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VM: Since you brought up the issue of the workshops, I was wondering if I could ask a question about your creative writing workshops as a teacher at the Far East Lounge, and I don't know if you were teaching specifically poetry or creative writing more broadly. I was wondering if you could tell us about how teach poetry or how you teach creative writing.

AU: Wow. That class, gee, I think we lasted about five years and then the pandemic hit. But we actually, a few of us are still meeting by Zoom, which is pretty remarkable. It was supposed to be, whether you call it creative writing, writing, whatever. It was a class intended for beginning writers, and because I know poetry, I basically taught it the way I've also taught creative writing while I was at Grant High School. What I would do is I would bring in work for people to read, and we might read it out loud, talk about it. For our particular workshop, let me think back, okay. For our own little workshop at Little Tokyo Lounge, we actually did a different agenda, now that I think about it. We started with quotes. Quotes or announcements. Announcements we might have to make to each other, and quotes, so people could bring in one or two quotes by famous people. They don't have to be writers, they could be anything, or maybe a quote they saw on the newspaper, so we do that. And then we would look at new work, look at something I had brought in for writing, and then we would look at the students' work. And because it's a beginners workshop, my effort is to try to be as encouraging as possible for people. Because for some of them it really is something new to get things down on paper. And it was also sometimes a little hard to juggle because all the writers weren't at the same level. So that makes it more difficult when you've got some that are pretty advanced and could, one woman could be in a different kind of setting as opposed to our setting. So I think we'd become kind of a family, a collective of women. And even though we had writing in common, there was also a common passion for the Asian American community, and many of the members were active in different organizations or at JANM, so there was always that kind of unifying bond between us when we'd meet. So it's kind of hard to separate it as, oh, you guys are writers? Because it was more than that.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.