Maybe, it’s just a crazy case of synchronicity & maybe one of my Japanese ancestors just bribed a god or some shit like that, I don’t know, but either way, I just got a dream fucking email by Unsolicited Press that they want to publish my experimental memoir, Dream Pop Origami. I’m in shock. I love this goddamn memoir, I started writing it in Portland and I’ve been working on it off & on ever since in Chicago, Buenos Aires, LA, & in Ann Arbor. I think this anti-memoir makes a tiny but important contribution to a very emaciated archive dominated by narrative nonfiction writers, most of them white or APIA women writers or former politicians or celebrities, some incredibly orientalist, some badly written, some clearly plagiarized, and some absolute masterpieces of form and content. Greywolf, for example, seems to have a knack for publishing brilliant nonfiction, but virtually none of it is written by men. I’m not really complaining, I’m just saying.
I feel like this memoir does a lot of important work in exploring, negotiating, subverting, deconstructing, and challenging not just genre in general but also the notion of a fixed or stable mixed-race/hapa male identity in particular. There are so few published experimental memoirs out there and even fewer that explore the fragmentation of mixed-race identity, the construction of APIA masculinities, variable storytelling, and the impossibility/the necessity of (cross-cultural) love, and the ones that do exist are written almost entirely by women. But I think some men writers have unique and important stories worth telling and reading too that aren’t celebrities, politicians, well-connected editors, or athletes. And to be honest, it’s a major deficiency in the publishing industry (and in the creative nonfiction archive at large), that has shown absolutely no interest in fixing its own issues with representation in CNF. For some strange reason, many people, who are feminists like me, are perfectly happy to gender genre, but I’m not. I think we should contest those assumptions. I think we should contest those calcified gender codes of how and where gender is performed not just culturally, spatially, or professionally, but also textually and artistically. We shouldn’t be reinforcing the very things we’re trying to undo, we should be accelerating their undoing. That’s literally part of the project of deconstructing patriarchy.
Anyway, I can say without question (or apology) that there are very few memoirs like Dream Pop Origami & that’s precisely the reason why it took a bold, punk-rock, amazing, and audacious indie press to give this book a chance (and a microphone) to show its unique mode of storytelling. Now that the ink is (almost) dry, I’m overjoyed to say that I just signed and returned my publishing contract, so it’s now official: I’ll have TWO books coming out in 2022, a novel published by 7.13 Books & an experimental memoir published by Unsolicited Press. Watch out, world!