asked us to read Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake, a book relating writing to Zen Buddhist principles.

But I found that the idea of writing as a practice spoke to me and re-fashioned my own relationship to my writing the more I thought about it. It does seem like a road that connects one day’s work to the next, pulling back layers to find more underneath, somewhere I might never get to (and where I might never want to fully arrive to).

What’s been the most important for me to sustain my writing practice are the writing communities I belong to, including Kundiman, Macondo and VONA, among others. I’ve realized that I’ve written a poem every day since last September because of a Kundiman poet who began The Grind, a rotating group of poets who commit to writing a poem every day of the month together (and onward and onward).

In the spirit of writing practice, I’d like to leave you with a writing prompt inspired by the word of the day: verboten (forbidden, prohibited).

1) List three things that you always write about.

2) Make a list of word associations with each of the things you listed. For example, one of the things I write about frequently is mother. My words on the list are orange, cicada, tiger, lines, soup and island.

3) Now list three secrets (transgressions or forbidden, prohibited things) you’ve never told anyone.

4) Pick one of the secrets to write about. Instead of naming what the secret is directly, use your word association list to write about the secret.

Happy writing!

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Inevitable

The word of the day is inevitable: Bound to happen, unavoidable, predictable. Fitting because I have been thinking about death. True, that this is the inevitable course of all our lives.

Facebook tells me that J.D. Salinger has passed away. And Howard Zinn. In the last year, we’ve lost beloved Filipino American poet and community organizer Al Robles, Chinese American historian (and chronicler of the Chinese American left) Him Mark Lai and Ronald Takaki all in the same month. In the very beginning of the year, Lhasa de Sela whose songs I’ve kept on repeat now for days.
They were all my teachers and mentors through their words, though the only one I knew personally was Al Robles. We would cross paths on street corners, in front of Mom & Pop sandwich stores, at the playground in San Francisco Chinatown where I worked down the street from the corner where the I-Hotel had stood (and where Al had organized against the evictions of the I-Hotel tenants in the 1970s). He was always friendly with a story or a joke to pass onto me and I always felt a little lighter after a chance encounter with him. But I never knew who he really was beyond his community personage.

One of the last times I saw Al was when he agreed to read his poetry at a fundraiser for Oakland Chinatown organizing against the evictions of elderly tenants at the Pacific Renaissance Plaza.  I thank him for his generosity and he smiled at me and just nodded his head as if it was a matter of course.  And I didn’t keep in touch with him when I moved from the Bay area. What would I have said to him the last time I saw him if I had known that would be it?

This Valentine’s Day weekend, I am going to make a pilgrimage with my family to see my grandmother, who is currently surviving Alzheimer’s. She is in the care of my aunties who take care of her in rotating shifts every few months.

My father told us a few months ago to make room in our schedules so that we could make intentional time to see her, possibly this one last time. Because she is frail, he said. The last time my father went to see her, she recognized him for only a moment, but it was a joyful moment.

When we ask him if it’s to say goodbye, he says No, No, No.  Just in case. But I’m thinking about what I want to bring with me on my way to see her, in case this is goodbye.

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Evince — to manifest, make evident, bring to light.

I love ritual. As an adult who doesn’t live near family, it’s been surprising to discover. Growing up, I can’t remember ritual in our everyday lives. Perhaps because we didn’t live near extended family — they lived at the end of a long drive for hours (at the closest) or the end of an international flight.

The rituals that automatically come to mind are those that my brother and I forced upon my family, like the tooth fairy and Christmas gifts and Thanksgiving. Though I think my mother drew the line at jellybeans during Easter, my parents often obliged, as if paying a toll.

But there were very rare moments, less flashy moments that we shared together. On our birthdays, my mother would make us a bowl of somen noodles with an extra egg cracked in for whoever’s birthday it was that day.

This past Friday, I called an assorted group of friends, pulled from different areas of my scattered life together for a celebration. An Iron-Chef-themed party where the guests had to bring dishes with one of these ingredients: coconut milk, chard or eggplant. Two of the guests engaged in a live, timed competition cooking with the secret ingredient, the lily bulb.

After the eating and the chatting and the laughing, I asked the guests to sit with me and write down words they wanted to manifest intentionally for the upcoming year. Two years ago to welcome in my 30th, I had asked guests to create manifestations of their demons a la Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons.

Then we threw them into the fire and watched them burn and let go.

This year, the words I received from a friend sitting next to me, “Love on people whenever you can.”

A good mantra to live by for this upcoming year.

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Lacuna

Today’s word of the day is lacuna, an apt word for poets. A blank space, a missing part, a gap. I’ve often thought of my poetry as trying to put into word, into sound, in names what I can’t say — in some ways, like tracing the path of what’s invisible.

Recently, I have been thinking about saturation. This is the strategy of Pepón Osorio, a visual artist influenced by his experience as a social worker in the Bronx whose pieces come from the communities where he is working. Looking at his installations, I feel like I almost can’t breathe. All the fragments piled into the space, like voices crowding in, demanding to be heard and recognized.

Each of us, whether we think about it intentionally or not, come from a network which we pull from each day as we go about creating our words, the spaces around us, the food we put in our bodies, the spaces we inhabit.

The gap and what saturates it are mirror reflections. What’s buried underneath and what’s at the surface.

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First Breath

Hello! Hello!

I’m writing you from Riverside, California where the gray desert sky has been pouring down all day. I am your guest blogger for the week so you’ve probably guessed that I’m one of the lucky writers who has found a home for my words at Red Hen Press.

My name is Ching-In Chen (first name pronounced, Chingy like the rapper). My parents named me Ching-In, which they told me meant happiness in Chinese.  But it was hard to pronounce and kids are mean so for my birthday in second grade, I asked my mother if I could get a name change for my birthday.  She acquiesced.  This means if you’re a telemarketer or some other person who doesn’t really know me, you know me by what’s on my driver’s license.

My first book, The Heart’s Traffic, is a novel in verse that was published by Red Hen Press through its Arktoi imprint, founded by Eloise Klein Healy.

When I was thinking about how I wanted to begin my week of blogging, two things surfaced:

1) I heard about a group of friends who kept in touch via dictionary club. Some used the Dictionary Word of the Day to keep each other up-to-date about their lives in farflung places; other made up fantastical stories in six lines and kept going from one word to the next.

2) A line in fellow Macondista Kristin Naca’s poem, “Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh,” from Bird Eating Bird: “Each word having no past in it.”

So in the name of synchronicity and inspiration, I’d like to begin my meditations this week with a Dictionary Word of the Day.

Today’s word: perambulate

Or in other words, to saunter, promenade, amble, mosey, meander, ramble.

This is a funny word to receive — after hiding out for the majority of the sunlit hours (though the sun was hiding as well today), sitting in my quiet house. Having moved to Southern California two and a half years ago, I use my car and walk less more than ever.

A friend whose car broke down recently observed that your whole experience of a landscape and those in relation to it change when you can speed by people and not have to really look them in the eye if you don’t want or choose to.

This past weekend, I went to hear the artists of Urban Intervention — German and Los Angeles artists creating site-specific art installations throughout Los Angeles — speak about their work.

In Passage, Flora Kao traced the paths of the shadows of mundane objects with charcoal to see who would notice. She said that children and seniors were more likely to notice. Middle-aged people were more focused on trying to get to the next place in their routine, didn’t always see what you put in their path.

I’d like to say that I would have noticed Flora’s charcoal lines, but I probably wouldn’t have. I probably would have been too busy whirling around the to-do list to look at the ground in front of me and really see it.

And maybe this is why I write poetry — because my production-oriented mind always needs to feel engaged in something useful. I can say that I am showing up at the page, churning out words, but I am also training my mind to be still and accept what is there in front of me.

No matter what happens, I breathe in and I breathe out. And I write.

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