Immigrant Strong: July 2024
Reflections on Kenyon; and writing about whales, cucumber salad, and motherhood
It’s back to 2024’s day-to-day insanity after an incredible week of writing and community at the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop earlier this month. My brilliant creative nonfiction group shared stories that made me laugh out loud and weep; we wrote new things every day; and we each read in front of more than 150 people in the evening. (some pictures are on my instagram).
Two participants three decades apart in age realized they lived minutes away from each other in Minneapolis—then found themselves on the same flight back, sitting one row apart. And when one woman realized another was going to drive back to Chicago for seven hours, she cancelled her flight on the last day and hopped in the car with her.
These bonds are truly the best part of Kenyon. And I loved that the workshop encourages you to produce new writing daily, which I never get to do in everyday life (well, at least not creative writing). Two days after returning, I was at the UN, covering a forum about progress on Sustainable Development Goals (Hint: it’s bad. The world is mostly off track). It’s always a challenge to squeeze in creative writing between other work and responsibilities, but I hope Kenyon’s vibes keep me going, and I truly can’t wait to see more of my group’s writing out in the world.
Before I dive into the newsletter, a few quick announcements:
On Saturday, Sept. 28 from 1-4 pm ET, I’ll again be teaching the Writing About Your Immigrant Experience online class through Cooper Street Writing Workshops at Rutgers-Camden Writers House. Please save the date and follow their website, twitter, or instagram for the registration link, and feel free to reach out to me with questions. The class is usually affordable and involves a sliding fee scale.
On Oct. 28, I’ll be reading my essay from the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024 at Stratford Library in CT. The book will be released that month.
I’ll also have an essay in this beautiful anthology: Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, scheduled for release on Nov. 19. I’m so excited about this book and it’s available for pre-orders now from the publisher, or bookshop, or wherever books are sold.
Book
As pre-election craziness ramps ups, Republicans will keep attacking immigrants and blaming us for everything while ignoring immigrants’ essential role in making this country function, not to mention infusing it with talent and brains. They will boast about their religious values while holding “Mass Deportation” signs; equate immigrants with animals; and espouse family values while denying immigrant mothers and children life-saving medicine and services, and putting families directly in harm’s way. Most Democrats will talk about the strengths and values immigrants bring, but refuse to acknowledge America’s role in creating refugee and migrant flows through its harmful economic and foreign policies -- or its disproportionate role in the climate crisis, which is increasingly forcing people to leave their homes.
How I wish that instead of useless debates, lies, and fear mongering, more Americans would educate themselves about immigration, the violence and inhumanity of our border policies, and this country’s direct role in pushing so many immigrants to leave their homes around the world.
Alejandra Oliva’s Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration is one book that does that. The author, who worked as a translator and interpreter for people applying for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border and at a clinic in New York, shares the stories of some of the people she met within the context of our brutal immigration laws and a history of unfair trade wars, military campaigns, and interventionist policies. I love how she acknowledges the challenges and limitations of her volunteer role within the immigration system, and her poetic writing about the complex and fascinating world of translation and interpretation.
Essays and Interviews
There were so many parts of this interview when I nearly jumped out of my seat because I felt precisely the same way—living in America for most of my life but never feeling at home here; the sadness that comes with going back home; how I choose to answer or not answer where I’m from. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, here is Katya Apekina’s interview with Priyanka Mattoo, Flying Right up to the Sun.
“When I think back to Kashmir and the time I spent there, I remember what it feels like to be in a place where I belonged—surrounded by family and friends and people like me, speaking my language, drowning in my own culture, embracing and enjoying and loving that culture. It was a very brief period of my life, and I won’t ever feel that again, even if I go back, because it’s transformed. The recent history has been so complicated that I can’t imagine feeling comfortable there … I can’t imagine feeling anything but sad, even though it’s safe to travel there now.”
For The Rumpus, Jennifer Tsai wrote I Didn’t Learn My Grandfather’s Name Until He Died.
“As I learn the lore of my grandfather, my father also takes shape. I see his heritage in the way he handles his iPhone so gently its unprotected corners wear no ruts; in the way he brings me lists of unrecognized English words for instruction at the kitchen table. I recall him driving to work with infected lungs. I remember his expectations. My father reflects his father’s sternness as an elocution of care. In Taiwan, I learn about where I come from.”
I’ve been so lucky to have the generous and talented Suphil Lee Park mentor me through AWP so it was wonderful to come across this Writer’s Insight interview with her in the Southern Review.
“I believe understanding the perspective of someone from another culture has much to do with the linguistic elements of that culture. Not that it’s impossible to understand someone from another culture without learning their language, but that it becomes exponentially easier to do so when you have some grasp of their language. I would even go so far as to say that each of us is born into a specific language—some of us more than one—because so much of society is built on and around these linguistic frameworks.”
I loved Jung Hae Chae’s essay for off assignment, To The Mother Who Lost Track of Time, which is such an exemplary piece of creative nonfiction. I encourage you to also read the Behind the Essay interview.
“Looking back, it’s fitting that I became a mother at a time when I sensed a certain urgency to unload the glut of griefs I’d been hoarding, to unpack the immigrant survival narrative I’d been living unknowingly through—a notable inflection point in the trajectory of my artistic exploration and general humanity. I needed to subvert that narrative, a stereotype of sorts, to stop it in its tracks, I told myself, and not just to do so theoretically, but in art and in life. What better place to do this than in the middle of America, where I knew no one.”
I recently met Grace Hwang Lynch so it was extra exciting to see her Eating Well piece, My Mother’s Taiwanese Cucumber Salad Is the Most Refreshing Side Dish You Can Make This Summer. The recipe looks amazingly simple and delicious, and I savored Grace’s story behind it.
“Our ancestors migrated to the island from southern China, but just years before her birth at the end of World War II, Taiwan had been a Japanese colony, and many older Taiwanese still have an affinity for the culture.1 Traces of that history can be found in the foods we ate: miso soup, bonito flakes sprinkled atop silken tofu, chicken curry simmered in a mahogany roux. My mother’s cucumbers, cut chunky like a Chinese salad, but flavored like a Japanese sunomono, carried these vestiges.”
I had the privilege of being in Rajiv Mohabir’s workshop at Kenyon, where he was as brilliant as he was funny. How Not to Write About Whales in Orion Magazine reflects these qualities in his creative writing.
“Don’t center Western epistemologies around animacy. No, please don’t further settler colonialist tropes when it comes to the usefulness of a species in their relationships to us, whether by oil or charisma. Terra nullius is a lie. There never was empty, unused land or water. This manifesting destiny has always led to genocide. We do not have dominion over the beasts of the fields, nor beasts of the sea. Or, all too often it seems, human “beasts” of a different hue. Whose land are you living on? Whose water? Can you speak their language, or are you just stealing their resources, polluting their homes?”
I’ll wrap up with these comments on bilingualism that I think many immigrants and children of immigrants can relate to. Here is Gauri Awasthi’s interview with Sarah Ghazal Ali for the Offing.
“Arabic in the book emerges always in the context of faith, since Arabic is the language that I pray in. It is exalted, one I wield with reverence and extra care. And English is the language I write in, the language I learned to write in. They each hold a different status: English as the language I think in, Urdu as the language I love and languish in, Arabic as the language I believe and beseech in.”
Thanks for reading,
Vesna
About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant and refugee life—the struggles, triumphs, and quirks—by immigrants and refugees, and children of immigrants and refugees. For more info, here is a Q&A I did with Longreads about the newsletter. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.
About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, then immigrated to Canada, and now live in the United States, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits in the human rights and international affairs fields. I have written about my immigrant experience for the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, The New York Times, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, and Catapult, and have essays forthcoming in Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, and Connecticut Literary Anthology 2024. I participated in Tin House and Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshops, and won the Poet & Author and Parent Writer fellowships from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Find me on Instagram, @vesnajaksiclowe, or twitter, @vesnajaksic.
Hi! wondering if you could share a link to your Writing About Your Immigrant Experience online class through Cooper Street. I couldn't find one on their website. thank you!
Love that so many wonderful things are happening in your world!