APAture Backstage: Cathlin Goulding on Literary Night 9/19

When I first moved to the Bay Area in the summer of 2003, I went to a poetry reading at Locus Arts with a group of people from my teacher education program. At the time, Locus Arts was housed in a darkened restaurant in Japantown. I grabbed a flier sitting at a table near the front door—this is when I first learned about Kearny Street Workshop.

After this event, I kept an eye on the Kearny Street webpage and then applied the following spring for the 2004 APAture. That work, a humor essay about the hit and misses in my (non) dating life, was eventually accepted into festival. It was my first time reading my writing in a non-academic setting—I can recall the festival was an all-day extravaganza of literary readings, film, and musical performances in the cavernous SOMArts Center.

This festival was another first for me: it was the first time I identified or was partaking in an event as an “Asian American” writer. As a person of mixed Asian heritage, I had long grappled with the subject matter I approached in my writing, in addition to having difficulty seeing myself as Asian. I was either absorbed entirely with generating work about my Japanese-American family or I was avoiding it, staunchly. Kearny Street Workshop and APAture allowed me to be a writer within a community—and it was due to this, this very offering of a community, that I managed an acceptance of myself as Asian as well as continuing to develop my craft as a writer. And that was a pretty tall order to fill.

For the past six years, I have taken several writing workshops with Kearny Street and attended a slew of KSW programming. In my swamped life as a public school teacher, it is Kearny Street that keeps me composing. What makes APAture so unusual as an event is that it binds artists to an organization, an organization that we often remained involved with for years after our initial participation. Now, it is my second year reading submissions for the APAture Literary Night. We on the Literary Committee are anticipating a surprising and winning state of affairs this Saturday evening at the very swanky Hotel Rex (which is apparently a literary themed hotel) in Union Square—right off of the BART line and with a splendid people-watching-stroll to boot. We’re also excited to hear new work from featured artist Aimee Suzara, who has been part of KSW as a workshop teacher and APAture 2008 literary artist.

In reading the submissions this year, we loved Jennifer Cheng’s mercurial prose poems in which characters are half-hidden in shadows. In Cheng’s work, water and fragrant plants are pervasive, lonely elements inserted into languid sentences. Yasmine Gomez and Linda Park are two writers with spunky punch and verve—they will be reading non-fiction that slyly dismantles the process of home hunting in the San Francisco Bay Area and the pathos of anti-depressants. I am thrilled, as well, to see two writers from the KSW-sponsored Intergenerational Writers Lab, Kenji Liu and Mai Doan, read their image-laden, finely wrought poems. I saw both writers perform recently at the Asian Pacific American-Latino Poetry Night at Oakland’s The Nest—I was quite enraptured with both writers’ humor and their interwoven narratives of immigration and teenager-dom.

And, well, shoot, nothing gets me more than reading a well-placed Ranch 99 reference.

See you at the Hotel Rex, Saturday September 19th, 7-9pm, yeah?