Where Would You Like to See Yourself in Five Years?

I remember one of the questions my supervisor asked me during the review session in the company I had my day job: "Where would you like to see yourself in five years?" I don't remember what my answer was as a worker whose job failed to define me--a playwright at the time. As a writer, though, I do have an answer to that question, and I have had the answer since I graduated from WMU. Five years is a reasonable length of time to reach a goal, and it's not too far a distance to see things around us unless an emergency happens that completely upset our plan. It did happen to me in 2010.

That said, I am glad to be able to return to be a story teller again. I can tell a story in a tanka sequence and a haibun; however, it's a different kind of story telling. I have enjoyed writing them and will continue to write them. Meanwhile, I will be working on my long writing projects. Where would I like to see myself in five years? I got the answer.

What about you?

Happy 2014!

My Winning Haibun

I've been sick for more than a week and am still quite sick. So I'm going to post here my haibun that won a second place of Jerry Kilbride Memorial 2012 English-Language Haibun Contest. This haibun has just been published by Haibun Today Volume 7, Number 4, December, 2013, which comes out today.


Leaves Falling to Their Roots

A sunny autumn day. Wes and I are driving through territory new to me.

“Remember where I want to be buried?” I ask.

“Have your ashes scattered into the Pacific from a promontory on the Oregon coast,” he answers. I told him that during our trip there.

I smile sadly. “Yes. So, a bit of me might flow back to the coast of Vietnam.”

Hours later, we arrive. He holds her urn as we walk towards the designated spot.

Calgary
his grandmother rests
at home





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My Published Poems

These days, we can read almost everything on the Internet for free. However, if the printed magazines and books that don't go digital, we are out of reach of them unless we purchase a copy.

For those of you who don't have a copy of the in-print journals that have published my tanka, here I'd like to share them with you.

The following tanka are about war in general, the Vietnam War in particular:

Memorial Day
the bagpipes' lyricism
on the screen
I recall the Tet Offensive
in Saigon and Cholon

(bottle rockets, no. 29)

For those of you who experienced the war in either Vietnam or America will remember the Tet Offensive that escalated the war. This tanka of mine is not only about the Vietnam War but about other wars as well.

maple leaves
spray red on the ground
I stand
on the blood-soaked earth
contemplating peace

(red lights, June 2013)

"War and peace" seems to like to pair up with each other. When the war ends, comes peace. Right? Wrong. For us South Vietnamese, peace did NOT come until . . . You fill in the blank.

Happy Halloween!

Humor in Poetry

We run in some sort of problems, frustration, and indignation. Humor is the best way to drive them off in order to keep our emotional balance. There's humor in all kinds of writing, even in poetry. In Japanese short form poetry, such poems are called Kyoka, another version of tanka.

Among all my published tanka, two of them, just off the top of my head, have humor in them.

Here is one published in Fire Pearls 2:

instantly
I become a beauty
when my sister says,
"your mouth is as big as
Sophia Loren's"

In this poem, I poke fun at both myself and my sister who unwittingly mocks her own sex by embracing the idea that degrades women. In traditional Chinese culture, there's a saying, "A man who has a big mouth (its physical size and thus has nothing to do with the American idiom) will have a feast everywhere he goes. A woman who has a big mouth will eat too much to impoverish her husband." How unfair is this saying! My old-fashioned sister fails to see the sexism in it. Oh, well. She's entitled to what she thinks and what she believes in.

Here's another one published in Atlas Poetica's special feature of "All Hallow's Evening : Supernatural Tanka" :

Halloween Party . . .
wrapped in a green sheet, a foam crown
with a paper torch
I strut like Lady Liberty
who comes from Saigon

This poem is about my partaking of a company's Halloween Party. I had a lot of fun, playing Lady Liberty.

It adds another level of meaning to a poem, be it tanka or free verse, if we inject humor into our poems; the same is true to the other kinds of writing.

My Own Favorite Poems II

Again, I am posting some favorite Japanese short-form poems of my own. I have had quite a few poems published in a variety of journals, both online and in print. I'd like to reprint them here to share with you in case you don't read those journals or you read only a couple of them.

The following link is from Haibun Today. My haibun is about a former Viet Cong who had fled the unified Vietnam wrote a memoir about his life during the war and its aftermath. I believe my haibun will be of interest to those who are curious about what happened in Vietnam once the Bamboo Curtain was drawn. I hope this piece of my writing will make the reader think not only of war and peace but also of life itself.

Haibun Today

My Own Favorite Poems

I believe we writers have favorite pieces of our own writings, be they poems, essays, short stories, plays, novels, and so on. I myself have quite a few of my own published poems that are my favorites. Here are some that I'd like to share with you.

1)
illusional
dreams come and go
and hard
to hold them tight
like flowers in a mirror

(Chrysanthemum 12, 2012)

2)
a nondrinker
I don't know the joy
of Li Bai who drowned
his worries in wine . . .
I sip my second coffee

(A Hundred Gourds 2:2 March 2013)

3)
gravel path
I kick at the pebbles
so small
yet, quietly carrying
our weight

(GUSTS No. 17)

4)
Tet flower market
revives in Saigon
whose old charm
melts the Hanoi sun . . .
Dharma Wheel

(Atlas Poetica Number 12, Summer 2012)(It's part of a sequence)

5)
my pen
dips into shadows
of the boat people . . .
endless I search for words
to paint their ordeal

(Lynx 27:3 October, 2012)

6)
one drop of mercy
from Kuan Yin . . .
rain after the drought

(Haiku News, Vol. 1 No. 8)

7)
a reflection
across multiple rivers
my heritage

(Notes from the Gean 3:2 September, 2011)

The seven tanka and haiku posted here reveal quite a bit of me as I touch on a variety of subject matters.

Self-Editing

I believe that I touched on this topic before. Now I want to say some more about it since I came across an advice by a well-established writer in a writing magazine. Here is the quote:

"I thinking what you actually learn is the art of self-editing. It's that ability to look at a line dispassionately and not feel attached to it just because you've written it. It's also a matter of confidence." by Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The two points that he brought up in this piece of advice are pretty good. First, I like "the art of self-editing." And, from my own experience, I did learn from self-editing. This is exactly what I mean "the writer's Aha Moment" that I posted in my earlier blogs. Self-editing is the hands-on learning process for me in haiku, tanka, and haibun writing, in plays and in fiction as well.

When Mr. Adams said, ". . . It's also a matter of confidence. . . ." I said to myself, "Yes!" My novel that is in the cooling period has gone through numerous times of self-editing. As it is now, I have cut more than 3,000 words by my self-editing. I did the cutting with confidence. During the first few times of self-editing, though, I was not that sure I should make the cut. Later on, I was confident that those words and even scenes I had cut were unneeded; in other words, they simply dragged on. What has given me the confidence? To do it. And, the more I do it, the more I find the self-editing process enjoyable and educational.

I know it's hard to chop off a piece from our writing, especially a scene. To make our writing better, I'd like to refer back to Mr. Adams's advice: ". . . It's that ability to look at a line dispassionately . . ."

I believe I have developed that ability. It takes time. And it takes work.






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