DEAR —

June 19, 2019

Dear Grandmother, 

Were you with me in the writing studio, surrounded by penciled facts and your son’s face; in the park with the low-rock memorial; in the walk through canyon trails and ghost reservoirs cooing with cattails; in the mountain baths with white bodies and wet wood? Were you with me in Arizona or the Eastern Sierras, when I stood beside your son, my father, and his wife, my mother: three in the cooler desert, correcting memory? [. . .]

June 14, 2019

Dad, 

There’s a new way I see the garden now, the one you’ve been tending for decades on Garden Avenue (of all names)—the street of our family home. In haiku written by camp prisoners, days and seasons are tracked by the falling leaves of the moss-rose, petal to earth. Poets in camp numbered months and years by the memory of their home gardens left behind on the West Coast: flowering rhododendrons and peony buds imagined as vibrant, their remaining firm. I think of us, traveling that week in the summer of 2019, away from California, along the train’s course, through Arizona, and on to Santa Fe. How far I brought you from your garden. [. . .]

January 20, 2020

Well Brynn — I could only say, the trip we did together was eye opening and very heart warming. What made me feel that way was that you were there and my own parents were there at one time. I guess I felt a presence of something living and something that has past. To be in a place that I couldn’t imagine how people felt and lived. [. . .]

August 11, 2019

Dear Grandfather, 

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

Another you emerges. A grandfather wisdom—thunderbird shadow and three-bird omen. 

Fighter in the Pacific Theater, tunnel between two languages, you embraced your Japanese cousins even as you were sent by the enemy. Code translator and second-born son, you stood beside the white general, saved by the ship’s weight from bullets and streaming torpedoes.

Grandfather, there are entire landscapes in me, alive in dreams and activated when I cross living seas and ghost-seas of the ancient, bouldered ruins of an earlier earth. [. . .]

June 20, 2019

Mother,

I’m brought close tonight by the spirits to your voice, as my machine cycles through sounds and soundtracks, beats, and melodies, and lands on a recording: us in a restaurant, seaside, 2011, talking family and farms, two heart attacks for grandpa, too much fish, and the legacies of sons. I have no memory of setting my phone to record that moment—dad and you and I declining dessert from our waitress, rising at the tail-end to catch the sunset.

Where were we? [. . .] 

February 8, 2020

Dearest Brynnie,

Every time I read your letter, I cry...about almost every single word and thought--maybe it’s because my heart can feel you loving me.

It makes me so happy that you and Dad took this pilgrimage together. It awoke so much in your Father. […]

October 6, 2019

Dear Devoya,

I’m on a plane chasing sundown and the sea. Flying west tonight and thinking of you in colder climates speaking your truth across oceans.

Tell me the story of your power. […]

January 31, 2020

Dear Brynn,

Your letter arrived on Dec 19th. The date lives in both light and dark for me. As a child my younger brother Keith entered into this life on Dec 19th. As an adult the only person I have ever unconditionally loved & felt it returned back left this earth, while I held her hand for the last & final time. […]

October 13, 2019

Dear Pastor Saburo,

I am so grateful that you are a part of this letter project. Thank you for taking the time to write to me, to our community.

As I reflect on all of the ways we’ve been in community together through the years, I remember interviewing you and Marion at your home, so many years ago, and learning about your experiences in camp for the first time. That was the first time I gained a deeper sense of the harsh injustice you (and so many) endured; the stories you told me then made their way into my poetic consciousness and, eventually, into my “stone poems.” I’m grateful for this. […]

January 29, 2020

Dear Brynn,

Thank you for this opportunity to share some of my thoughts with you. Ever since the Yonsei Memory Project gave me an opportunity to write the story of my sister Aiko, I have been wanting to do some more writing, but failed to follow through.

As I think about stories I want to tell, a few come to mind […]

January 4, 2020

Dear Nikiko,

I’m sitting in the bright light of January, summoning memories of our work together, thinking on the meaning of memory work—four days into the new decade.

Last night, I dreamt of my grandparents. They were returning from camp, but it wasn’t 1945, it was the present day, and they were alive, and coming home, and I was in my home making a bed for them to sleep in.  […]

February 8, 2020

Dear Brynn,

Reading your letter feels like you are holding my hand. I imagine us at Gila River, walking together to the half-circle monument of stark white pillars at the top of the rocky hill that overlooks the desert which once caged our grandparents. In this vision of us together, I can let my heart-space soften.

You remind me that we don’t have to carry memories in isolation. […]

October 13, 2019

Dear Marion,

I am so happy you are a part of this letter writing project. It has been a privilege and a joy to collaborate with you over the years, to learn from you and witness your power.

I remember—I will always remember—all of us sitting in my living room last Fall, after we learned about the theater vandalism, and your calming, nourishing presence. Your forthright reminder to stand up for justice in a difficult time held us in relief. Kept us going. […]

January 20, 2020

Dear Brynn,

I always feel a great sense of responsibility to my great grandmother, my grandparents, my hard working parents, and the young 442 soldiers who gave their lives that I might have the good life I enjoy today. […]

February 2, 2020

Dear Samina,

Friend, colleague, mentor, fellow writer, I’m so happy you’re adding your voice to this tapestry of reflections. It’s an honor.

I have to tell you: a few days ago, I received a letter from my dad, a response to the one I wrote him last summer, after we journeyed together to Gila River. It floored me. I flashed to the pieces you wrote about your father, reflections from a daughter on the tidal-storms of grief, in the wake of loss. […]

February 6, 2020

Very dear Brynn,

You write me this gift of a letter on a magical date, all twos or nothing, and everything together: 02-02-2020. When I was pregnant with Cyrus, the doctors in Taunton, Massachusetts, gave me the due date of 02-20-2002, though he was sculpted out of my womb four days prior. My grandmother, Kaneez Fatima, was born 02-20-1920. Whatever her due date had been, it occurs to me as I write to you that this month marks the 100th anniversary of her birth in Patna, India--the home she yearned for all her life, the home that I, her granddaughter, have never known. […]

February 2, 2020

Dear Lee,

This morning: Starbucks coffee shop on Willow Avenue, my student (surprise) behind the counter, so sweet. I’m re-reading your poetry and pausing for the first time in weeks, to write. To read. Fog stretches across the dawn sun. The orchards do their whispering. We’re in the liminal winter months, our valley shrouded in mist, the fields slowly waking, a month of remembrance for so many communities — for me, a difficult time. I find myself straining to listen, desiring spring. […]

February 8, 2020

Dear Brynn,

It makes me happy to know you were writing that day. I know those liminal spaces and “how the fields slowly wake,” as you say. In this month of remembrance, I send you my love for that difficult terrain.  […]

A letter to the artist, Chiura Obata

Dear Obata-sensei,

Time moves slowly in museums. There, the eons pass quickly from gallery to gallery: bones reshaped from dust, fossils pantomime geological dramas, the world in past tense reduced to human scale. I have often found myself pacing museum floors--restless--first clockwise then counterclockwise, my feet circling rooms in widening whirlpools, urging my eyes to absorb as much as possible to understand my place in the world. My place in time. What it means to bear witness; to be an outsider allowed only a glance from afar. One can get tired of simply looking. You can grow numb even to beauty when you can’t touch it. […]

February 2, 2020

Dear Nohemi,

This morning I’m remembering that very first workshop for Storytelling for Change: us slightly shielded from the bright, August sun near the Simonian Farms memorial, learning each other’s names and ideas of beauty, stepping into a year-long journey with so many twists and turns—how could we know then? Along the way, you came alive to your writer’s voice, eventually performing for hundreds your marvelous piece on music, family, art, and expression. That culminating day was so cathartic — for me, for Nikiko, perhaps for all of the storytellers, too, considering the ways we had to regroup, regather ourselves after violence and vandalism. […]

February 7, 2020

Dear Brynn,

I read the poem you mentioned, “After the Pyre” by Li-Young Lee. It made my chest ache. I suppose that’s the thing about writing, right? It confronts you with truths you haven’t told yourself yet. The last two lines are lingering in my mind: what kept you alive all those years kept you from living. It makes me think of my parents, my family, my ancestors, my immigrant community. […]

May 27, 2019

Dear Brandon,

Yesterday, blackbirds rose from the high brush near the stone memorial at the Poston camp, while my father flung his arms out, marveling and smiling in the sweet unseasonal winds. A half-moon hung above the circle of palm trees in the morning light. Weathered folded cranes lay slumped at the base of the memory marker. Is it too soon to be writing this? Is it too late— [. . .]

July 18, 2019

Dear Brynn,

It is too soon and too late, though mostly too late, and on time. I’ve been thinking about the pilgrimages you’ve been making, with your father, to the ruins of the concentration camps, and wondering if there will come a time when they will not be necessary. Probably not. [. . .]

July 27, 2019

Dear Valarie, 

I begin, again and again, these letters to you. Starts and stops across these days, as I make my way from the ancestral desert and home to sea-level, to the howling heat and summer in the Central Valley—remember?

Today I had a vision: I was over me and listening, standing over my own body, pulling frayed, dark rope-strands by the handful from the heart’s cave, unlacing the bright green muscle, coaxing it out of hiding.

What is intimacy? Releasing ghost pains from an unanswerable era. Two pink wings floating over desert mountains.  [. . .]

February 8, 2020

Brynn,

I write you tonight from the border.

I walked across the great mass of concrete

bridge into Tijuana for the first time in my life

and stood between two 

countries separated by a wall of barbed wire.

Up in the sky,

a full moon was shining

radiant light. […]

January 20, 2020

Dear Akiko,

We’ve been in orbit around each other lives for a decade now: connected through community and family, and now making a friendship of our own. Your spiritual strength—your inner power—has become more and more clear to me over the years. Times I’ve asked you about theology, services I’ve seen you officiate, songs you’ve written, stories you’ve shared from the pulpit—all of these moments flood me now, and I’m grateful. […]

February 5, 2020

Dear Brynn,

A couple weeks ago, I was at Monday night contemplative prayer group. In the meditative silence, my mind was not only wandering, but there was also real risk of me falling asleep…so I found myself in that weird, middle space between waking life and dreams…That space that makes random thoughts seem like intergalactic, groundbreaking ideas […]

November 13, 2019

Dear Brynn,

It’s been almost two months since we drove to Manzanar together on one of the beautiful days of early fall. It was a gorgeous trip – late night as we slipped away from the city and out to the desert stars, waking up in the tiny town hugging the slopes, against the rabbitbrush, the creosote and the blue mountains. Cold clear mountain morning, us wandering into a museum of plants, sylan before the hot days of October, before this year’s fires, which I think we knew were coming, though it felt good to be in a part of fall where they had not yet. I wanted to hike forever. […]

January 20, 2019

Dear Naser,

New friend, hello! I’m grateful for the way our paths have crossed, here in the Central Valley, by way of all the places we’ve lived and traveled: from Colorado to Chicago to Santa Fe. Grateful for cabin card playing nights and dinner with the dogs, photo portrait shoots, and nights in the Tower—those life moments making friendship possible. You and your beloved, Akiko, bring such joy to our community; I’m blessed to witness to your unfolding love. […] 

Originally started on February 8, 2020 & updated April 23, 2020 amid the Covid-19 Pandemic

Dear Brynn,

I share in your grateful spirit! Whatever purposes this life offers, one such purpose is most assuredly to appreciate moments with these unexpected and enriching connections encountered along the way. Moments with new ideas, familiar laughs, and feelings of community. I read recently that the human heart produces a magnetic field that can be felt, sometimes from feet away from the body. […]

August 26, 2019

A letter-poem from Amy to poet, Lawson Fusao Inada

Dear Lawson

— after seeing “I Told You So,” Alan Kondo's 1974 film on Lawson Inada

Did you know you were the very first

poet I ever heard? Round about 1970 -

UCLA, early guest speaker in

Asian American Studies - you

were one of us – angry, young, militant -

and yet you weren't. You “talked the talk”

but only like a poet who plays upright bass

and loves straight ahead jazz. Man,

you sure knew how to riff. […]

August 27, 2019

Dear Reader, 

Do you believe in the wide open privacy of the desert?

Do you believe in the prophecy of stones?

My desire for you is eternal and makes you eternal. My desire is the shape of three columbines blooming in a cracked riverbed. 

Do you feel the distant, silent company of the women in your family—the continuity of the clandestine?

Do you memorialize wire; do you ritualize joy?

I want to fall nightly to the sitting place where the ghosts visit, then draw a bath for the goddess of all things that flow —

Water, words, time. Speech, sound, Knowledge. 

Were you afraid of what you might say to yourself in the face of the page’s stillness, under the hailstorms of an arid high desert?

I was afraid.

So lonely at the writing desk, I imagined you drinking midnight tea, or turning your face to the shameless marigolds, or rising with your daughter’s cry before the blue light of dawn.

Do you imagine me?

None of the fires have forgotten you, don’t tell me otherwise. 

Forgive the rotting daikon, the gobo overgrowing in the old yard. 

I’ve made a ceremony of ghosts. 

Yours,

—Brynn