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BN: But yeah, unless Valerie has something, we can move on to the next one.

AU: Oh, move on to my last book? Okay, so this book came out in March or April of this year, 2022. So it was accepted for publication either a year or a year and a half ago. No, it was more than that, more like two years ago. Because when this was accepted for publication, I didn't know about my breast cancer reoccurring. So it's kind of scary in a way to see That Blue Trickster Time when time seems to be something that's become a primary consideration for me now that I have stage four breast cancer. But the book, all through the pandemic I was doing lots of writing. So this book reflects that. It has poems about the pandemic, a lot of poems that are critical of Trump, poems about the rise in anti-Asian violence and Americans going after, randomly going after Asian Americans, because they're saying we caused it. So I have more current poems like that, and I have a whole section at the beginning that I consider old women poems because I am. When I wrote this book, I was in my, probably early '70s maybe, when I wrote the manuscript. So I am an old woman, and I am seeing things a little differently than I did thirty, forty years ago. But speaking of old women, that's been kind of a thing, too, in many of my books because I would have old women, gee, in 30 Miles From J-Town, there were old women, especially some, there were either Issei grandmothers or like women I'd see on the highways of Mexico when we'd go on vacation. You know, like poor native Mexican women, like that. The second book, too, I'm trying to think, some of my other books carry on the old woman theme or in terms of my just getting older. But one of the things that I used to think was weird was I'd have an old woman in a lot of my dreams. I tend not to remember my dreams, but for some reason I remembered these dreams at the time. I think I was in my forties, and this old woman long, white hair. She was very ethnic, and she'd be dancing, and she'd be on top of the car, and she ended up in two or three of my poems. And I think she still even comes up. Like one of my poems is called "Sister Muse," and about something called a "feminine woman creative power." I think the old woman is still there, and what's kind of, I guess this is also true, is that old woman is me now. I used to talk about older women as someone a generation younger. But now, I'm here, I'm in my seventies. So that's the first section of the book. The other big, big poem for me in this book is my "36 Views of Manzanar." And this was a project that I think took two or three years to write. I've always loved Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and had decided that I wanted to try to write some sort of poem and something about Japanese Americans, but using Thirty-six Views. So some of those views did end up in those longer poems that we've talked about in other books. But this going to be focused more for my own very limited knowledge of Manzanar because I was born after camp, the Uyematsus' didn't talk all that much about it. So what I started to do was to do research, or if I saw something in the Rafu, things here and there, I would just jot it down thinking, hey, I may be able to use this in this project, in my "36 Views" poem. So that's sort of how that occurred. Bits and pieces, I know I listened to my aunt Mare's interview, I think she was interviewed for some organization. But little bits here and there, and then finally you've got, I think I had more than thirty-six things, but I had to narrow it down to, okay, what are the best thirty-six, and then how am I going to sequence it? And then I got this long poem. So that long poem and the antiwar poem in Basic Vocabulary, those are the two that really did take years to write.

This book also has its own Asian American section, and I've got the camp story about my grandfather and dad when they got a permit to leave camp. I've got a poem about Dad dancing, because he was a really good dancer. And he and my mother, the Nisei would go to dances after the war. And "Little Tokyo Haiku," which is sort of my view of how Little Tokyo has changed. And one of the poems I like to perform a lot, because it rhymes and people get a kick out of it is "Love-In for Jeremy Lin," which... who can't love Jeremy Lin? [Laughs] And then another piece I feel very strongly about in the book is called "Dear Lawson," and it talks a lot about Lawson visiting our early Asian American Studies class, that would be about 1971 or '2, and how much it just impressed me. And I talk a little bit about what I know about him and his writing, and just looking up to him, so just kind of honoring him.

VM: Has Lawson, did you send him that poem? Has he responded to it?

AU: Yeah, he's seen it, he likes it.

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