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The Stafford Challenge: Month 5 - Games

I've been seeing this image everywhere on Facebook and Reddit, and I thought it is funny. I looked up the origin of the image and I found it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicthecirclejerking/comments/1l5v1da/petition_to_make_this_the_new_color_pie/ Thank you u/Eljefe900 on Reddit for this image. This was a tough month of writing. Work is the most hectic in the summer, and writing is hard to do consistently on a daily basis. I have times when I wrote three poems a day, or where I didn't write for five days. Even figuring out the topic for the month was difficult, which started out as "nerd stuff." However, through difficulty, I think I have some paths to follow. The focus of this month eventually became "games": video games, game shows, or card games. The above image references Magic: The Gathering which I played in my early college years. The image above reminds me of my crass sense of humor and taste then, and how it'...

The Stafford Challenge: Month 4 Doubutsu (動物) and Mono no Aware (物の哀れ); Animals and the Temporariness of Things

Credit to user anu-nand from Reddit for the photo. I've been reading a lot of Kobayashi Issa and Kobayashi Issa insight recently. I recommend David G. Lanoue translation and insight of Kobayashi Issa's work as it has great readings, analysis, and examples withing the work. I keep thinking of his book Write like Issa: A Haiku How-To where Lanoue writes: Issa's concern for small, weak, alone, and oppressed creatures began with a genuine and sincere effort to imagine the world as experienced by them. He then affirmed his connection with fellow beings acknowledging a shared reality in which he was not living on a higher plane looking down on them but, instead, was on their level, commiserating with them. If you look through some of Kobayashi's varied work (I recommend https://haikuguy.com/issa/ ) you'll see the subject matter of Issa's haiku has animals like frogs and flies, mosquitos and crickets. So I wanted to write about animals...

The Stafford Challenge: Month 3 - Barazoku 薔薇族 The Rose Tribe

Barazoku , which translates to "The Rose Tribe" was the first commercially ran gay men's magazine in Japan. I learned about it from reading Yukio Mishima, and my memory is a bit vague about how involved he was in the magazine, but, for me, he represented this type of bigger, muscular gay Asian male. Granted, Mishima was and still is not a great role model for gay men. Seppuku and honor was all in his books, as he himself commited seppuku in a coup attempt. But for me, a kid in his 20's who was ashamed of his sexuality, and sense of masculinity, turned to Barazoku as an ideal self and attraction. Just seeing Asian men being confident in their sexuality and just living their lives gave me hope that there was something better out there, since coming out wasn't a great experience: being laughed at, being told I'm going to Hell, being somewhat disowned and being told I was replaceable definitely changed my world view on what I believed in and the people around...

The Stafford Challenge: Month 2 - The Watsonville Riots, Thoughts and Reflections

In grad school, I took a course in Detective Fiction in 2010. One of the projects we could do at the end of the course was to create our own book proposal for a detective story, and I had one in mind for a long time. Let's go further back, back when I was studying about Asian-American History when I was an undergrad in 2003 I learned about the Watsonville Riots from Strangers from a Different Shore by Ronald Takaki . From my memory, the title of the chapter about the Watsonville Riots, and the Filipino-American experience in American was called "A Dollar a Day, A Dime a Dance." This is in reference to Filipino farm workers earning a dollar a day, and spending a dime to dance with someone at a dance hall. But what interested me most about this was this hysteria that Filipino men were dating, loving, and being with white women which was said to be the basis of the riots. Also the idea that one man, Fermin Tehera, was killed in a farm house -- shot through the hear...

The Stafford Challenge: Month 1 (Name:Memory), Thoughts and Reflections

The Stafford Challenge is a commitment to write a poem a day for a year. I haven't really written poems for a year, and seeing this challenge pop up on my Facebook feed made me wonder why I haven't so before. I think I'm one of those type of writers who tells himself it's easier to wait for inspiration rather than be more active in the writing process: research, writing, revision as a way to say to myself "I'll write it when it's the best time." Well, there's no time like now, right? In the past two years, I was able to do poem a day challenges that lasted for a month. However, the way I wrote them was more improvisational journal entry: writing what I see that day, or what was happening, and since I did this type of writing for two challenges, I wanted to try something different. So a week before the start date, I decided to list a bunch of themes, ideas, undercurrents, to latch onto and guide me as I explored what I thought about them throug...