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VM: Brian, is this a time to move to the writing, or did you have other things you wanted to ask?

BN: No. Yeah, why don't we go ahead to the Asian American Women Writers West?

VM: This was a really important group and you were there from the early start. We're hoping that you could tell us how you got involved with Pacific Asian American Women Writers West?

AU: Okay. And I'll just call them PAAWWW, which I like because it's like "pow," right? I got involved with PAAWWW really because I took a writing class at the Japanese American Community and Cultural Center, or was it Cultural and Community Center? But at JACCC, Momoko Iko, the playwright, offered a couple of creative writing classes, and I attended both of those. And it was really, it really helped me as a young poet, she was very, very supportive. And some of the poems that ended up in my first book, the first expression of those came out, some of them came out in Momoko's workshop. So Momoko was a member of PAAWWW and she invited me to join. At the time I was in PAAWWW, we mainly did performances. So our meetings would be around planning for those performances. I think I read one of your questions about did we maybe help each other with our writing, maybe give feedback on each other's writing. And I'm not aware of that occurring, although maybe it was happening on an individual level. But as a group, we didn't do anything like that, we didn't really look at, as a group, a person's writing and give comments. So like I said, it was more performance and social. And for me, just the fact that these were all Asian American women writers from L.A. that that's not an easy task. Just being in the same room with them and having coffee with them was very nice. It included people besides Momoko, people like Naomi Hirahara, she was just a baby when I was in PAAWWW. She was just coming out of college. Who else, Joyce Nako, Jude Narita, people like that.

VM: I never actually got to meet Momoko Iko. Well, we had one phone conversation. Can you describe her for me? What was she like?

AU: She had one of these, sort of, wry sense of humors and very intelligent, really smart, very kind, often had kind of a little smile on her face. For me personally as a writer, she really gave me positive affirmation. And from there I went on and took more classes at UCLA. I consider Momoko and Peter Levitt, the two main teachers in my own writing development.

VM: Was Peter Levitt a teacher at UCLA?

AU: Yeah. He taught poetry at UCLA Extension, and my first two classes there were fiction classes. And I wrote some short stories which I've never submitted any place. And toward the end of the second class with the same instructor, I think his name was Wilson, Professor Wilson. He wrote the comment, "You might be better suited for poetry." [Laughs] So there was something about the way, I guess, I wrote. So the next extension class I signed up for was poetry. And I had no idea who Peter Levitt was, but he's the instructor I got. And once I met Peter, I worked within the UCLA Extension, and then he invited me into his private workshops, which were a small number of people. And that was around 1984, 1985, and I stayed with Peter until 2000 when he moved to Canada with his family.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.