Mizuko: True Spirit; meet artist Art Nomura

by | Jan 15, 2025 | American Harvest, Classes & Events, Featured, Lament in the Night, Minor Feelings, Phone Booth at the Edge

Mizuko: True Sprit – Meet Artist and Writer Art Nomura

Saturday, February 8, 2024, 2 pm

“Mizuko: True Spirit” is an epic American-immigrant tale of hardship, assimilation, and the eventual triumph that ensued. When the Takahashi’s, one of the wealthiest families in western Japan lost their great fortune in 1900, five-year old Mizuko Takahashi went from riches to rags. Mizuko’s lifetime in Japan and America offers the reader an intimate look into the world of an Asian immigrant. This book is the story of one woman’s efforts to surmount racism, sexism, and poverty in the 20th century. Featured is a riveting accounting of the matriarch’s life in Manzanar Concentration Camp for three years beginning in 1942.

Art Nomura will share his book, the creative process of memoir writing, and inspiration for his work.

Art Nomura has worked as a painter, sculptor, potter, filmmaker, writer, and New Media artist since 1968. Several of his works have themes directly connected to the Asian American experience. His work has screened on PBS, cable, and in festivals, galleries, museums, and universities worldwide. Nomura has taught media production and writing since 1981.He is Professor Emeritus in Film/TV Production at the School of Film and Television, Loyola Marymount University.

RSVP for this free event.

AMERICAN HARVEST, a book talk with Marie Mutsuki Mockett

AMERICAN HARVEST, a book talk with Marie Mutsuki Mockett

by | Sep 26, 2020 | American Harvest, Classes & Events

American Harvest, a book talk with Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Wednesday, September 30th, 4 pm

An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains

We welcome Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, who will join J-Sei once again to share her recent journey through the harvest in the heartland of America.  The JSei Book Club will share reflections from their deep dive into the book and pose questions to spark dialogue with author Marie Mockett.

For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it.

In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds.

Please RSVP for the link to the book talk. If you are interested in making a donation for the program or purchasing a copy of the book, see the  form below.

American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

 

 

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and a memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award. She has written for numerous publications and has been a guest on The World, Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered on NPR. She is a core faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop and a Visiting Writer in the MFA program Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California.