Last week, author, professor and Carleton alum Karen Tei Yamashita (‘73) visited St. Olaf to give a reading and talk about her newest book, Letters to Memory. Professor Yamashita was also generous enough to spend some time answering our questions about her newest book, her writing process, and her interest in placing an emphasis on historical truth to keep her fiction honest. The Miscellany encourages its readers to check out this new memoir as well as her well-received previous novels. For now, enjoy our interview with her below!
Welcome back to Northfield! How do you remember your time at Carleton? How significant a chapter has it been in your personal history?
Coming to school in Minnesota was the first time I lived outside of California. I had never visited and was immediately enthralled by the seasons. In California, seasons exist but not with such striking changes — fall colors, snowy winter, burst of spring. Along with the change in weather patterns, I experienced a very different America in the midwest; my folks thought I should leave California to know another side of the country, and this would be the beginning of my travels.
In Letters to Memory, you weave material from your family archive with academic perspectives on the Japanese internment. How do you view the relationship between the personal past and a broader historical narrative? What was challenging or enlightening in your exploration of the two in tandem?
I don’t think my personal past is of any importance, but I have to admit I’ve been shaped by the history that determined the lives of my parents and their families. And while their story is only one of many stories in the lives of Japanese Americans devastated by war incarceration, I did have their correspondence and documents from which to speak. I chose not to write a family saga, but anyone can visit the Yamashita archive and reconstruct the narrative of their lives. What I wanted to explore were the gaps in their stories that connected their wartime imprisonment and dislocation to the larger story of civil rights in America. This larger story continues to be important because it is still of consequence to others — to immigrant communities, to undocumented migrant people, to Muslims and Middle Eastern people, to exiles and refugees, to all people of color, and to the very fabric of American life as we understand it to be protected by our Constitution and beliefs. What has become challenging is to face the current political climate of racism and hatred and fear that threatens hope and the long legacy of, not only my family, but of so many who have sacrificed their lives.
As well as writing books, you’re also a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz. How does your writing inform your teaching, and vice versa?
I’m not a trained academic, but I’ve understood my place as a teacher in a place of research as a Socratic experience, that is, an opportunity to question together with others. I think all teachers know that they are learning constantly from their students and that that exchange can be richly rewarding. With that in mind, I’ve created all my courses as opportunities to study what also interests and feeds my research.
Who are the biggest influences on your writing, literary or otherwise? Were any of them at least partially responsible for your decision to pursue writing in the first place?
My high school teachers were perhaps my first influences, Virginia Buchanan and Casey Krache who taught English and Greek literature. Then at Carleton, American literature professor Bob Tisdale and anthropologist, Paul Riesman. These teachers encouraged intellectual query, showed how ideas come about creatively, mentored with integrity. In the day, I only knew that I could write and perhaps that would prove useful. It took a long time to teach myself how and what to do. Looking back I realize that despite my high anxieties, these teachers provided foundations and, more importantly, believed.
You have been writing and publishing books for several decades now. Has writing come to mean something different to you over the years? What do you hope to achieve by writing today? Which stories do you think are still in desperate need of telling?
When I began to write in Brazil what I thought would be an historical novel, I really didn’t know what I was doing or what I was getting into. If I knew what I now know, I likely would not have begun. Writing was an act of hubris and risk, but I was a kid. What did I know? I wrote and rewrote that novel, Brazil-Maru, five times from beginning to end. In doing so, I guess I taught myself how to write. With every writing project, I’ve sought to understand some other aspect of writing and narrative. In this sense, writing is always about learning. I finally figured out that I write to learn. The other thing is that depending on what you choose to write, you have a responsibility to that project and those people you bother with questions and interviews and research. I have a few more projects or questions in mind, but I hardly know what they mean or might achieve. Selfishly I like to write. It makes me happy and sane, and it’s the only thing I really know how to do.
When questioned about the role of research in your writing, you have said you “think that intense and thorough research keeps fiction honest.” Could you talk more about what it means to write honest fiction and how you manage the balancing act between anthropologist and fiction author?
Maybe to write fiction is to lie honestly, and if you do it poorly, the reader knows. John Gardner had a lot to say about this, but simply I’d say that anything that disrupts the reader’s transport into a continuous fictional dream is probably because the writer didn’t do her homework. I probably do too much homework because research is fascinating with so many pathways to other subjects. I get bogged down and forget the project at hand. Let’s be clear: I’m just an untrained lay anthropologist; actually I wouldn’t even say anthropologist — so there’s no balancing act here.
In addition to fiction, you’ve also expanded into other literary forms, namely memoir and playwriting. After generating such a versatile body of work, do you find yourself applying the specific tools of one form to others? Has the variety left you wanting to explore any other areas of literature or art?
The form a project takes depends on the requirements of the project. I worked with playwriting early on, and it taught me about the constraints of dialogue. Dialogue in drama and fiction is not really how people talk; it’s always a construction carefully honed and edited to drive character and story. However, it still has to seem “real.” One thing I learned while writing I Hotel is that documentary film and drama could represent themselves while still telling story, that it was not necessary to perform or produce either as actual film or produced play. For many years I struggled with actors, videographers, and musicians to produce on stage performances, but then it became evident to me that these events could be written and imagined in text. Even though Coffee House Press has to categorize my last project, Letters to Memory, as “memoir” in order to place it on bookshelves, I don’t think of it quite that way. Writing is an open space in which the writer can experiment and stretch the meaning of genre and form. It would be exciting to experiment with multimedia formats that the stage and computer technology afford and also with interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with other artists.