Secret Harvests limns the compounded tragedy of the Japanese internment for one family, when a cognitively disabled member, herself disabled via the racism of inadequate medical care–was separated and “lost” to the family during World War II. David Mas Masumoto uncovers the smallest thread of the story and achieves the seemingly impossible feat of reconnecting the lost family member whose story had been lost to racism but also family shame.
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Today’s book is: Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm (Red Hen Press, 2023), by David Mas Masumoto. In his new memoir, Mas discovers his “lost” aunt. She had been taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. Due to a disability, she became a “ward” of the state; and his family believed she had died. Then came a surprising phone call—she was alive and living a few miles from their family farm.
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Growing up, Mas Masumoto was vaguely aware that he had an aunt who’d been separated from the family in the 1940s. Her name was Shizuko Sugimoto, and she had an intellectual disability. As was often done in those days, she became a ward of the state. The family never talked about her, and assumed she had passed away.
But one day in 2012, Masumoto received a surprising phone message from a funeral home worker named Renée Johnson.
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In a narrow, windowless room at the University of Southern California, a group of graduate students is workshopping a short story….
While they speak, their professor, the novelist Percival Everett, sits quietly at the head of a too-large table, one palm steadied against it, his body swivelling almost imperceptibly from side to side…He talks at a low volume, but the sounds he makes have the electric quality of speech being filtered through a mike.
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Today’s poem celebrates the glow and growth of daughters, their energy and curiosity, their intuition and vulnerability.
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“Every sentence Juliana Lamy writes is like a match being struck. Not many authors debut with her clarity of vision, inventiveness, and verbal agility, and I would wager almost anything that You Were Watching from the Sand will mark only the first chapter in an important body of work.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories
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Catch her episode on March 5, 2024 Episode at 2:00pm
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The SOMERSET Book Awards recognize emerging talent and outstanding works in the genre of Literary and Contemporary Fiction.
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About this Poem
“This poem is inspired by the great songwriter and American treasure Paul Simon. I was teaching one of my college poetry classes about the strength of the interrogative in poetry. I thought of the great Paul Simon song ‘Nobody’––it’s a song full of questions that have no easy answers. The poem comes from a writing exercise that I gave to both my students and myself.”
—Allison Joseph
A worker at a funeral home makes a special effort to locate the family members of an ailing woman, and unwittingly uncovers a family secret that goes back decades.
On this edition of Your Call, David “Mas” Masumoto discusses his new memoir, Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm.
It tells the story of his aunt Shizuko, who was disabled and taken as a “ward of the state” in 1942, just before the rest of Masumoto’s family members were forced into WWII concentration camps. For 70 years, the family believed Shizuko was dead, until one day Masumoto received a call. She was alive — and living just a few miles away from their family farm.
In Secret Harvests, Masumoto attempts to reconstruct his aunt’s life and pierce the veil of silence surrounding her disability and survival, as well as his family’s incarceration in the Gila River Relocation Center in the Arizona desert, south of Phoenix.
Guest:
David “Mas” Masumoto, organic peach and grape farmer and author of twelve books, including Epitaph for a Peach: For Seasons on a Family Farm.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is a poet and artist who explores innovative and experimental writing techniques. Her writing incorporates computation and artificial intelligence alongside more conventional literary forms, with her interdisciplinary work often investigating the intersections of race, gender, and coming of age in late capitalism.
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In 2004, Francisco Aragón launched Letras Latinas under the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame. As the institute’s literary arm, Letras Latinas has a mission to “enhance the visibility, appreciation, and study of Latinx literature” at Notre Dame and beyond. The organization pioneered the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a first-book award for a Latinx author; a collaboration with Red Hen Press to publish books by Latinx writers; and Curated Conversations, recorded interviews with Latinx poets. Aragón recently reflected on his work and what’s next for Letras Latinas.
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Sky hears no talking when Green leaves the sea cliffs. All he hears is the fog net snapping in the offshore wind, the whine of the plastic fabric as it tears from its poles and unravels across the glass-littered beach. It is only with his arms jumped into the whirl, fingers clawing at the airborne net, that Sky notices a fleck of movement high on the distant bluffs—a falling dot. It sprouts legs as it slices the dark cliff face, knees skimming the sheer rock, two feet diving toward tide pools heaped with boulders jutting. The shredded net tugs loose from Sky’s grip as the dot silently grows into Green, and Sky wants to grab, wants to speak, but all he can think is I am seeing this, No—but I am seeing this happen.
A palm slaps red to Sky’s face.
Pay attention, yells Mark as he stomps the netting flat, into a ground alive with stinging sand. Further down the beach Tie kneels on the uncoiled fabric, her kinked fingers humming the threads back together, and Tie and Mark have their heads low, they are still working—what do I do? They didn’t see it happen, what do I tell them?
Fresno State’s Master of Fine Arts Program in creative writing announced Southern California author William Archila won the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest, which includes a $2,000 award and publication of his poetry collection, “S is For.”
The creative writing program sponsors the national prize, which honors Levine, the late poet and Fresno State professor emeritus of English. Levine won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and he was the 2011 poet laureate of the United States.
Archila’s book will be the first to be published as part of the Levine Prize’s new partnership with Black Lawrence Press. A New York-based publisher of contemporary poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, Black Lawrence Press was founded in 2004 and has been an independent company since 2014.
Levine Prize final judge Douglas Kearney — a widely published poet, essayist, opera composer and McKnight Presidential Fellow — chose Archila’s manuscript as the winner. There were 736 submissions. Kearney wrote of the winning entry:
“Searing — not merely how I’d describe William Archila’s gaze at the desperation and depredation attendant in power’s abuse, the violence dogging the migrant, the slayings of those who stay. No, also, searing in the sense of that which burns a mark into a surface, how the poet’s prosody scorches language into the line, into the throat, into the air. Heat, here, that makes light, signal visible even from exile, even to a distracted North who may not/may only notice that ‘Yesterday a cutthroat carved a copper / who carved a cutthroat, 224 wounds / for the smallest of spoils.’ Archila tallies these wounds and those that set fire to the heart. Here, S is for searing, for song, for sorrow. S is for sunlit, for shot, for shattered. S is for sublime. Stunning. Staggering.”
