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April 25, 2018On respectable narratives and why diversity on the page matters
Growing up, I was very particular kind of Chinese girl. I attended Chinese school on Saturdays. I took piano lessons. My report cards were always the best in my class. I played first clarinet in my school ...
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September 01, 2022On Shooting Stars and Poetry as Fuel
To live at all is to grieve;but, once, to have it all at onceis to see a shooting star: shooting starshooting star.Arthur Sze (From Shooting Star) I read a poem every morning. Not because I have a pile ...
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September 10, 2014On Silence
I grew up in a silent house, aside from the times when the silence was punctured with yelling. The crying was always quiet. The children did stay quiet—even when not crying—as best they could, to ...
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September 12, 2014On Silence in Poems
“To reveal all is to end the story. To conceal all is to fail to begin the story." Robert Kroetsch, The Lovely Treachery of Words.Where is there silence within the poem? Where on the page? Emptiness? ...
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April 29, 2021On slowing down and appreciating the little things
With so much going on in the world and in our own individual lives, it’s easy enough to let small pieces of happiness slip through our fingers. As a writer wearing so many hats, I won’t lie, sometimes ...
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April 30, 2020On Sounding Stupid: A Love Letter to my OWN DAMN SELF
In my last post here I want to reflect back on what I realized about myself while writing these love letters to my lovely poet friends over the last month of isolation. I wasn’t sure at first where ...
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July 30, 2018
On Staying Hungry
One night after a reading years ago, before any of us had published a book, I and another writer I know gave a third writer friend a pretty hard time about not wanting to submit stories to magazines. ...
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June 20, 2019On Synchronicity and Writing: The Path Back to Myself
Last month, I had the privilege of going on a road trip across Northern BC as part of an author’s tour organized by the BC and Yukon Book Prizes, for which my book of poems, Port of Being, was a finalist. ...
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September 27, 2021
On Synchronicity, or: a Set of Emergent/Entangled Influences
Moments of liberation—such as those of revolutionary rupture, or personal “peak experiences”—matter enormously, insofar as they remind us that conditions that once seemed fixed are not, and create ...
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June 09, 2015
On the Benefits of Not Writing (Surfing)
It isn’t (usually) wise to blame other people for things that happen to you, but I blame Dr. Kary Banks Mullis for everything.Dr. Mullis is a Novel Prize-winning biochemist who devised paradigm-shifting ...