 on YouTube and we're live in the room. Good evening, oh, good evening. My name is Tommy Suzuki. I'm with the San Francisco Public Library. We have a special event with poet and author Brian Komei Dempster tonight. We are gonna start in just a couple minutes. So thanks for being patient. We are happy to have you with us. Brian, thumbs up. Shall we go? Yeah, I'm good to go. Okay, welcome to San Francisco Public Library's virtual program with Brian Komei Dempster. The San Francisco History Center is hosting this evening's very special event. We are coming to you via Zoom. We are also streaming live via YouTube and you are being recorded. We're recording for YouTube and there will be playback. Close captioning is available. We will have time for discussion with the poet after the reading. Questions can be posted in the chat. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatush Ohlone peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatush community. For those of you who are first peoples of native lands, please share your territory with us in the chat and welcome. Brian Komei Dempster is a professor of rhetoric and language and a faculty member in the Asian American, sorry, Asian Pacific American Studies at the University of San Francisco where he also serves as director of the administration for the Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies. He is editor of both from our side of the fence growing up in America's concentration camps and making home from war stories of Japanese American exile and resettlement. Dempster's work considers what it is to be othered in America, historically and personally. His poems combine historical narratives, his family's stories, and his own experiences which give his work a wonderful texture and density. Book C's, it explores his role as a father in raising his son, Brendan, who has epilepsy and severe physical and cognitive disabilities. The book also articulates not only the challenges that his wife Grace and he face but the rewards and joy as well. The vivid imagery illustrates the poet's search for grace and justice. C's has received numerous awards including most recently the Northern California Publishers and Authors Gold Award in poetry. Words that readers have shared about C's include eloquent and brave, a brilliant follow-up to his first book of poetry, Topaz. Readers are privileged to see the insights and deep connections to this family experiences. Please welcome Brian Komei Dempster. Thank you so much, Tommy. And I just wanna confirm with you that you can see the PowerPoint. We don't yet, Brian. Okay, let me go back and try that again. Thank you, that should be there now. We definitely see it, good to go. All right. Well, thank you all so much for being here and thank you to Tommy, Anissa and Norman. Tommy's been really the leader and organizer of this event. We first met in December of 2020 virtually and we've been talking about this for nine months. And so I'm so excited and delighted and honored to be here. And Anissa and Norman, thank you for the support of this event as well. I wanna give a shout out to my publisher, Four Way Books. They are an incredible team of advocates and amazing people for poets and authors. And Martha, Ryan, Sally, Hannah and Bridget. I just owe you so much gratitude. I just put the link there so that if you do decide to get the book at some point, I love supporting independent publishers and I encourage you to do so. And that can probably be dropped in the chat at some point as well. So today's reading, it's meant to be multi-dimensional, both the word, the image and an auditory sense of image mixing with the visual. And for you to get a holistic experience of what Tommy talked about in her introduction. So what I'm gonna do is the book is composed of 49 poems and it's 152 pages. And what I want for you as an audience is to get a sense of the arc and trajectory of the speaker's journey and quest. The speaker is a father as Tommy mentioned and really rooted in my own experiences of raising Brendan, my son. And he is non-verbal. He has epilepsy, cerebral palsy, yet I would argue that labels and words cannot completely define him. And so this book is really about my attempts to understand who he is, to describe, but at the same time to understand the limitations of language and the ways in which he lives beyond and outside of language. And that's one of the themes of the book as well. This first slide is actually a painting by my mother. Her artist's name is Sui Ren. And I just encourage you to let the paintings sink in to feel the colors, the energy that emanates from it. For me, I see blood. I see a forest. I see clouds. I see a brain that is seized by epilepsy. And there's many other associations you can make. My mother and I chose this painting for the book after perusing many visuals. And this one to us speaks to many of the themes and narratives in the book. I'm gonna start with the first poem. It is also called Seize, the title poem, Seize. Blue flame in the eye's corner. Stove on high, we brace for his flint and spark. Our dark surprise, his smile jolts. Head unleashed, little body arched, straining in the high chair. We stand to face anything. She steadies his tray, eggs bubble in the pot. I lunge for his spoon, his purple elephant. Water boils over sides. We look to each other, sense the sizzle, his bowl clattering, a reverse crater. We shake off faults, shells crack, window shut. We smell the heat, hardened yolks. His brains singe gray, the scorched black dome. We are all hollowed out. So the book begins in what I would call in media rays in the middle of things at the moment of crisis. And then later in the first section, what I wanted to do is really write a character portrait of my son in all his dimensionality. So if you look at these two photos, you get a sense of his goofiness, his positivity and his radiance, and also the ways in which he lives between light and dark. And there's a harness that he's wearing, and this is one he's younger. And he had personal protective equipment so that if he suddenly fell, we'd have to grab him. And there's a handle in the back that we could grab if he had a sudden seizure. Also he's in his blue stroller roadster, which is now a bigger version. And that's his place of safety and comfort. So as you look at these photos, you're gonna see just little snippets of text that are from the poems that I'll read, and they're meant to resonate together. This one's called Brendan Lexicon. Angel, lion, bird, cluster, seizures. He splashes, barks in baths, screams near edges of pools, loves the school bus, hates Grace cutting his fingernails, loves and hates most things. On some spectrum, shrieking angel, palsy lion, intractable bird, falls in cracks between labels. My son, nine years old, ma, hai, duh, his own language. Atonic drops intermittent. He chases robins, flings our clothes, against chairs, pounds, tennis balls, claws, tabletops for dishes, tosses, spoons, thumps his feet to funk beats, dunks, orange ball, body checks the plastic hoop. Focal motor misfires, disco bird, point guard lion, wrecking angel. We clap for simple things, guide him back when he misses the toilet, piss staining his pants. Sit too close, he moves away. Sit far away, he moves close. His sounds fly by. He lets out a sad roar through grinding teeth. Staring spells, chronic shaking. Night through skylights are peaceful time. Grace and I on opposite couches, flipping channels, backs stiff, pulsing temples, sleeping through madmen, true blood, waking to melted coffee ice cream. It's not that simple to love him so much, to hate just some of it. Moving further into the first section, we then begin to see how the father's speaker passed and his ancestral past informs the present. This picture that you see is actually just up the street from the San Francisco Public Library in San Francisco's Japantown on Pine Street. And it's the Nichiren Buddhist Church of America that my grandfather founded in the early 1930s when he came over from Hiroshima, Japan. And many years later, I actually was a caretaker for this building and this is a picture from during that time. But I want you to just get a sense of this visual image because this is where they were forcibly removed during World War II and unjustly incarcerated in prison camps. My grandfather and department of justice camps and my mother and the rest of the family in Topaz prison camps. So they were separated for about three to four years. There's a picture of my grandfather, Oji-chan, the archbishop, Nitenashita. He's in a case, a priest robe. And this is him in front of the church. And this is what he would look like during the services and very ceremonial and dignified. He was also a master calligrapher and some of his artwork is associated with the public library. And Tommy can tell you more about that if you have questions. This is his wife, my grandmother, Obachan and her full name is Chiyoko Ishida. She is a haiku poet. She did tea ceremony. She was very gifted artistically, but she also held together the family with a quiet strength and served as glue. And especially during those war years when she had to take care of my aunts and uncles and my infant mother and topaz while they were all very young and separated from my grandfather. So this poem truce then sets the stage in terms of the convergence between the Japanese American wartime incarceration and the historical seizure linked to the medical physical seizure of my son Brendan through epilepsy. And this just arose organically those connections. And you'll notice some references to my grandmother, my grandfather and my mother as well as the camp experience in the poem. It's called truce. Some days we are bombed harbors, then silence. Other days I speak, my voice, a snake cursive in deserts. A father and son, two countries flags whipping in wind. I know the words I need to whisper, words keeping us apart. My shirt twisted in his fist, he tugs at me. Back churned, I shake him off. My torn sleeve, a white cloth he holds up. Shots fire from my mouth. Stop, tell me what you want. Words in our own war story, he can't answer. My son seized ancestors trapped. Grandmother walks on boards, carries my baby mother over mud and horse shit of Tan Fran. Wraps her with blankets in topaz, their sand prison. Images sizzle in his eyes, light forking the sky, mother blinks. Like my son, she doesn't know the words. Bedtime stories, a nightly clash. My hands guiding his head, forcing him back to the page. Rain on tin, home of songs, her father missing. Empty deserts, shutter of flags, the mouth and its silent dust. Between quiet and the noise, I reach the edge, almost surrender. So as we move through section one, we then have poetry about a war veteran who uses a racial slur and the speaker's mixed race identity being half Japanese, half European American and how that slur creates dissonance and a better understanding of racism. And then we move into the speaker's brother's experience of being assaulted and the racialized nature of that assault. And the final poem in that section, I'm gonna read to you is Storm Music. And I think it combines those various themes. The brother is a cellist and music is linked to that assault. Music itself is a metaphor because it goes beyond language in the book. So I'll return to that later. Storm Music, son, we tried to fix you. Halfway up, you cut out. Starts, stops, notes bent, lost, music warped. You skip inside us. Orange tip, struck, your flame stains us. We skip a breath and hold you. Grooved, dark, unseen, nicks, skies, black disc. We spin between static and song. Your flashes fill our hands, starred. Brendan, a storm is not your face. We wait for lightning to be light. In the picture there, you see Brendan when he's younger, he's now 16 years old. And we had many trips to the hospital and this is recovering from a bout of seizures and he just looks so peaceful and calm and gracious in his hospital gown. And to the right of that is a painting by my mother, Sui Ren. And it just reminded me of this notion of the storm and what it must feel like to have a seizure and how some clarity peaks through the grayness of it. And so I thought those images together spoke well to the poem, right? Now, moving into the second section of the book, the father, son journey and the family's journey continues. And there's poems about my son's neurosurgery and getting some of his brain resected in the hopes of helping his epilepsy and helping to calm the seizures with some moderate success. There's also further exploration of the mixed race identity themes and linkages to more contemporary acts of racial and homophobic violence. And so there's a poem about the tragic murder of James Byrd of Oscar Grant at Fruitville Station. And the poem I'm gonna read to you ends that section. And it's about the really, really disturbing murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998 in an atrocious act of homophobic violence that is always, always really, really had a deep impact on me. And I believe that's because of the connection to the metaphor of seizure, the connection to what happened to my son, what happened to my ancestors in the camps. I feel that same sense of seizure and assault when I wrote this poem, Shepard's Psalm after him. And it borrows from Psalm 23, Shepard's Psalm. Prepare for enemies, warm your feet from dirt's grave cold. Uncover your voice. The words flying out like leaves into gusts of their rage. Dissolve the fist stain on your face and the rope around your wrists. Lie down in the beaten dark, near pastures green and unbrewed. The salt raining down your blood restoring dusk's ragged edge to smooth planes of terracotta slate. Your gold straw hair igniting the wick of pink dawn. You shall not want. So this painting by my mother, which is part of a set called Flight evokes for me the dissonance and power of violence. And again, the image of blood in the poem and how clarity might peek through in between those moments where everything is blurred and fragmented. And just looking at the image, I think of a very ice cold landscape and Laramie Wyoming. So I'm now gonna turn to the third section and the third section is moving towards a further negotiation of the family and the marriage and how the marriage is both tested and challenged but also become stronger through the experience. So here's a picture of my son Brendan on a swing and you'll see that resonate later in the poem. And then my lovely wife, Grace and my son Brendan in our converted van. And there he is in a graduated blue stroller roadster, a bigger version and you can't see it but it's strapped down to the floor and the entire backseat is removed so that he can actually have enough room there. There's also a ramp that we can wheel it down. So this poem is called Broken and although it's about being tested, I think it's also about healing the rift. The park below gives us fire, orange leaves crackling over green. I gulped coffee as I drove. Grace held the cold cloth on his head. I do, I do he babbled his mantra. Our mouse chalked, minds chipped and torn away. He never gets better, I said. Her lips tightened, that doesn't help us. Back to our corners, another night in ER, two bags of fluids through our eight-year-old son. A flock sweeps over, shadows the flame, spiking mercury, the night crack into ice chips, his skin paling, seizing, stopped. Some couples like us end up broken, Grace says, rubs my back. Not us, I tell her, my hand on his chest as he sleeps. Through the window, I see kids swinging into the sky, gulls rising, wings white as Brendan shirt, the silk of Grace's gown, the long field flickering, she leans against me, our forms resting with his in glass. A whole life of I do, I do. Sorry, skipped ahead there. So the next poem is, this is actually something close to my heart. Brendan cannot independently draw or do art, but he does art projects in school. And I actually haven't shared this at a presentation before. This drawing was done, obviously, with a lot of assistance from his one-on-one aide who's wonderful. And I just find so much power and vivid imagery as Tommy spoke of earlier in the introduction. And it was amazing to me how this paired with the poem field that I'm gonna read, field. I kneel, roll the foam ball slow across the rug to you. Blur of red seams, white sphere of memory, lights orbit above green fields, leaves scut off the mound. Leg kicked high, I rocket pitches into my dad's mitt. Baseball, father, autumn, words you can't say. Just this simple game, catch, I repeat. Eyes wavering, you sit, reach out, circling the world, small planet, past your hands. It keeps spinning. So that was like a childhood memory of me playing catch with my father in the backyard as a baseball player and then how catch got translated into something entirely new when we had Brendan and how you have to realign your expectations as a father when you have the challenges and rewards, as Tommy said, of having a son like Brendan. So this poem, Golden Oak opens the fourth section. And the journey of the book is beginning with crisis, attempting to resolve the crisis, finding moments of resolution and grace and gratitude amidst some of the chaos and tension and challenge. The final section, I wish to create a through line where we really feel a sense of movement, a sense of redemption, a sense of appreciation and an acknowledgement of the beauty of everyday moments of Brendan and of all the family's relationships with him. So Golden Oak really is an homage to my father Stuart and to my brother, Lauren, who I mentioned. He's the subject of the earlier poems about the assault. And now we think of the power of music in these poems and not only as an artistic form, but as a way to bridge to Brendan, who is nonverbal. So I thought it was a really good poem to begin the section because it moves us into this different space. It's called Gold and Oak. The deaf hear music like gold coins in their stomachs. My boy is an oak, receives the wind of our conversation, catches scattered leaves of our words. My father's brass, my brother's string makes sense to him. Gold comes out clear from the slide. Laughter folds inside the bell's rim. Ducks fly out, wonk and quack in air, a sound forest. Oak harms bright, then deep. The bow smooths out the noise in his head. Brown eyes, lit from inside my gilded sapling. All right, so the next one. This was sent to me only about a week ago by my uncle Doug, my father's brother. And uncle Doug is this amazing journalist now retired and he's just a wealth of information and encyclopedia and has always been really supportive of my writing career because he himself is a writer. And this is a letter I wrote when I was 10 years old and I don't remember writing it, but Doug sent me the original envelope. So I wrote this to my father's father, Doug and Stuart's father, my granddad. It simply says, dear granddad, what will happen if you touch a rainbow? And I thought, yeah, that's such a cool thing for a young person to ask. And Doug was like, yeah, this was the beginning of you as a writer, this letter. And I put it in the slideshow because it just reminds me of the magical nature of Brendan. It reminds me of something he would think and something that he would say if he could and something that he makes me believe in, a sense of the miraculous in the everyday, a sense of the surreal, a sense of things beyond our everyday reality that he embodies. So I just wanted to share that with you in honor of him in this final section. So the next poem I'm gonna read as we near the end here, I have a few more. And this is very deep into the book. And this is my mother, Renko, and Brendan, so her grandson. And this is the same mother, Renko, who was incarcerated as a baby in Topaz that I referred to earlier. And they have this very magical relationship as he also does with my dad and my brother. So I wanted you to really get a sense of that and a sense of how do we redeem ourselves from our past traumas and how does that relate to the lives we live in the present? So this poem is written in my mother's voice. This is also my mother is the one who did the paintings that I referred to earlier, sweet Ren, but her name is Renko. My mother watches forces with Brendan in the voice of my mother. Through the fence, you look out. They're hooves breaking, new earth. Sleek fur, the shade of bourbon. Kicking up plods of green. I wheel you closer to shaking ground. Grandson, at 10 years old, you pointed them. Once I thought you said the word horse. Someday I'll paint you the story. Topaz reigned, galloped over roofs, barracks, thundered. We were the ones corralled. My hands on your shoulders, your hand taps my wrist. Look, they are flying over crests of hills running into the sky. Go far enough, speak what you can. There's love in silence. All things, they come and go. One of the most pivotal moments in Brendan's life was several years ago when we actually got to take him sailing. He's with this amazing organization, Keen, K-E-E-N, and kids enjoy exercise now. They're an organization that works with special needs, children like my son and gets them to do sports and other activities that they otherwise would not have access to. So Grace and I had to drive him really far to like Treasure Island. And it was very tricky to get him from the chair to the dock and roll him into the boat, but we got him there. And I felt like he was so at home in the water. And as I looked at this picture, I think of this poem, it's a short poem called Da, and Da to me evokes dad. And it's my imagination how his sounds sometimes sound like words. Da, da, skips through our house, ripples in the lake of my chest. So before we close with the final poem, I wanted for you to see visually some representations of Brendan's strength, perseverance, and incredible determination. So there's a star student award. I was so proud of him when he won this back in 2008. He's in the room one gang and one most determined. And that to me really defines who he is. So the earlier poems you heard, really about an intermittent struggle for him. His body did not always behave and work the way that we all hoped. The seizures would come and go. His ability to walk would come and go. His sort of ability to function fully would fluctuate. And then about four or five years ago, he had this awful stomach flu and he expelled so much mainly through vomiting. And he had a high fever, got IV fluids. And after three or four days and he recovered, he magically was able to walk better than he ever had. And this thankfully has continued for the last four or five years. So there he is in the present day walking. And he's so proud. And I'm trying to keep up with him right behind him in our neighborhood. Final poem I'm gonna read is, I think a good way to close the circle and the journey of the book. And it's based upon a real life incident that happened several years ago. There was a huge storm that some of you may have experienced in the Bay Area. And the streets were full of water. You couldn't even see the asphalt. It was seeping into our driveway and it was at least inches of water. Rain was pouring down, the gutters were clogged. And you just hear this constant shh, shh, shh. And so Brendan, you know, it was his birthday. And Grace and I were sitting with him at our living room table and this is what happened. It's called Brendan's I Am. A close flash, quick torrent, the sounding near it happened in time. The path deepened, water reached the house. Our son, 14, walked alone to his blue stroller chair. Wheels locked, we strapped him in. His body still as Buddha beneath the tree. I steadied the bowl. Grace raised the spoon of broth to his lips. Her words, Brendan, we just want you to have a happy life. Silver touches his tongue. Two syllables gush from his mouth. Rain gathers, our eyes close. The current flows through us. His first real sentence, I am. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to share these poems with you. I'm gonna now stop the share and I think we're gonna move into Q&A with Tommy. Tommy, who's gone through a few tissues. Thank you, thank you. Well, I really love the poem where the words, I do, I do, I do, I mean, I can feel myself. I remember my children, I do, I do. Right, right, right. And in the earlier draft of the poem, I just had the I do, I do at the end of the marriage vow, right, that I do. And then my wife, Grace, said to me, you know, Brian, probably why you wrote that poem is that Brendan says, I do, I do. But for him, it's more babble. He'd always go, I do, I do. And so I added that to the poem. I said, wow, that's the connection. It's between his babble, but yet majestic sounding, I do, I do, and the marriage vow, you know? So I was so grateful that my wife is so smart. She's also a writer and that she gave me that great idea. So I'm glad that it resonated, Tommy. And I think it would with others, right? Cause I do, I do mean so much to all of us in different ways, right? Yeah, yeah. What about the line, we wait for lightning to be light? Yeah. Or? Yeah. Well, you know, it just emerged. I, when you think of epilepsy, when you look at a EEG scan, you see these up and down waves that remind you of the storm, right? And of course, then you think about rain and storms and lightning and thunder. And so then I thought, well, sometimes, right? When you see lightning, you see the blink and then it disappears. And then you see light, like there's a clearing. And then I thought, well, that's really a metaphor for epilepsy or for Brendan, right? You have the seizure and then you wait for his face to clear. And so that's what that one photo I showed you. It reminds me of the one in his hospital gown where he looks very calm. That's the light, you know, that's the waiting for the lightning to be light. So I think that when you live in an intermittent state as a person with epilepsy, he probably waits for that. And then we as a family wait for that and we stay there with him through both the storm and through the clearing. In the poem, Give and Take, you write, epilepsy is sacred. And I've read that in the Hmong community. Epilepsy is sometimes seen as a sacred gift. Yeah. Where the bearer might grow to become a shaman. Yeah. What did you mean when you wrote that? Right, right. Well, thank you because there is a book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. And it talks about the Hmong community and this particular case. And reading that book was definitely influential to me. And you know, it also in the poem, it says epilepsy is profane after that line, epilepsy is sacred, epilepsy is profane. And so I think it's juxtaposed to really the embodiment because when you first receive that diagnosis as a parent, I think you see it as only profane. You see it as a threat, you see it as damage. And what I realized was that number one, it's beyond your control what happens, right? And so then you have to make a decision, you have to be autonomous and figure out how to receive it. For me, receiving it as sacred is really a metaphor for Brendan, right? That he's actually the most sacred person that I've come into contact with in my years on earth. And it's forced us, his condition, epilepsy, the seizures has forced us to slow down, to attend to the moment because in that moment, you have to surrender, right? When he's having a seizure, you sit with him and you wait for it. And that is a bit like when you walk into a church or a temple or whatever type of practice that you do, it doesn't have to be religious per se. You may have a storm in your heart, you may have pain and suffering. And the prayer, the moment of the sutra, the moment of attendance to that, of grace, is that's the sacred nature of epilepsy. And so I don't mean it like literally that epilepsy is sacred. I think I mean everything that is connected to it makes you enter a sacred space that you otherwise would not experience because you have to. If you don't, you will remain in the ego, you will remain in dissonance, you will remain in a state where your expectations and realities are not aligned. And so you have to kind of find a space of detachment and sacredness to understand and to see through him, to see through him and who he really is beyond the medical condition. Sorry, I think your microphone might be off. We have a question in the chat. Are all the paintings that you showed, besides the one, the drawing by your son, are they all by your mother's we ran? And then there's a follow-up question, which is do you have much of her collection of work? Yeah, thank you. So I just wanna make sure that I was clear enough that the first sketch that I showed, so one was by me, like the letter about the rainbow. And then the orbiting and planet drawing was probably what happened was the aid sat with crayon and held his hand and helped him draw those images. So he did it, but I think with a lot of assistance. And that's totally cool, right? Because that's how he creates. He creates in a collaborative fashion. Yeah, all the paintings for this particular presentation, I really wanted you to get a sense of the artistic manifestation within our whole family. So my grandfather's a calligrapher, my grandmother's a haiku poet, my uncle Doug on my dad's side is a journalist, my dad Stuart is a trombonist, my brother's a cellist, my mother Ranko's a painter. And in this particular book, because we chose her painting for the cover, it was the perfect image. Then we had to go through so many of her paintings. And even though we didn't use those for the cover, they spoke directly to the poems to me. And I liked the idea of the audience realizing that the world is a text as my friend Dean Raider has both said and has a book titled, The World is a Text. And I liked the idea that the poems exist in conversation with other forms of art, music, paintings. And so yeah, my mom's sort of abstract expressionism combined with the influences of her father's calligraphy and brushstrokes, to me is really that idea of the mixed race identity being expressed through all these different influences, but also the idea of epilepsy. You can really feel and see it through both the blurriness of her imagery, the abstract kind of clouds and forest and blood and fire and whatever those things are. And then the sharper images that cut through the noise and the blurriness that epilepsy may cause for my son. Norm, if you can post those images. So we have some of the calligraphy from Archbishop Nitenishita, your grandfather. Your family donated it to the library. And these are just a few because they're the smaller pieces that we were able to easily capture. Right. Anyway, we have some of that. And his grandfather was a significant figure in the community in Japan town and through, including through redevelopment. So, these are actually part of our, what we call our book arts and special collections department which is also on the sixth floor with the San Francisco. Yeah. So yes, I find it amazing how, I guess it would be very difficult to be in your family and not be creative. Right, right. Well, I tell you, Tommy, when I was younger because my dad was this renowned musician, you know, it's like being Michael Jordan's son and oh, you're gonna play basketball, right? And so everyone thought I was gonna play an instrument. So I tried to play the piano and then I tried to play electric bass. And I just wasn't, I didn't feel naturally gifted at it. And I just, I felt, oh my God. But when I found words and language and stories and poems, I realized there's quite a bit of musicality and poetry. And there's quite, you know, there's rhyme, there's meter, there's the sense of the line, there's sense of breath. And actually, I think poetry to me, it combines music and my mother's visual influences as a painter because you have to look at the white space on the page and you have to feel that breath when you recite the poem, when you create the form, how to break the lines. So I really think that even though I didn't realize it when I was younger, that actually I am carrying out the musicianship and the visual expression that my mom does, but I use the meaning of language in combination with those things. So I don't feel so bad now, you know, as bad. So we, I mentioned this to be you when we chatted once recently that I believe poets make excellent nonfiction writers because they have, they can use those words so gracefully and bring the reader to see something. Do you think differently when you're writing as a poet than when you're writing as a nonfiction writer? Right, thank you. So there are a number of poets that will write a book or two of poetry, then they switch into memoir or nonfiction. And I think of Garrett Hongo, I think of Leon Lee, I think of David Murrah, some of my earlier influences on my own work. And, you know, you see that trend in general that, you know, I think poetry is this distillation, this crystallization, this winnowing down of, you know, raw clay into some kind of sculpture. You can think of it that way. And that's amazing, right? Because you have to, you know, in that revision process you can't lose the energy of the original draft. And I feel like nonfiction is almost like the opposite where you might start with a smaller thing and then you just open out and you blow it open and you can explode it. Now, of course, a poem can feel like that as well in the initial creative stage, but in the crafting and revision process it's more of the shape and the revisioning. In nonfiction, I feel like sometimes an openness because I can just let it rip a little bit more and I can riff more. And also it's just, sometimes I wanna tell a story, I wanna create a narrative, I wanna have plot, I wanna have more dialogue. And I do that in poems as well, naturally, but sometimes it's just fun to switch back and forth. And it's almost like the energy from one feeds the other. So, you know, sometimes a story or an anecdote might make its way into a poem or sometimes an image in a poem, you think, wow, that could be a cool beginning point for a nonfiction story. So I'm actually working on a manuscript called Brendan's Garden, Reflections on a Special Son. And it's like these little nonfiction essays, a day in the life, moments with him. And they're about two to three pages each and they're not really linear or chronological, but they're just a series of stories of my life with him. And if anyone wants to check out, there's one called Walks and another called Blessings in the Jellyfish Reviews. So those are published. And that can give you a picture of what those look like. But I agree with you, you know, I think that having the attention to language and poetry, rhythm and syntax, repetition, elongating sentences, compressing them, that helps in the nonfiction. At the same time, in the nonfiction, you don't wanna get so caught up in the language that you don't attend to the plot and to the characters and to the tension. So you wanna have both the craft and the language but also looking at the dimensionality of the story itself is very important. So, you know, I love both genres and I definitely wanna continue to write in both, but I think it's very helpful to be flexible and to inhabit both. Okay, I think your mic got it. Yeah, I think- A very nice comment from one of our guests which, oh, I can see it now. Oh yeah. Thank you for the event and for sharing such a personal side. Thank you for that comment. I appreciate that because it was a vulnerable process to write the book, but especially to publish it and then to share it. But as Brené Brown says, right, there's strength and vulnerability and I'm not patting myself on the back by saying that. I'm just saying that in my own experience, I feel that audiences do respond to that and your comment is deeply appreciated because I think the idea is being authentic and real with people. I think elicits a response of, okay, you know, like I feel that, I hear that. And like Tommy's point about I do, I do, those kind of moments are, I hope that they resonate because really the book is not much unless it has an audience, right? It's just words on a page. And so thank you very much for your comment. I appreciate that. So this is the book Seize by Brian Comey-Demster. It's available at Four Way Books. The site is in our chat. You can also purchase it at Eastland Books in Berkeley. You can also borrow it from the San Francisco Public Library. So thank you, Brian, if you have anything else you wanted to share. Well, I wanna just close by saying, really wanna thank Tommy in particular because I remember at one of my first events that she attended and we were in conversation and she was so enthusiastic and excited and it really created a lot of electricity and fire in that moment, and that audience, there were many of my colleagues and friends and family members there. It was like the San Francisco launch. And we've been in conversation for quite some time, as I said before about this event and the public library means so much to me what you do for authors, also my grandfather, right? That he has his artwork there and what you do for history, what you do for the community. And geographically, you're so close to our family church. So this event was special and means a lot to me. And Anissa and Norm, thank you too for really being great support. And all of you in the audience, I appreciate your kind words, your gracious thoughts. And I just hope that in some small way, today's event and the words and images and things that I shared with you that it resonated and that it touched you and that it really allows you to tell your own stories, to share your own experiences and to reveal your own vulnerability. So with that said, I just send warm thoughts to everyone as we get through this crazy year and a half that we've all been through and thank you for being with us today. I also wanted to say thank you to your wife, Grace and your son, Brendan. And I think Grace is attending to him right now so that you can even be with us right now. But I know it's really a team. Yeah, yeah. And he's been very well-behaved. You haven't heard a single sound, have you? No, no, no. So we have a good teamwork approach here. And when I have events, Grace is very, very steady and calm. And I tell Brendan, I'm about to have an event with the San Francisco Public Library, be good buddy. And he comes through like every time. It's amazing. So he gets it. Yeah. This has really been a wonderful program. I quite moving. Thank you all of you guests for joining us tonight. We have so many excellent programs, both virtual and live now in person. So check out our website events. Some good readings coming up, the undocumented Americans. Thank you also to Norman Yee, our technical host and to Anissa Malady who gave us guidance with the program. And we hope you have a good evening and join us again. Thank you. Peace, everyone. Bye-bye.