Mori weaves culture and classics in writing
By NOREEN GILLESPIE
News Writer
Detailing her educational training and the discovery of the role her homeland could play in her writing, Asian-American author and poet Kyoko Mori explained her emergence as an Asian-American writer Thursday.
Mori, a native of Kobe, Japan, settled in the United States at the age of 16 in Wisconsin. In a Japaneese culture where Mori felt many women are pressured to marry, she wanted to pursue a writing career. She left her homeland because "there was nothing for me to do there," she told the audience in Carroll Auditorium.
"I wanted to study creative writing. In Japan, people don't go to school to learn to write I don't know how people become writers. I don't think I could have learned [how to write] on my own."
Mori discovered her love of writing in high school, the beginning of an educational process that would lead her to discover she could incorporate her homeland in her memoirs, poems and novels. It was in college where she first began to become aware of the need for a strong setting in her work, she said.
"When I went to college, I started writing seriously," Mori said. "I wrote about people I thought I knew, girls on campus who were going through a crisis. The setting wasn't very strong. It could have been any college campus, and the young women I wrote about could have been any young women."
But recently emigrated from Japan, Mori was not yet ready to incorporate her memories of Japan into her writing. Instead, she focused writing about her present experiences in the United States, and "didn't really talk about the past," she said.
It was the desire to write about her grandmother, however, which catapulted Mori to take a more introspective approach to her writing and draw upon more personal experience. Interested in knowing what life was like for her grandmother, Mori began to write a poem about her grandmother, in which she tried to imagine what her life was like, she said.
That poem became the springboard for a series of writings about her grandmother, and subsequently, the inclusion of Japan in her work.
"Somehow, that wasn't enough. It was just a snapshot I wanted to write as story," Mori said. "I didn't know a lot about my culture that I came from, but I knew what my grandmother did every morning," Mori said.
Mori withheld from including her culture in her writing for much of her educational career, however, due to a lack of minority writers in the curriculum. Exposed to classics such as Hemmingway and Faulkner in the canon while earning undergraduate and graduate degrees, Mori supplemented her education by exploring work done as minority writers on her own.
"Everyone should read them Hemmingway and Faulkner," she said. "But you come to a point where it is good to supplement that education, particularly if you are an Asian-American writer."
It took seeing examples by other minority writers for her to understand she could include her culture in her work, Mori said despite the knowledge of writing she gained from modern American literature.
"It was only in my grad school years that I started to feel I had permission to write that way," Mori said. "
even though I didn't read it in the Norton Anthology of Literature."
Currently a resident of Cambridge, Mass., Mori is the Briggs Copeland Lecturer in Creative Writing at Harvard University. She is the author of the New York Times best young children's book Shizuko's Daugther. She has written several collections of poetry and memoirs, including Polite Lies, A Dream of Water, Fallout, and her most recent book, Stonefield, True Arrow.
Mori spoke at Saint Mary's as a part of Asian Pacific Island Heritage Month, sponsored by PAC. The last event of the month, a Mehndi tattoo demonstration, will occur today in LeMans' Reignbeaux Lounge from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
All News Stories for Friday, March 30, 2001
