KATE GALE has authored seven poetry collections, including “The Loneliest Girl” (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2022), “The Goldilocks Zone” (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2014), “Echo Light” (Red Mountain Press, 2014). She has written six librettos including “Rio de Sangre,” an opera composed by Don Davis, which premiered at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee in 2010, and “Paradises Lost,” co-authored with Ursula K. LeGuin, composed by Stephen Andrew Taylor, and performed at the New York City Opera in 2006. Gale is managing editor of Red Hen Press which she co-founded with Mark E. Cull In 1994. She is editor of the Los Angeles Review, an annual print and online literary journal established in 2003. She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program in poetry at the University of Nebraska and speaks on independent publishing at schools around the US, including Columbia and the University of Southern California; and in England at Oxford University.
Interview host DOUGLAS MANUEL is the author of two collections, “Trouble Funk” (Red Hen Press, 2023) and “Testify” (Red Hen Press, 2017). His poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites. He received a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and is a recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts. Manuel is an assistant professor of English at Whittier College and teaches at the Spalding University’s low-res MFA program.
“Family stories fill gaps in my sense of history,” writes David Mas Masumoto in Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm (Red Hen Press, April 18), the story of a Japanese American farm family in California, beautifully illustrated with linoleum block prints by Patricia Wakida. The author knows that his immigrant story—first- and second-generation farmworkers rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II; an uncle who served in the all–Japanese American 442nd U.S. Army Infantry Regiment—complicates the traditional narrative of American history.
My Chinese-Taiwanese grandma used to say that our Asian community comes from a long line of spoken words. From the ancient deities in our fairy tales about world creation, to the heroes whose achievements are in our epic poems, we are the descendants of storytelling.
Stories help us form our voice, discover our place in both old and new worlds, and define our identity in the continuum of time. Generation after generation, we connect and pass along information through the bonds of oral history. I hope some of these titles will resonate with you, move you, inspire you, and bring you (back) into the uniquely fascinating universe of Asian storytelling, just like my grandma’s vivid nursery rhyme narrations did for me. —Hsin Chao, Audible Editor
Oh, Russia, are you having fun yet? The butt of sanctions and scorn, slaughter and humiliation on the battlefield, your place in world standings can’t get much lower.
Of course, it’s unfair to hold your citizens to the same substandards as we do your maniacal leader, but that’s the way it works—until you shake him off like a bad case of lice. We’ll be here for you when that build-back-better time comes, you can count on it. Memories are short.
Artem Mozgovoy’s Spring In Siberia reminds us of the everyday casualties, the heartbreaking isolation and intolerance of the Russian system that Putin has built. In her Foreword review for the May/June 2023 issue, Erika Harlitz-Kern calls the book “a chilling coming-of-age story about everyday helplessness and being forced to adapt or founder when the merciless wheels of social change begin to turn,” and the following conversation makes it very clear that we must never look away.
Jade Shyback is the author of the new novel Aqueous. She lives in Oakville, Ontario.
Q: What inspired you to write Aqueous, and how did you create your character Marisol?
A: The inspiration for Aqueous was found on a road trip along the Pacific Coast Highway with my three daughters, just before my eldest “abandoned” me for university. The specifics of that life journey can be found in “Aqueous, an Idea” at www.jadeshyback.com.
Marisol was also developed in the rental car on that highway. She is a hybrid of all of the women that I love. They are young and old, loyal, smart, caring and kind without conceit or maliciousness. They are the wheelhouse of our society.
American/Australian poet, David Mason, is also a verse novelist, librettist, and essayist. His latest collection of essays, Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can literature change us?, is clearly the work of a man who enjoys literature as he finds it rather than as he is told to see it. He is not afraid to declare in his introduction that ‘[s]ome literary works are better than others’. It is the works themselves, rather than the author’s origins or identity, with which he is concerned.
David van den Berg, author of “Love Letters from an Arsonist,” recommends raw and unflinchingly honest poems about the American South
A California author and multi-generational peach farmer has penned a moving and revealing memoir about family, loss, secrets, survival and the unearthing of a painful past stemming from an unexpected gift and reunion.
Best known for Epitaph for a Peach (a Julia Child Cookbook Award winner and James Beard Foundation Food Writing Award finalist), David “Mas” Masumoto is a third generation, Sansei, organic farmer of peaches, nectarines, apricots, and grapes for raisins on his family farm in the Central Valley of California. I first came across his work in the essay anthology Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World, edited by Alison Deming and Lauret Savoy. Mas has also published numerous memoirs including Harvest Son and Five Seasons in Five Senses. His latest is Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm, a memoir about discovering Shizuko–an aunt with disabilities, long thought dead–living not far from the family farm. I talked with Mas about Secret Harvests and his writing life over Zoom; this is a condensed version of our conversation.
“Every family has secrets,” says David Mas Masumoto. “secrets that need
to be told.”
Find the full article in the April 21-May 4, 2023 print issue and stay tuned for the online version!
By Diana Arterian
The poet Douglas Manuel’s debut poetry collection Testify follows the topic so many of us (this poet included) attend to first: family. Testify attended to the stark realities of Manuel’s childhood in Anderson, Indiana, a place that once had a burgeoning Black middle class—until the General Motors factory shut down. Anderson was subsequently a community depressed both in finances and morale, and then struck particularly hard by the crack epidemic.
Each month, I provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups. The aims of these lists are threefold:
- I want to do my part in the disruption of what has been the acceptable “norm” in the book world for far too long—white, cis, heterosexual, male;
- I want to amplify indie publishers and amazing works by writers who are women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, APIA/AAPI, international, queer, trans, nonbinary, disabled, fat, immigrant, Muslim, neurodivergent, sex-positive or of other historically marginalized identities—you know, the rest of us; and
- I want to challenge and encourage you all to buy, borrow and read them!
Happy April, and Happy National Poetry Month. Since my dormant love of poetry was reignited, I’ve found it so refreshing and inspiring to read beautiful collections each year and share them with you.
Below are some of the most exciting and extraordinary I’ve read in the last year.
Red Hen Press and Fictional Cafe celebrate today the publication of Spring in Siberia, the first novel by a young writer named Artem Mozgovoy. Born in Central Siberia, he finds solace in the literature he reads and begins to write. Spring in Siberia is his coming of age story, told in fiction.
This excerpt is from Chapter 16. An interview with Kate Gale, Managing Editor
and Executive Director at Red Hen Press, follows it.
‘I’m afraid that I love you,’ my classmate spoke quickly and quietly, but I managed to catch his words before they melted in the evening smoke.
We were standing on the sixteenth-story balcony, on the top floor of the tallest building in our city. Neither he nor I lived in that block, but we knew that each level gave access to a public deck overlooking the vast provincial drabness in which we did live. First, we would stand by the locked door downstairs, waiting for some resident with a key; we’d tell that someone that we wished to visit Masha, or Sasha, or Dasha, or some other non existent friend, and hopefully be let in; then we’d ride the doddery, stinking elevator to the top, walk through a dark corridor and, after pushing open a rusty, creaky door, at last reach that secret place of our own.
“Yesterday my wife and I watched the Dead Can Dance live DVD “Toward the Within,” filmed on their 1993 American tour. I’d seen them prior in 1990, and then again in 1996 and 2005, but the ’93 show was my favorite and this brought back memories and made my spine tingle all over again. I dug it out from my collection as Britt had never had the chance to see them perform and the show we had tickets for was canceled, and I wanted her to be able to experience it even from the distance of three decades and a TV screen.
This in turn reminded me of a book I recently finished, Peter Ulrich’s “Drumming With Dead Can Dance & Parallel Adventures,” issued last November. Ulrich and his publisher Red Hen were kind enough to send me a review copy, and I enjoyed every page. An amiable and intelligent narrator, Ulrich was drafted into the drum and percussion role by DCD duo Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard at the end of 1982, just in time to experience and participate in the creation of their magnificent debut album.”
