What I Did In 2019

WELL. Y’all. Here we are at the beginning of another year. 2019 wasn’t a year for blogging for me, but it was a year full of cross-country travel, family, baking, cooking, food, and writing. I love this time of year, not because of the holidays, but because it gives me a chance to reflect on what I’ve been up to and what I’ve learned over the past 12 months. I look back at the intentions I set at the beginning of the year and see how well I worked toward them (or didn’t). And after that, it gives me a chance to set intentions for the next 12 months. There’s almost nothing I love more than a fresh start. A clean page. I love these moments (and they don’t happen just once every twelve months) because they remind me that I can always start over. If I haven’t been doing so great at something I set an intention for, I can try again. I can even modify my intention this time (!!).

They remind me that, even if it sometimes doesn’t feel like it, I’m never actually stuck.

***

One of my intentions for 2019 was to not be afraid to be seen. I wanted to stop second-guessing myself and my abilities. I wanted my dear little poems to go out into the world and be seen, I wanted to trust that I had something valuable to say that would mean something to someone somewhere, and I wanted to continue following the paths that have been laying themselves out for me when I say Yes to them, in professional and personal capacities.

Though I don’t think there will be any end point to this journey, I’ve worked really hard to get to where I currently am. I published a fair amount of work in 2019, and I’m so proud of all of it.

***

First, my dear poems. Tahoma Literary Review took my John Waters-inspired poem “Girl Gone Rogue” for their spring 2019 print issue and featured it on their website in May. A journal I’ve long admired, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, took two of my Kelly Kapowski poems: “Kelly Kapowski Unplans A Pregnancy” and “Kelly Kapowski Gets An Abortion.”

Honestly, I can’t tell you how much I truly adore each of these poems, and how often I’ve looked at them and thought, “WHO is going to publish you? WHO is going to love you as much as I love you?”

***

Over at Hyphen Magazine, I was so honored to be a part of their Deconstructing Cookbooks series, which set out to examine the ways in which food creates identity for Asian Americans and/or immigrants through the lens of conventional cookbooks and ones that were cookbooks and a little something else. To make it simple, I told people I was writing cookbook reviews, but I was really writing something that was a hybrid of personal essay and cookbook review.

My first piece, “‘And yet, we meet there’: On Resistance, Memory, and Transformation in Sarah Gambito’s Loves You” was on Sarah Gambito’s latest poetry collection which is, itself, a hybrid of poems and recipes. Sarah has long been a personal hero of mine for her poems and for the work she does to champion Asian American literature through Kundiman, and writing this essay was an honor and a struggle for me. I had flashbacks to college when I spent hours and hours writing papers on poems and struggling to find the right words to express what I saw each poem doing, but in the end, I got there, and I’m so glad I did.

When I took on writing “‘This Cookbook is Really A Love Letter’: On Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish,” I didn’t know that I would end up cooking the majority of the recipes in it with my own mother, who had never eaten Indian food before. It ended up informing the way I experienced Indian-ish itself, and I love the piece that came out of it.

***
In April, I got an incredible opportunity to go to San Francisco and attend a Food In Two Worlds immigrant food journalism workshop. It was a crash course in all things audio — how to record good audio, how to edit audio, how to tell a story through audio, why we should tell stories through audio, how to write good recipes, how to pitch a story to a publication. There was so much information packed into two days that, at the end of each day, my brain felt at max capacity — there was no further information it could absorb. And not only did I get a chance to learn an entirely new skillset, I got a chance to meet and have great conversations with incredible and talented people who want to tell new food stories.

During the workshop, we teamed up with a partner, recorded ourselves interviewing each other, and edited the results into vignettes about food objects. My vignette partner and host of the podcast Queer the Table, Nico Wisler and I talked about my empanada press and my mother teaching me how to make empanadas, and how cooking arroz con gandules helped Nico process grief and create community after the Pulse shooting in Miami. The vignettes that Nico and I produced on each other’s stories ended up on the Feet in Two Worlds podcast.

And then the vignette Nico produced featuring my empanada story ended up on Public Radio International’s show The World. It was all very exciting and also made me want to hide under a table a little bit, but I kept reminding myself that this was the year that I would be unafraid to be seen.


***

And that’s just the work that’s been put out into the world in 2019. I did a couple poetry readings in Bloomington alongside my forever partner-in-crime; at one reading, Ortet, the experimental band that featured between readers, recorded lines from the poems that M and I had just read and mixed them together into a surprising and awesome track that they played during the breaks. In October, I got to read poems at a Kundiman Midwest poetry reading with other Kundiman fellows (who are some of my favorite people in the world) in St. Louis (which is one of my favorite places in the whole world).

It’s been a wild year. While all these exciting professional-type things happened, I increased the frequency of my trips home so I could see my mom and family more often. I’ve done so much self-reflection on who I am and how I came to be the way that I am that at times, it’s felt like I’ve been locked in a room surrounded by mirrors and bright lights. I’ve learned a lot about being vulnerable and asking for help and communicating my struggles to the people around me.

***
So that’s been 2019. In a nutshell. I have no idea what 2020 holds. I haven’t even made my intentions yet. And who knows, maybe I won’t even make any (see my post 2017: The Year of No Intention). It’s kind of feeling like 2020 is that kind of year.

What I do know: I’m working on an essay about adobo that will be a part of a food anthology that I’m very excited about. I’m working on putting together my first full-length poetry collection (finally!) and sending it out into the world. I’m starting to write more essays, and I’m going to blog regularly again. I think I’ll be blogging more about food and horror and maybe even books?

And that’s all I know.

I hope everyone who reads this was able to find spots of joy and gratitude throughout their year, no matter how great or how down they felt. Here’s to the end of a real doozy of a year, and here’s to not knowing what comes next.