A Conversation with Brynn Saito
BY ELIZABETH BOLAÑOS
Brynn Saito’s third book of poems, Under a Future Sky, was published in August 2023 by Red Hen Press. A 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, Brynn is the recipient of the Benjamin Saltman Award and her poems have appeared in the New York Times and American Poetry Review. Brynn lives in Fresno, CA, located on Yokuts and Mono lands. She teaches in the English Department and MFA program at Fresno State. She’s co-editing with Brandon Shimoda an anthology of poetry written by descendants of the Japanese American / Nikkei incarceration, forthcoming in 2025 from Haymarket Books.
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Elizabeth Bolaños: Thank you for taking the time to do this, truly. What a gem of a book. Let’s begin with its cover and title, the latter of which is in a poem. Your husband, photographer Dave Lehl, is responsible for this enamoring picture, and, (as stated in your acknowledgments) the “title-finder.” Looking at his website, I came to the notion he rarely does black and white. It’s especially alluring because of the contrast between the title above and the sphere behind the Joshua Tree. Regarding this combination on the cover, is it a homage to the black-and-white photos of the incarcerated Japanese Americans? What compelled these decisions?
Brynn Saito: That’s a wonderful connection you’re making! I can certainly see the resonance between the black-and-white cover photograph and the iconic images of families living through incarceration. But, alas, the cover came together sort of randomly. Dave had taken a series of photos during a trip we took to Death Valley. He then created an image with that black-and-white Joshua Tree, originally framed by a red sun. I showed this image to Red Hen Press and, luckily, they were open to working with it for the cover.
EB: In the opening poem, “Dear Reader,” the line: “Do you memorialize wire…” feels both like a vital question and reminder. Wire, being so dangerous, something I doubt comes up as the first thing in one’s mind when thinking of something memorial, is hence a reminder of what literally surrounded the victims of captivity, and the pain they endured as prisoners of it. It is a powerful introduction to one of the central themes in the book relating to your ancestral identity. Would you say this was part of your intention? Is there another meaning behind it?
BS: Yes, I think that’s a spot-on interpretation. Originally, the line was something like “do you memorialize violence” and an early reader of the manuscript, my friend the poet Brian Komei Dempster, encouraged me to push through the abstraction to something more concrete. I find that the images, textures, and metaphors that enter our poems do so intuitively, mysteriously, you know? Later, the editorial mind comes in and refines, selects, cuts, amplifies, sees what the subconscious mind activating the generative moment of the poem was ‘up to.’ The barbed wire surrounding the camps arises in so many works by poets writing about the incarceration; some of us dream about it.
EB: The lines “Do you ever / feel alive with someone else’s memories, ancestral animals / incepted in nightmares, projected in dreams?” from the poem “Letter to my Sister,” and “Do you think we have a responsibility to the memories we inherit?” from another. Really, I could go on. You’ve inspired me to think twice about my own memories, made me wonder about those dreams where we see a place we don’t recall ever having seen awake. You know those? How did you come to this brilliant concept of inherited memories?
BS: The mind is such a mysterious place! Am I dreaming, am I remembering? Much of my thinking about memory has been shaped by my community work and various scholars and colleagues—so many conversations over the years, too many to name. When farmer and artist Nikiko Masumoto and I started Yonsei Memory Project in 2017, one of our driving questions was: who will remember (and how will we remember) the history of the World War Two-era incarceration of the Japanese American / Nikkei community, now that the survivors are passing on? And through my friend the writer Brandon Shimoda, I learned about Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,” which she describes as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.” She’s talking in particular about the descendants of Holocaust survivors and how these descendants inherit the memories and stories of the previous generation. At times, those inherited memories feel more real than the descendant’s own memories.
I don’t know when I first learned about the camps. The story was a spectral energy backdropping my childhood, this big thing no one talked about. I do remember—and I think this is an actual memory?—my grandmother at the kitchen table talking about being “packed like sardines” on the trains to camps, her voice dripping with anger and disgust. Then the moment passed, a portal closed and all of us went about our evening.
EB: Your digital archival project DEAR —, featuring work in the limited released chapbook you self-published and hand-made of the same name, is where some of the epistolary pieces in here first appeared. I have to ask about the form, what led you to it?
BS: Gravitating toward the epistolary form happened sort of intuitively and spontaneously. I’d just visited Gila River, the camp located on the sovereign lands of the Gila River Indian Community in southern Arizona where my grandparents were incarcerated. I remember returning to Phoenix that night and writing a long email to Brandon Shimoda. Brandon knew that my dad and I were spending the day at Gila; so, I wrote him to describe the day, the feelings and questions emerging. That letter became one of the closing letters in Under a Future Sky. Mary Ruefle, in her book Madness, Rack, and Honey, writes “The origins of poems, prayers, and letters all have this common: urgency.” The epistolary poems began with that urgency, a need to connect, to tell. I don’t know if it’s the scholar in me, or my Gemini side, but I love being in conversation with things—people, elements, ancestors, my child self, my future self, and so on. Conversation brings me alive.
EB: You’ve made honorable contributions that help educate the world on this vein of our nation’s history: narration in the PBS documentary Silent Sacrifice, the Yonsei Memory Projects, your interview in Vogue, and an anthology featuring poems by descendants you’re currently co-editing. Seeing as you’ve done so much with this in honor of your familial history, and clearly those of others belonging to that community too, do you think you’d ever want to instruct a course on this, maybe related in some way to poetry or prose?
BS: That’s a great idea. I had this idea years ago for a course called “community-based poetry” or “poetry of the commons” or “ancestral poetics”—something to help students (and myself) make connections between poetry, family, and community. Poetry is so rooted in collective rituals of mourning and celebration, so connected to ancient practices of chanting and singing; I think we forget this. My new work is, I think, beginning to turn toward my Korean American identity—my mother’s family line. Her grandparents fled the brutal Japanese occupation of Korea at the turn of the 20th century and immigrated to the Central Valley. For me, this kind of journey into ancestral memory is also a political project, an inquiry into the forces that have shaped us, oppressed us, made our lives possible.
EB: A whole garden seems to grow as one reads through the poems: marigolds, rhododendrons, sago, yarrow, toadflax, and peonies, to name only a few. You talk about your father’s devotion to his own. I’m enchanted with “fog unlaced the winter orchards” in the poem “Letter to My Mother.” In your father’s letter to you, he’s amazed to discover the incarcerated were able to cultivate lush gardens and koi ponds on such desolate terrain. That said, how is horticulture present in your life now, if so? Does it harvest something in you?
BS: I wish I had the gift of a green thumb, like my dad, who can bring the land to life, who knows the names of the plants and how to care for them. I don’t garden myself, but I still spend a lot of time in the garden of my childhood when visiting my parents (who live about 15 minutes from my house). 40+ years on, and my dad is out there daily, tending to the garden. When my sister and I were young, all of our summer meals contained vegetables grown in our backyard. When we visited Gila, my dad had so many questions about the gardens and ponds the prisoners created while they were in camp. From my friend, the scholar Koji Lau-Ozawa, I’ve learned more about the origins of those gardens—he’s spent many years as an archeologist at Gila River. We look back in time, and say, oh they were incarcerated from 1942 until the end of the war. But, when they arrived at the camps, they had no idea how long their indefinite detention was going to last. How terrifying. So they made gardens and schools and sports teams, and a life in some of the harshest landscapes in North America, not knowing if or when their imprisonment would end. So, gardens were about beauty and survival. (By the way, there’s a lovely anthology that just came out called Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them edited by my friend, the poet, Tess Taylor).
EB: You have such a way with ghosts. In the poem “Turn to Ash” there are the words “phantom orchid,” in “Self Disguised as My Father’s Garden”: “…midnight fish ghosts in the half-built pond,” and “though ghosts grow their nails into me / I remain a romantic,” there’s “ghost fog grows,” “show me post-memory ghosts” and more. In “Prayer for a Trembling Body”: “What have I hunted? / What will I haunt?” you give your living body a spectral element. Can you talk about your relationship with ghosts?
BS: I love ghosts! There are people in my family who are more psychically attuned to otherworldly presences than I am, who actually feel or sense energies from other dimensions. I don’t quite have those powers, but I love trying to be in dialogue—through letters, poems, prayers, art—with ancestors, guides, my child self, my future self, everything, everywhere, all at once—you know? Etymologically, the word “haunt” is related to “homecoming.” To write poetry is to be haunted, is to return home to the self. I follow the hauntings intuitively. One day, I woke up and thought: I have to go to the Gila River. I have to take my father there. Where did that come from? It’s a gift to be haunted in these ways—the past making itself known, the future calling from another dimension.
EB: In Summer 2019, you and your father visited the ruins of the Gila River camp, located on Gila River Indian Community’s land in Arizona where your grandparents were incarcerated. Could you share more about this journey in terms of the book’s creation? I’m curious how this visit contrasts with the one you made alone afterwards, where other ancestors of yours were imprisoned around Santa Fe NM, when you did a writers residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute?
BS: There’s a great resource called Sites of Shame that maps the sites of detention and internment associated with the mass removal and imprisonment of the Nikkei community during World War II. It’s produced by Densho, a Seattle-based organization that preserves Japanese American stories. Besides the ten more well-known War Relocation Authority-administered concentration camps (that was the official government term for those camps), there were dozens of immigration detention centers, “assembly” centers, and Department of Justice-administered internment camps scattered all over the country. Some of these spaces live on, as part of what Brandon calls the “afterlife” of Japanese American incarceration—as official memorial sites, yes, but also as sites detaining migrant families today. A short drive from downtown Santa Fe, overlooking a park, you can find a stone memorial marking the internment camp that imprisoned close to 4,500 people, mostly Japanese issei (first-generation) men. I visited while I was staying at the Santa Fe Art Institute.
I’ve been to Manzanar, Heart Mountain, Poston, Gila River, and memorial sites in Portland and Santa Fe, and each journey has been unique and difficult to describe; perhaps the poetry is an attempt to express the crosswinds of memory and emotion that flow through each location. Who you go with certainly shapes how you feel the space. Some sites have extensive memorials and museums on the grounds, others don’t. We had to apply for a special permit to enter the Gila River Indian Community’s reservation and we were guided through the former site of the camps by members of the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh communities. My dad and I agreed that learning about the tribes’ histories and their struggles for sovereignty and survival over many generations was so impactful and unexpected. I don’t know what we expected, honestly. What has bloomed since then—the book, the letters, the readings, and the connections—has been beyond my wildest dreams. At my launch in August, I read the letter-poem to my father and he got up on stage and read his reply. His letter to me is sort of the “secret track” at the very back of the book. My dad’s not a poet or a writer—he’s a former football coach!—so the fact that he even wrote me back then recited his letter before a packed performance hall was miraculous!
EB: Love lives in these pages, as vigorously as the heartache and grief, and even in the painful moments I still felt love emanate. You lovingly give shape to the otherwise shapeless: “His silence is the shape / of a crane’s back” in “Self Disguised as My Father’s Garden.” “Will I give birth to fire” from “Lines for a Future Essay” The very imagery, the marriage of words, it feels so palpable. In “How to Prepare the Mind for Lightening,” a woman bleeds, but she’s bleeding wisteria. Writing from your pain and writing from your joy, what was that like? At times, did you ever feel the difference blur?
BS: I think I move through the world—probably like a lot of poets and artists—with a great tenderness for it. Sometimes joy can feel like grief—or, like it contains the seeds of grief, since everything is vanishing and dying, even as we are totally alive. I have certain medical conditions that cause enormous pain; on my better days, I can come up for breath and wonder what the pain is teaching me. We’re living through intertwining global crises—the pandemic, the climate crisis, the rise of right-wing political forces; I try to move with love—a revolutionary love, as my friend, the activist Valarie Kaur, calls it—even as rage, grief, and confusion overtake me. Lately, I’ve been feeling an ache for the world—a mix of love and grief. A nostalgia for the present. As poets “our material is the way we feel and the way we remember,” wrote Muriel Rukeyser. Amidst ongoing crises, war, genocide, and displacement, I understand, more and more, what a privilege it is to feel, to write.
I remember hearing a monk say that spirituality is asking questions. If that’s the case, then I’m a deeply spiritual person—I’m invested in an inquiring and wonder-driven life. Where’s the joy here? Where’s the sorrow? What’s the story beneath the story, the poem underneath the poem? Perhaps leading with that kind of curiosity, that commitment to meaning-making, is a way of living a life grounded in an ethic of love.
EB: You’ve lived in the Bay area and New York, two skyscraper cities, before reuniting with the layered heat, tule fog, and stretched hills of the Central Valley. Several poems tenderly remind us that your childhood lives here. How did this change of atmosphere, your arrival, play a hand during the making of Under a Future Sky?
BS: My childhood lives here—that’s a beautiful way to put it. I never thought I’d return to Fresno. As a young person, I dreamed of leaving the valley for the Big City—dreamed of being a writer there. And, somewhat unbelievably, I got to do that. Now, I’m home. Being back here these past five years made possible the travels with my mom and dad—to the camps, yes, and to other sites of family origin and memory (like my parents’ hometowns, Reedley and Dinuba, south of Fresno). All of this made the book possible. So, there’s a creative harvest here, a tending to the past, to my family’s stories. Doing this work has grounded me, even as it destabilizes, haunts, and surprises. “I live alongside our past now,” goes a line in the poem “Letter to my Sister”; it’s “the only doorway to the future.”
