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When we read, creativity is stirred.

And when we create, our lives expand.

3 Good Books invites writers & artists to share their favorite books on a given theme.

Tuesday
May272014

Good Books: Mari L’Esperance on Mixed Heritage

Born in Kobe, Japan to a Japanese mother and a French Canadian-American father, Mari L’Esperance is the author of The Darkened Temple, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and Begin Here, a poetry chapbook. She also co-edited, with Tomás Q. Morín, Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of awards from the New York Times, New York University, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. L’Esperance lives in the Los Angeles area, where she works as a psychotherapist, writes, and occasionally facilitates poetry groups.

Mari L'Esperance reccomends three books on mixed heritage:

The Unbearable Heart
by Kimiko Hahn

I discovered this collection of poems — I can’t now remember how — while I was a graduate student in New York City in the mid-‘90s and it has held much meaning for me ever since. Hahn’s mother was Japanese American from Hawaii, her father German American from Wisconsin; both were artists. The collection is an elegy for Hahn’s mother, who died suddenly in a hit-and-run accident, so it arrived in my life when I most needed it, as I was reeling from the sudden loss of my own mother. Hahn’s poems experiment with a range of forms, including short lyrics, long-lined free-verse poems, list poems, and zuihitsu, a Japanese form inherited from China that consists of loosely connected personal “essays” and idea fragments in a flowing “brush stroke” down the page. The poems make occasional reference to Japanese culture, almost in passing, as if the poet is standing just outside of this aspect of herself and looking in. “The work is furious, flawed, and absolutely necessary,” Adrienne Rich wrote of The Unbearable Heart, and I agree . . . and it was published by the amazing Kaya Press and awarded an American Book Award, so you really can’t go wrong.

Dust of Eden
by Mariko Nagai

The forced imprisonment of thousands of Americans of Japanese descent on U.S. soil during World War II is a shameful and still little known chapter in our country’s history. In Nagai’s powerful novel-in-verse (for young adult readers), she combines poetry and story to convey the dark tale of middle school student Mina Tagawa’s family, who, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, was forced from their Seattle home to spend three years under armed guard in an Idaho internment camp. Each of Nagai’s verse “chapters” begins with a date, so as I read I continually had the sense of time passing and of time stilled; each chapter is like a vivid black-and-white photograph, stamped in time and indelible in its stark narrative. Much has been published over the years about the experiences of Japanese American internees, but this is the first verse novel for younger readers of which I’m aware, and is written with intelligence and heart; young people everywhere need to know about this piece of history and how its legacy continues today.

Nagai herself is the embodiment of cross-cultural hybridity: born in Tokyo to Japanese parents and raised in Europe, the United States, and Japan, she is a frequent traveler and writer of the world, possessing a keen eye, uncompromising voice, and a true gift for language (she’s won the esteemed Pushcart prize in both poetry and fiction). I’m grateful for her necessary work.

When Half Is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities
by Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

It was late 2012 and I’d recently moved back to Los Angeles after 27 years away, and at a pivotal and uncertain time in my life. Murphy-Shigematsu’s book is a collection of personal and scholarly essays that I discovered via a review by Nancy Matsumoto at Discover Nikkei, and it helped to affirm my own mixed heritage, which I’d long taken for granted and not really considered with any kind of depth. Murphy-Shigematsu, a psychologist and academic and the son of a Japanese mother and an Irish American father, was born in Tokyo and raised in Japan and New England. He uses his own experiences as a biracial, bicultural person to convey the complex journeys of other individuals of mixed-Asian descent. His writing is accessible and personal and is grounded in scholarship and lived experience. Through stories, Murphy-Shigematsu reflects to us how mixed identities are formed in the “borderlands” between worlds—the multiethnic person’s realm of neither-here-nor-there. Murphy-Shigematsu and his subjects grapple with the question, Who am I?—and their responses are surprising, thought provoking, and illuminating.

In 1942, Japanese-Irish American artist Isamu Noguchi wrote, “To be hybrid is to anticipate the future.” Here in Los Angeles in 2014, that future is now. “The stories that I present bring greater understanding to how identities today are flexible, inclusive, and multiple, and challenge the meaning of national and racial categories and boundaries,” Murphy-Shigematsu writes in the prologue. I am fortunate to have When Half Is Whole as my companion and guide as I continue on my own journey. I encourage everyone to read this engaging and powerful book.

 

Saturday
May102014

Good Books: Lee Lee on (Un)Natural Resources

Lee Lee is a visual artist working in a variety of mediums, from paint to collage to elaborate installations. Her art examines collisions between traditional practice and globalization, and explores environmental impacts of our post-industrial chemical age.

Her recent work looks at the friction between US food policy & Haitian experience, and will be featured in 2014 by the Society of Caribbean Studies in Glasgow, Scotland and by the Center for Global Justice in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It is part of a larger exploration on sustainable food systems that has been featured by the International Symposium of Electronic Arts, and will be included as part of the Slow Food US delegation to Terra Madre in Turin, Italy. Her work on plastic has been featured by the UN Programme on the Environment, the Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences, the Museum of Natural History at the University of Colorado, the La Napoule Art Foundation in France, and will be included in the Ruhr Biennial in Germany.

"I feel very strongly about the importance of collaboration between the arts and sciences," she explains. "Where science offers authenticity, art is rooted in our emotional core and has the capacity to touch people in a way that encourages action."

Lee Lee suggests three good books on, about, and related to (Un)Natural Resources:

Kanaval:
Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti

by Leah Gordon

I had the honor of participating in the 3rd Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 2013. Leah Gordon was one of three curators (the others being David Frohnapfel and the Haitian artist, Celeur Jean-Herard, whose exquisite sculpture stands on my studio table watching over me as I work). I acquired Gordon’s book of photographs before making the journey to Haiti and was deeply moved by the portraits she had taken during the Carnival celebrations in the southern coast town of Jacmel. Just after the book was published, the big earthquake nearly leveled the place. Haitians have long been subjected to the impositions of outsider worldviews while suffering severe injustices due to the dominating forces of economic globalization. Particularly after the earthquake, there were hoards of journalists and NGO sponsored photographers who took quick pictures of Haiti in her devastated state. These pictures raised a ton of money which never really made it back to the source, frustrating those who were portrayed. Gordon took a different approach. It was a slow process to set up her large format camera, which offered the opportunity for rich dialogue through the process. Her work celebrates the resourceful and creative nature of those she portrayed, and she wove in direct accounts of oral histories that offer meaning to what is being expressed. Haitians have an acute understanding of their history and maintain their stories through creative means; music, visual art and in this case, costume and performance. The work is powerful, without relying on the sensationalized circumstances that we saw in images after the earthquake. Gordon has a genuine interest in Haiti, and in keeping with her approach to the portraits presented in Kanaval, I was impressed by the attention she gave to the Biennale. She was constantly exploring what worked as well as the misunderstandings that took place as 35 foreign artists worked with the community of artists that made up the Atis Rezistans. She cares.

The Floating World of Ukiyo-e:
Shadows Dreams and Substance

by Sandy Kita

After booking a ticket to visit cousins in Tokyo this summer, I pulled out this book to lose myself regularly in one of the most exquisite movements in art history. This traditional form of Japanese woodblock printing captures the delicacy of cherry blossoms falling lightly into water, the graceful lines of a fine kimono and the intricate patterning in samurai robes. Throughout, the attention to detail and sensitivity to the natural world is awe inspiring, and the skill necessary to create these works by carving them out of hardwood does not cease to amaze. Balance is essential in my practice. Since immersing myself in the ecological problems presented by single-use plastic, I have found myself synthetically saturated. After researching the issue thoroughly, I found that Edward Hume’s Garbology and Plastic, A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel offer the best insights into our consumption and devaluation of the material. (For an apocalyptic view on the chemical age we live in, stirring evidence of what is at stake is presented in Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski & John Peter Meyers). It can be overwhelming and utterly disheartening to be so consumed by the environmental catastrophes we are facing. I’m moved to work around it because I think it is vital to question our actions that lead us down this mortal coil. To keep a steady course, I have found ways to ground my emotional sensitivities in the natural world so that my muse is replenished by the beauty therein. When I don’t have the time to escape to the mountains, getting lost in the floating worlds of Ukiyo-e offers a quiet and reflective visual space to inspire.
 
Seeds: Time Capsules of Life
by Rob Kesseler, Wolfgang Stuppy and Alexandra Papadakis

One of the most visually rich accounts of seeds, this book is a delight to open to a random page and ponder the potential for growth. Incorporating electron microscopy, the images are an elegant presentation of the design of seeds, offering an intuitive understanding of their function that complements the scientific elements in the text. I especially love the exploration of how plants gain the ability for movement and migration through the dispersal of their seeds. In this age of the Anthropocene, I feel very strongly about the importance of collaboration between the arts and sciences. Where science offers authenticity, art is rooted in our emotional core and has the capacity to touch people in a way that encourages action. Since humans have had a monumental impact on the world’s environment, we should take ownership of this era that has been named after ourselves to become planetary stewards. Our survival depends on it. This book inspired a series of art exhibits in Taos, New Mexico, where I maintain a studio. The multisensory SEED exhibitions invite visitors to “look through the lens of the seed to explore connections between art and science and their personal relationship to the natural world.” Built by Siena Sanderson, Mandy Stapleford, Katie Woodall and Claire Coté, these arts luminaries have developed substantial and rich educational programming to complement the art on display. Part of my life in Taos is dedicated to the development of our permaculture garden as a platform for creative engagement. Happily, we were able to provide seeds for the SEED Sensorium during the last exhibition there. True to the nature of seeds, they are allowing the concept to be dispersed and grow there it finds fertile grounds. I have the honor of building the next phase to the project in Denver in 2015, and am looking forward to maintaining their vision with a new set of creatives.


Wednesday
Apr162014

Good Books: Henry Hughes on Fishing

Henry Hughes is a poet, professor, and fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Antioch Review, Shenandoah, and Poetry Northwest, and his commentary on new poetry appears regularly in Harvard Review. He is author of three poetry collections: Men Holding Eggs received the 2004 Oregon Book Award; Moist Meridian was a finalist in 2011; and Shutter Lines, published in 2012, includes photographs by Paul Gentry. Hughes is the editor of the Everyman’s anthologies, The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing and Fishing Stories.

"There are dozens of good books involving sport fishing, and many of our greatest authors have found in fishing some of life’s happiest and most painful moments," notes Hughes, who admits difficulty in narrowing his favorite books on fishing. "Chekhov, Yeats, Ted Hughes, Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, to name but a few, loved to fish and write about it. Among those essayists who write specifically about fishing, I count David James Duncan, Ted Leeson, Marjorie Sandor, and Thomas McGuane as the best."

Henry Hughes shares his three favorite books on fishing:

The Longest Silence
by Thomas McGuane

The Longest Silence is my top pick for a book in the genre. “Early on, I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world,” McGuane tells us in the opening of this collection of essays. He travels widely and is passionate about fishing, especially fly-fishing, but unlike many fly-fishing philosophers, he doesn’t just gush over pristine rivers or get all ultra-precious about trout on the dry. McGuane is sophisticated and reverent but also down to water level, you might say. He is funny and brilliantly insightful about people and fishing. “Humans have suspected for thousands of years that angling and religion are connected. But if you can find no higher ideal than outfishing your buddies, catching something big enough to stuff or winning a trophy, you have a lot of work to do before you are what Izaak Walton would call an angler.” McGuane humbly reflects on the psychological and cultural aspects of angling, and he shapes sentences as elegantly as long casts over wary bonefish. This is a great collection.  

A River Runs Through It
by Norman Maclean

Family fishing stories are even more susceptible to the quaint and corny, and they can feel very dated, but Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It holds its place in the currents of time as a beautifully written novella about Montana, fly-fishing, people, love and art. I teach the book every couple of years and it continues to make me see, smile, laugh and consider the great metaphors linking fishing and life. Set in 1930s Montana, Maclean’s semi-autobiographical narrative features a father who is a Presbyterian minister and angling mentor, preaching that “all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art doesn’t come easy.” Equally challenging and rewarding is Maclean’s relationship with his brother, Paul, a colorful raconteur and master angler with a dangerous taste for drink and gambling. The heartbreak in this story gets me every time, but Paul is immortalized in the lyric prose: “The images of himself and his line kept disappearing into the rising vapors of the river, which continually circled to the tops of the cliffs where, after becoming a wreath in the wind, they became rays of the sun.”

Big Water
by John Engel

There are a lot of fine poems about fishing. Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Hugo, Dave Motes, Derick Burleson, Sandra Alcosser, and Roseann Lloyd have written some of my favorites. But there’s a little known collection, Big Water by John Engels, that brings together images, sensations and water-world discoveries in such finely crafted lines that I can feel them hold, hold, hold, and then let go like a fish, or life itself. The poem “The Disconnections” about hooking and losing a sailfish off Cape Bianca in the south Atlantic is packed with energy that beautifully breaks free with a line-snapped fish and a dazzling reverie that exceeds anything that might actually have been gaffed and lashed to the boat. And there’s the quiet, color-soaked meditation on life and death in “Damselfly, Trout, Heron,” where, again, full possession always lies beyond the physical, “beyond reach / on the far side of the river.” Engels writes of a struggling home aquarium with the same mortal energy as a man falling out of a boat and nearly drowning. These poems understand our stewardship and existence through water. With striking narrative leaps and turns we experience the rivers and lakes of Vermont, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Wisconsin, as well as those unnamed dark pools of our own imaginations where hope and possibility undulate unseen.
                . . . I’ll be staring
        into the ravenous power
        I’ve always known
        to be holding there.  I know
        of other spots like this one, where
        in some fluid congress of the general dark
        something heavy takes
        secret breath . . .    
 
This is an indispensable collection for the poetry-minded angler.

 

Monday
Mar172014

Good Books: Tracy Weil on Play

Artist Tracy Weil is known for his playful forms and bold use of color. Influenced by the emotional intensity of Vincent Van Gogh, the whimsy of Dr. Seuss, and the abstract landscapes of Fort Lewis College professor Stanton Englehart, Weil's paintings live in a passionate, colorful world in which brightly painted rural-scapes merge with loopy figures and vibrant striped objects. A leader in the Denver arts community, Tracy Weil is founder of the River North Art District, owner of Weilworks Gallery, and co-director of the new art-infused Denver County Fair. His paintings appear in Forecast, a poetry-painting collaboration. See his portfolio at www.tracyweil.com.

Tracy Weil shares three favorite books that encourage and celebrate play:

The Thinks You Can Think
by Dr. Seuss

As a child, Dr. Seuss taught me how to play and how to imagine new worlds other than the one I lived in. He taught me how to see the world in a way that was different than most. A few years ago, I was going through some old boxes and ran across this book. It's amazing how much one book can inspire a budding artist! In this book, Seuss illustrates and talks about a forest of red and white trees; this image has always resonated, and now populates much of my work. These simple red and white trees with a bold pattern have always influenced my imagery, along with red and white sunflowers, and boats filled with red and white striped noodles. It's with this simple visual that my mind as an artist was inspired to play and create something new, bringing joy and whimsy to my work. In that same box was a shoebox filled with legos — all red and white and stacked in stripes. I proudly blame Dr. Seuss for my visual obsession.
 
Stanton Englehart: A Life on Canvas
edited by Jules Masterjohn

In the mid 1980s, I attended Fort Lewis College as an aspiring architect. One of my course requirements was an art history class, and I met a man who would change my creative life: professor and artist Stanton Englehart. He taught me to PLAY with art. I always had a passion for art and loved to draw, but in this class I was really exposed to all the great things about art and the deep history of this expressive medium. As I progressed in school, I began to struggle with some of the technical classes required of my architecture major. Increasingly frustrated and distracted, I found myself attracted to art, its freedom and lack of boundaries. I enrolled in a beginning painting class and quickly learned that this was something I loved. Later, I signed up for Advanced Painting, and was thrilled to be under Engelhart's wing again. I distinctly remember that first day; he told us that to be a successful painter we needed to learn discipline, we needed to paint every day. Our first assignment was to paint seven paintings in three weeks. It was with that simple direction that I buckled down and started to create. He inspired me to jump in and get the work done. We were invited to visit his studio and discuss our progress and it's there that I became familiar with his impressive work, and realized he was a renowned artist appreciated far beyond this small college. He taught me not to feed into pressure but to have fun and play with this form of expression. This book is an amazing retrospective of his work over 50 years, from student to master. I strive to be as disciplined and prolific.
 
Life Doesn't Frighten Me
Poem by Maya Angelou
Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat

This book was given to me by a dear friend. It's a simple book, but spurred in me a fearlessness that has shaped me as a person and as an artist. It taught me confidence in presenting my work in any form, and allowed me to play freely and never fear what other people think of my work. The book is made up of a selection of paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, with a strong poem by Maya Angelou that presents a contemporary narrative to Basquiat's work. It's direct and simplifies the negative energy fear sometimes dictates and makes it playful and almost fun. It taught me the power of my own voice and that my work is like no other.

 

Friday
Feb282014

Good Books: Penelope Scambly Schott on Strong Women

Penelope Scambly Schott is a poet. As a child, she wanted to be an explorer and an historian. "I’ve mostly done it at my desk," she explains, "publishing several book-length verse narratives based on history."

Her first book, Penelope: The Story of the Half-Scalped Woman, is about an early New Jersey settler. A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth is a biography of Puritan dissidenter Anne Hutchinson (and received an Oregon Book Award for poetry). In 2013, she published  Lillie Was a Goddess, Lillie Was a Whore, a history of prostitution, particularly in the American West.

"My favorite way to read history is through the voice of some historical personage vividly re-imagined in poems," says Penelope. "All three of these historical women handle their difficult situations with courage. Mary and Susanna survive to write the accounts later used by the poets while Tamsen chooses to stay with her husband. I found these books inspirational in two ways: I admired the historical characters, and the poets reinforced my desire to keep writing historical narratives."

Penelope Scambly Schott suggests books about strong women:

The Journals of Susanna Moodie
by Margaret Atwood

In 1832 Susanna Moodie emigrated from Scotland to Ontario, Canada with her husband and their first child. They lived in a backwoods area where she had four more children.  Susanna found life in the bush difficult and even when they moved to the town of Belleville, she was ambivalent about Canada. In the poem “Death of a Young Son By Drowning” Susanna says, “I planted him in this country/ like a flag.” The historical information in this book is drawn from two journals which have become Canadian classics.

Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey
by Ruth Whitman

In 1846 Tamsen Donner and her husband and three young daughters left Illinois on their ill-fated journey to California.  Caught by snow, the wagon train got stranded in the Sierras where many died of starvation. The Donner party is, of course, famous for the fact that some resorted to cannibalism.
 
        Must we devour ourselves/ in order to survive?
        ...for my children I find it/ not so hard:

        But for me/ I cannot see

        How I could bear to live/
        by eating my friend’s death

When a rescue party finally arrived, Tamsen sent her daughters to safety and chose to stay with her dying husband.  Tamsen apparently kept a diary but it has been lost.  The poet used an NEA grant to travel the route of the Donner party.

The Dreams of Mary Rowlandson
by Hilary Holladay

In 1676, during King Philip’s war, Mary Rowlandson was captured by Indians who attacked the small settlement of Lancaster in the Massachusetts Bay colony. After eleven weeks of being moved from place to place and the death of her wounded daughter, Mary was ransomed for twenty pounds silver. In Whitman’s poem, Mary says of her captor:

        Quanopin did not force me to be his wife.
        He did not kiss me or slide his hands down my thighs.

        There were a few warm, well-fed evenings when I might have let him:
        I felt the breeze on my flesh, the old music in my bones.

In 1682 Mary published The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, the first in what would become the popular genre of Indian captivity narratives.