A Place for What We Lose, a memoir by Tamiko Nimura
Saturday, October 10, 2 pm
Hear from historian/writer Tamiko Nimura as she shares “A Place for What We Lose, a daughter’s return to Tule Lake”. Joining in conversation is fellow writer Susan Ito who will serve as moderator. Together, they will explore the writing process of their deeply personal stories and the discoveries along the way.
In a moving conversation with the past, Tamiko Nimura explores her late father’s life and her family’s wartime history at Tule Lake. The typewritten pages of her father’s unpublished memoir—written decades earlier about his childhood behind barbed wire—spark a reckoning with the long shadow of parental loss and the unresolved legacy of incarceration.
Following an innovative structure, Nimura interlaces her father’s vivid recollections with her own: scenes of camp life, family separation, and resistance alongside her present-day journey as a mother, writer, and descendant. Joining a community pilgrimage to Tule Lake transforms inherited pain into collective remembrance.
With honesty and lyrical precision, Nimura shows how intergenerational trauma and silence are transmitted, and how confronting them can foster healing. Part memoir, part dialogue with the past, A Place for What We Lose illuminates the enduring costs of incarceration while honoring the persistence of family, memory, and story. It is a profoundly moving exploration of grief, history, and the fragile but necessary work of resilience.
Tamiko Nimura is an Asian American (Sansei/Pinay) writer and community historian. She grew up near Sacramento, went to college in the Bay Area, and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been published in many places including Discover Nikkei and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is co-author of We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration. Her most recent book is a memoir called A Place For What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake.
Susan Kiyo Ito (moderator) is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press. It was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award, shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize for International Literature, and named a best book of 2023 by the Library Journal. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Hyphen, Literary Mama, Catapult,The Bellevue Literary Review, Agni, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and Blue Mountain Center. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She teaches at the Writers Grotto in San Francisco.
