Hello wildflowers,

As July comes to a close, we notice it is a time of great transition for many of us. We notice your apartment hunting, your moving, your breakups, your new loves, leaving your job, finding a new one. We notice your traveling, connecting with old friends and new selves, visiting with family, returning to ancestral villages, moving through the ancestral villages of others; these cycles of endings, renewals, and beginnings. We hope your transition from summer to fall is graceful, loving, and safe. (Please stay hydrated, friends!)

We are writing to you during this time hoping to provide for you the care you may need in the form of community, poetry, and, in some cases, the gift of karaoke:

🎙️📝August 9th, 7-9pm: Literaoke! We will be hosting a Literaoke open mic in partnership with Kearny Street Workshop’s Trust the Tides exhibition. This event is one part karaoke party, one part poetry open mic. The format works as follows: share an original poem, then sing a karaoke song! We have secured the wonderful poets Jason Bayani, Christine Imperial, and Michelle Lin as featured reader-singers for this event; please join us in cheering them on, and, perhaps, even joining us in sharing your own poems and songs (we’ll circulate a sign-up sheet!).

❤️‍🔥Asian American Poetics as a Radical Possibility (Course Listing here!)(Sign-ups here!): We are offering a 6-session course, taught by Jess & Kazumi. The description for the course is as follows: “This is a course for Asian American and Asian diasporic writers seeking to break from self-effacing patterns and step more fully into our writing practice. In this course, we will name the psychic conditions of our lives and link those conditions to our positions in relation to the imperial core. We will consider our inclusions, exclusions, and the contingencies upon which our belongings hinge. And we will write poems that hold within them our many ways of being, our many relations. We will study poetry, theory, ourselves, and our writing, in an attempt to restructure and rename Asian American life and identity as a radical possibility.” 

We will be hosting this course bi-weekly, on the following Saturdays: 8/17, 8/31, 9/14, 9/28, 10/12, 10/26. The course will be held in-person at Moments Cooperative (410 13th St, Oakland, CA 94612), from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM. If you’re interested in joining a community of writers dedicated to the craft of poetry and also the work of a radical Asian American poetics and politics, please consider joining us. 

🌻Instagram: We now have an Instagram: @wildflowerselves!  This handle is inspired by the dedication page of erin Khuê Ninh’s work Passing for Perfect, a book about Asian American subject formation and the challenges we face in becoming more unruly, more free, more wild in our blooming. erin dedicates her book to all of us working on this project of freedom, against the violences of patriarchy, empire, and racial capitalism. Radical work, for us, begins with the transformation of our selfhood, with the determination to adopt new forms of being, new identity formations. We dedicate this handle to erin, and to all of us joining in this project of becoming the most wildly beautiful version of ourselves.

🛠️Organizing Projects: We recently hosted an organizing meeting, in which many of us gathered together to brainstorm new forms of collective care and communal being, to imagine how we might support one another in our literary endeavors and beyond. We have been thinking deeply about all that we spoke of and generated together, and are hoping to continue this work in August. (For those of you who joined us earlier this month, we will be in contact with you shortly!) Please stay tuned as we continue to move forward considering the kinds of collective care we can offer one another.

Thank you everyone! We hope the rest of your summer is as restful and as radical as you hope it can be.

With love,
K & J