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MY: And so, and then, of course, my writing. I organized the... at first I, I was getting tired of always being the teacher in the classroom, and always being a teacher and the only, with one Asian student, I mean, it was mostly white students at Cypress College. And I felt like I needed some colleagues, and most of my friends, colleagues were writers and poets were up in San Francisco. And so I thought there must be something around in Orange County. So I started sending out kind of a position paper to say I would like to start the Asian American women writers group here in Orange County, and I asked if people would be interested. I'll have my first meeting at my house at such and such, and several women showed up, and that was sort of the core group. About six of us started as an Asian American writers group. And we were, we just made kind of a mission statement that it was just going to be a group of women, we will bring our writings to the group. And then that didn't work because we were all professional women, we were too busy, and so then we decided, well, why don't we do this: why don't we meet all day Sunday or Sunday afternoon for about four to six hours and we will do our writing there. I mean, it was just shut out the whole world and we just stay in the room together and write. And that worked out quite well because we didn't have, you know, took the telephone off, it was just my husband and me at home at that time. And we holed ourselves up in the dining room and we started to, we gave ourselves topics. And I remember... another one, we, the six of us turned around and they said, "You know, every one of us were married to a white guy. Mitsu's the only one who's married to an Asian, to a Japanese American, and why is that? Why does this happen?" And so then, so we said, "Okay, that's our topic," and so we start writing on "why I married a white man," you know, and that was quite interesting. And then we came back, we read each other's papers. And one of the women did something with it, published it, but most of the time it was just sort of rambling. We didn't worry about structure, we didn't worry about whether it was a poem. We just thought it was important to write about these issues. Like a journal entry. And so we started meeting, we were meeting twice a month but that got to be a little bit much, so now we meet once a month. And we have been together for almost twenty years. The composition -- we only have two members of the original group left, but it is no longer an Asian American writers group, it is called a multiethnic -- MultiCultural Women Writers because we decided, we thought well... we were having trouble with being exclusive, because one of our things was that we kind of resented the exclusivity of certain white organizations, that we got excluded from getting published and so forth. And so when some of the women like Italian American women or Jewish women, Hispanic women wanted to join our group, we talked about it and -- what shall we do? And we just decided that it was not politically correct. It just didn't feel right to tell anybody no, you can't join us because of such and such. So we changed our mission to any woman who is writing from the perspective of a feminist ethnic and multicultural perspective is eligible to join the group. And so we have one woman who is a white woman, who was, she is an American Indian literature expert. She's been a scholar and isn't an American Indian. She's written a lot and published material by American Indian women, and so we thought well, Helen was eligible. So we have quite a range of people in our group.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.