B R U N A is pleased to host an ongoing series of monthly full-moon gatherings that explores and introduces seasonal moons, the gathering of foods, and some of the ideas and values that sustain First Nations Coast Salish peoples. This course is led by Lummi Elder, WILLIAM John, X'welwelat'se.

Check for upcoming gatherings under FUTURE.

This event is supported in part by a MAC grant from the Community Food Co-op.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of Bruna Press + Archive take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty, rich cultural practice, and heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.

For this gathering of Coast Salish Concepts of Time + Space, regularly taught by Lummi Elder WILLIAM John, there was a SCREENING + SPECIAL GUEST: filmmaker ALTHEA Wilson introduced and discussed her film "Revitalizing Cultural Knowledge and Honoring Sacred Waters: Documenting the Oral history of the life on the Nooksack River." At the end of the screening, ALTHEA presented a beautiful blanket to WILLIAM and his wife, ANE.

ABOUT COAST SALISH CONCEPTS OF TIME + SPACE

B R U N A is pleased to host an ongoing series of monthly full-moon gatherings that explores and introduces seasonal moons, the gathering of foods, and some of the ideas and values that sustain First Nations Coast Salish peoples. This course is led by Lummi Elder, WILLIAM John, X'welwelat'se.

Check for upcoming gatherings under FUTURE.

This event is supported in part by a MAC grant from the Community Food Co-op.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of Bruna Press + Archive take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty, rich cultural practice, and heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.

Reading the Migration Library is a project of Vancouver-based artist LOIS Klassen.

For the B R U N A presentation of the project, Klassen discussed the visibility and audibility of "migration culture” with particular emphasis on the way visibility is deliberately thwarted in anti-immigration policies. She also provided context about her overall approach to publication and distribution as an artist and researcher. An open mic on the subject of human migration followed her talk, and she set up an informal chapbook exchange. Everyone who attended received a complimentary chapbook, of their choice, from the traveling library.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Reading the Migration Library is an archive of multi-form publications (images, poetry, narrative texts, and more) that describe personal experiences with human migration and displacement. This collection is designed for easy distribution and public circulation. Other publications from Reading the Migration Library will be available for visitors to assemble and take away or to locate on-line browsing and reading.

See: https://lightfactorypublications.ca/rml/

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Klassen is a Vancouver-based artist and writer whose work combines research and creative methods. Her projects, including Renegade Library, Comforter Art Action and Slofemists (in collaboration with LORI Weidenhammer), combine collective actions with public dialogue and exchange. Her texts have appeared in Word Hoard, Fillip, Public Journal, Border Crossings, LIVE! Performance Art Biennale blog, and more. Her work has been hosted by Anvil Centre, Santa Fe Art Institute, Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and Plug In Summer Institute in Winnipeg, Banff New Media Institute, SOMA Summer Institute in Mexico City, Charles H. Scott Gallery (Emily Carr University), University of Salford in Greater Manchester, Glenbow Museum, Western Front, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba and more. She is currently a doctoral student of Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Reading the Migration Library was previously hosted by Anvil Centre’s Artist in Residence program and the Santa Fe Art Institute Immigration/Emigration Residency. It is supported by Graduate Research-Creation/Community-Based Research and Action Fund, Cultural Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

The growing list of Reading the Migration Library participants (authors and content contributors) includes:

DEANNE Achong, OANA Capota, FREDERICK Cummings, MARGARET Dragu, FRANCISCO Fernando Granados, ALAN Hill, SANDEEP Johal, KAITLIN Kazmierowski, SARAH Klassen, FRANCI Louann, GRAHAM McGarva, MISTIKO (DAWN Livera), KAREN Ngan, PEGGY Ngan, CHRISTINE Riek, KATTIA Samayoa, NATASHA Sanders-Kay, ELISA Yon

Photo Credit: LOIS Klassen, Reading the Migration Library (chapbooks); ELISA Yon, Dwelling (furniture for migration books and their exchange)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of Bruna Press + Archive take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty and rich cultural practice + heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.

WHAT BELLINGHAM CAN LEARN ABOUT DESIGNING HOUSING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

B R U N A and Localgroup.studio in collaboration with PAUL Schissler and GALEN Herz presented an exhibition featuring Vienna, Austria’s innovative approaches to housing, architecture, affordability, as well as urban, neighborhood, and community development.

The Vienna Model: Housing for the 21st Century was on view at 221 Prospect Street from April 6 through April 28, 2018 and presented social housing in the context of Vienna’s stable market (where over 60 percent of Vienna’s residents live in homes owned by the municipality or limited-profit organizations).

This exhibition (curated by Wolfgang Förster and William Menking) illustrated how Vienna has an expanded menu of urban planning options. By bringing the exhibit to Whatcom County, B R U N A and collaborators provide a space for dialogue around the future of our local cities and towns, where we hope the quality of life will be affordable.

The Vienna Model highlighted eight key principles through a series of photographs and interpretive displays: Social Mixing, Developing New Urban Areas, Diversity and Integration, Citizen Participation, Environment and Climate Protection, Developing Existing Housing Stock, Building on the Outskirts, Use and Design of Public Spaces, and the Role of Art. These principles have made Vienna one of the most livable cities in the world without making homes unaffordable for the people who live and work there.

RELATED EVENTS In addition to the exhibition, there were a series of public programs that invited the community to attend and participate, including:

COMMUNITY DISCUSSION Bellingham to Vienna

Local community activists, professionals, representatives, and residents convened a discussion on Bellingham’s current housing crisis and what might be learned from The Vienna Model. Special guests included Sabine Bitter and Jeff Derksen, organizers of the Vancouver, BC iteration of The Vienna Model exhibition and members of the research collective Urban Subjects. We also heard from organizers of the Bellingham Tenants Union, Nickolaus Dee Lewis from Lummi Stepping Stones, and many others.

FILM SCREENING AND DISCUSSION How to Live in Vienna (2013)

FILM SCREENING AND DISCUSSION Urbanized (2011)

COMMUNITY DISCUSSION What If...? Local community activists, professionals, representatives, and residents met to discuss what a better housing future might look like and what lessons from Vienna could work in our region.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of Bruna Press + Archive take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty and rich cultural practice + heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.

B R U N A opened its public events program with the Zizi Show, a philosophizing platform by the ROCCA Family. 

The Zizi Show, a traveling performance taking a variety of manifestations by the ROCCA Family (ZIZI and DJ TAITA O), engages audience members and pre-arranged guests via rituals, movement, music, interviews, and interventions, both planned and spontaneous. The Zizi Show, a soiree with bruna presented a site-specific version of the performance for the B R U N A audience. This event offered an evening of drink, food, music, and dance in English and Arabic, and introduced B R U N A to Bellingham while also sharing some of the Rocca Family's Road Notes, to be published later by the press. 

About ROCCA Family Six years ago, the ROCCA Family (two humans and one feline named ROCCA) traveled through space and time from the faraway (some refer to it as Jordan for highly politicized quasi practical reasons) and landed in San Francisco. In 2017, they locked their SF home for the last time and embarked on their RF USA 2017 Road Trip. Through its practice, in search of home perhaps, the Family uses all its folkloric know-how, trusting in humor, to make friendships, and talk about immigration, family, freedom, and the meaning of life.

See  https://www.roccafamily.org/

About OLA El-Khalidi Arts collaborator and curator, Ola is the founder of Makan art space in Amman, Jordan (2004-2015). She is presently on the road continuing to examine the complexities of family structures and wondering about home and intimacy through travel, music, eating, and writing. Ola holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts (2012).

About DIALA Khasawnih The road trip has certainly changed in ways that will manifest clearly and mysteriously now and later. Still expecting (with half closed eyes) a monster to appear out of little leaf brushing sounds in the forest (urban and wild), and hopes that she will still manage to share a bag of chips. Born in amman, jordan in 1975/5'2"/185lb/brown what else do you need?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of Bruna Press + Archive take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty and rich cultural practice + heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.

Lo, the Ouroboros, its tayle devouring, was a project by Seattle-based artist JOE Milutis taking the form of an exhibition and artist talk in Nov 2018. This project departed from the seventeenth century German alchemist MICHAEL Maier’s emblem book, Atalanta Fugiens. Published in Latin in 1617, Atalanta Fugiens represents an early form of mass and multi-media that reveals a mystical pre-history of the modern world, a system of symbology and thought that preceded modern science.

B R U N A exhibited creative translations by the artist of Maier’s alchemical texts, which he composed and printed as posters that mix visual and lyric concerns and forms.  Recombining the original illustrations of Matthias Merian with his own 21st century sensibilities, in this project, Milutis teased some questions around the (im)possibilities of alchemy as a literary form, the (in)fidelity of images and symbols according to context, and the pedagogy of mysticism and montage, among others. After opening the exhibition, Milutis will also speak on the context of the project, riffing on such topics as alchemy, the Rosicrucian underground, occult Christianity, and pre-modern forms of Esperanto.     

With Disappearance was the first in a series of micro-exhibitions that feature selections from the B R U N A Press Archive, and which form inter-connective pathways between its collection’s many thematic threads and concerns arising locally.

For this exhibition, Curatorial Fellow ROBERT Yerachmiel Sniderman approached the subject of disappearance by specifically highlighting “works [that move] within, from, or towards disappearance. The crisis of disappearance. The opportunity of disappearance. The future of disappearance. The roots of disappearance. In Israel/Palestine. In Minnesota. In the Korean Diaspora. In Vancouver. In the traditional lands of the Nooksack people. In Kosovo.” Through nine publications that range from a work of poetry to artist books to a handmade chapbook to a linguistic textbook and a newspaper manifesto calling for an “Irradiated International,” this exhibition invited visitors to engage intimately with the archive around questions of consequence.

DO IT YOURSELF presented an afternoon of workshops and conversations by three local artists, publishers, and community organizers centered around their methods and practices of independent publishing. For this special event at B R U N A, each participant spoke for about 30 minutes, sharing their work and perspectives with attendees. This event was organized by ROSIE Lockie. 

The workshop program was as follows:

ROSIE Lockie discussed her own path from painting to self-publishing by focusing on a few zine and comic projects and her approach to them vis-a-vis fine art, zines, residency opportunities, and self-direction. 

ANDREW Molitor compared the differences between handmade book bindings and print-on-demand platforms in his own publishing practice.

BAILEY Cheney introduced attendees to the world of risograph-prizted zines, providing a brief artistic history, prepping work for print, and zine assembly.

B R U N A presented the first event in the MUTTER COURAGE program, an occasional reading series + conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland.

For this very special inaugural event, three poets, recently landed in Bellingham, read from their work to celebrate the launch of ELY Shipley's latest project Some Animal, published by Nightboat Books, "a new cross-genre collection that engages historical and personal explorations of gender and self."

In support of this launch YANARA Friedland and JANE Wong also read from recent work.

ABOUT THE POETS

Besides Some Animal, ELY Shipley is the author of Boy with Flowers, winner of the Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips, the Thom Gunn Award, and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; and On Beards: A Memoir of Passing, a letterpress chapbook from speCt! Books. His poems and cross-genre work also have appeared in literary publications including the Seneca Review, Western Humanities Review, and many others. He is currently Assistant Professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

YANARA Friedland is a German-American writer, translator, and teacher. Her first book Uncountry: A Mythology was winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Fiction award. "Abraq ad Habra: I will create as I speak,"  a digital chapbook, is available from Essay Press. She is the recipient of research grants from the DAAD and Arizona Commission on the Arts, supporting her current book project, Groundswell, a chorography of border regions in the German-Polish and Sonoran borderlands. She is the director of MyLife Tucson, a community archive, hosted by the Jewish History Museum in Tucson and teaches at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. She is curator of the MUTTER COURAGE series at Bruna Press.

JANE Wong is the author of OVERPOUR, published by Action Books, and is the recipient of The American Poetry Review's 2016 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, The Volta, Third Coast, and in the anthologies Best American Poetry 2015, Best New Poets 2012, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.  

ABOUT MUTTER COURAGE

MUTTER COURAGE is an occasional reading series and conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland, which invites writers at the corner of poetic, embodied, and intersectional practices to share their work with the B R U N A community. MUTTER COURAGE refers to the name of the main character in Berthold Brecht’s eponymous play. A relentless maker in a war-torn world, MUTTER COURAGE inspires this series, which unfolds in expressions of courage in voice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of Bruna Press + Archive take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty and rich cultural practice + heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.

B R U N A presented the second event in the MUTTER COURAGE program, an occasional reading series + conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland.

For this event, poet, lyric essayist, and artist DANIELLE Vogel presented an artist talk about The Earth Archives during her week-long residency at B R U N A. During her talk, Vogel shared inspirations for this archive and collected sentence-specimens from the audience.

ABOUT THE EARTH ARCHIVES

Water, earth, air, and fire are often considered in their physical forms, rooted within a particular place and time. In The Earth Archives, they are invisible and set loose into the air as audio recordings articulated by the voices of hundreds of people who share their own poetic memories and imaginaries of the four elements.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DANIELLE Vogel is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and ceremonialist. She is the author of the poetry collections Between Grammars, the forthcoming The Way a Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity, the artist book Narrative & Nest, and the e-chapbook In Resonance. As a writer, Vogel explores the bonds between language and presence, between a reader and a writer, and how a book, as an extended architecture of a body, might serve as a site of radical transformation. Her visual works—or “public ceremonies for language”— celebrate the archives of memory stored within language. They have been exhibited most recently at The Nordic House in Reykjavik, Iceland, RISD Museum, MICA, Temple and Pace Universities, and The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. She teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in New England with artist Renee Gladman.

ABOUT MUTTER COURAGE

MUTTER COURAGE is an occasional reading series and conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland, which invites writers at the corner of poetic, embodied, and intersectional practices to share their work with the B R U N A community. MUTTER COURAGE refers to the name of the main character in Berthold Brecht’s eponymous play. A relentless maker in a war-torn world, MUTTER COURAGE inspires this series, which unfolds in expressions of courage in voice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of Bruna Press + Archive take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty and rich cultural practice + heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.

B R U N A presented the third event in the MUTTER COURAGE program, an occasional reading series + conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland.

For this event, Denver-based poet JULIE Carr read from Real Life: An Installation, her new book, which takes up economic inequality, gendered violence, and losses both personal and national. At this special event she also interacted with video collaborations from Reallifeaninstallation.com, a project which features 36 hypothetical installations actualized in digital space by artists of diverse backgrounds and artistic practices, including Amaranth Borsuk, Edwin Torres, Erin Espelie, K.J. Holmes, Gesel Mason, Amir George, Kelly Sears, and others. This is poetry at the crossroads between the real and the supernatural, the actual and the imaginary. To read excerpts, visit The Elephants.

ABOUT JULIE CARR

Based in Denver where she lives with TIM Roberts and their three children, JULIE is the author of seven books of poetry and two works of prose including Objects from a Borrowed Confession, Think Tank, RAG, Surface Tension, 100 Notes on Violence, among others. A former dancer, she now collaborates regularly with dance-artist K.J. Holmes. With TIM Roberts she is the co-director of Counterpath, an independent literary press and a bookstore/gallery/performance space/community garden in Denver. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the English department and the Intermedia Arts Writing and Performance Ph.D. where she teaches courses in poetry and poetics.

ABOUT MUTTER COURAGE

MUTTER COURAGE is an occasional reading series and conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland, which invites writers at the corner of poetic, embodied, and intersectional practices to share their work with the B R U N A community. MUTTER COURAGE refers to the name of the main character in Berthold Brecht’s eponymous play. A relentless maker in a war-torn world, MUTTER COURAGE inspires this series, which unfolds in expressions of courage in voice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of B R U N A take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty and rich cultural practice + heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.

B R U N A is made possible with support from the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force.

B R U N A presented the fifth event in the MUTTER COURAGE program, an occasional reading series + conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland.

Mutter Courage #5 welcomed STEVEN Dunn, author of Potted Meat (2016) and water & power (2018), both published by Tarpaulin Sky Press.

ABOUT STEVEN DUNN

Shortlisted for Granta magazine’s “Best of Young American Novelists,” STEVEN Dunn is the author of two novels from Tarpaulin Sky Press: water & power (2018) and Potted Meat, which was a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. STEVEN was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from University of Denver. He is currently an MFA candidate at Goddard College.

ABOUT MUTTER COURAGE

MUTTER COURAGE is an occasional reading series and conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland, which invites writers at the corner of poetic, embodied, and intersectional practices to share their work with the B R U N A community. MUTTER COURAGE refers to the name of the main character in Berthold Brecht’s eponymous play. A relentless maker in a war-torn world, MUTTER COURAGE inspires this series, which unfolds in expressions of courage in voice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of B R U N A take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty and rich cultural practice + heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.

B R U N A is made possible with support from the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force.

B R U N A presented the sixth event in the MUTTER COURAGE program, an occasional reading series + conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland.

Mutter Courage #6 welcomed STEFANIA Heim and the celebration of two new books by her.

ABOUT STEFANIA HEIM

STEFANIA is author of two collections of poems. Her most recent, HOUR BOOK, was selected by JENNIFER Moxley as winner of the Sawtooth Prize and published this year by Ahsahta Press. Geometry of Shadows, her volume of translations of metaphysical artist GIORGIO de Chirico's Italian poems, has just been published by A Public Space Books. STEFANIA received an NEA Translation Fellowship for her work on de Chirico. Also a scholar of poetry, STEFANIA’s recent essays have appeared in Textual Practice, The Paris Review, and the edited volume 19|21: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth Century Archive. She teaches in the English department at Western Washington University.

ABOUT MUTTER COURAGE

MUTTER COURAGE is an occasional reading series and conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland, which invites writers at the corner of poetic, embodied, and intersectional practices to share their work with the B R U N A community. MUTTER COURAGE refers to the name of the main character in Berthold Brecht’s eponymous play. A relentless maker in a war-torn world, MUTTER COURAGE inspires this series, which unfolds in expressions of courage in voice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of B R U N A take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty and rich cultural practice + heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.

B R U N A is made possible with support from the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force.

B R U N A, along with Connecting Community, presented STORY CORNER #2, a storytime series for kids and kids-at-heart that expands our world while bringing us closer together. This program was developed in conjunction with MONICA Koller who heads Connecting Community and is currently a Community Fellow at B R U N A. 

For the second event in this series we read YOKO by Rosemary Wells and engaged young readers in an origami exercise. Sushi and Japanese cookies were also on hand as refreshments while we discussed the story together.

About the book, from Publishers Weekly:
Yoko the kitten has gone off to her school with her willow-covered cooler filled with sushi, looking forward to a good day. But her classmates tease her mercilessly when lunch time rolls around (""Ick!... It's seaweed!""). Even worse, during the class Snack Time Song, the two bulldogs who brought franks and beans for lunch snort, ""Red bean ice cream is for weirdos!"" A pat ending seems in sight when Yoko's wise teacher plans an International Food Day and requires the students to try everything. But only hungry Timothy (a raccoon) is brave enough to taste Yoko's sushi--and yet this proves to be enough for Yoko. By book's end, Timothy and Yoko are fast friends, planning to open their very own lunch-time restaurant featuring tomato sandwiches and dragon rolls. As usual, Wells demonstrates a remarkable feel for children's small but important difficulties. Like the just-right text, her expressive watercolors, both panels and full-scale, capture a distinctive variety of animal children as well as the nuances in Yoko's expressions. Wells's message is clear without being heavy-handed, making this brightly colored schoolroom charmer a perfect book for those American-melting-pot kindergartners who need to develop a genuine respect for one another's differences. Ages 3-7.

B R U N A was pleased to host the first public presentation of the poet BRANDON Shimoda’s Hiroshima Library during August, September, and October 2019. The library was available to the public through an array of activities, among them, vigils for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a film screening, a reading and book launch, a children’s storytime hour, and a public lecture. Opening cultural, literary, and historical questions thrust into consciousness by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which extinguished over 225,000 lives nearly 74 years ago, the Hiroshima Library and its accompanying events program, co-developed with local organizations, invited new relationships with the unfathomable, unconscionable events of 1945.

The Hiroshima Library is an itinerant, sometimes spontaneous, often undisclosed collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their ongoing afterlives, as well as the environments and situations in which the collection either publicly or privately exists. The collection consists of hibakusha testimonies, history and journalism, art and photography, poetry, novels, graphic novels and comic books, art and literary criticism, theory, politics, science, and also contributions by the communities in which it appears. It is inspired, in part, by the Rest House in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima; the ice cream vendor in the Hypocenter Park in Nagasaki; the reading areas in the MRT stations in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; abandoned gas stations and strip malls throughout the United States and Japan; as well as mundane, workaday spaces adjacent to catastrophic life, which occupy a frequency between communal mourning and melancholy, private refreshment, and idle and free associative learning, and into which an individual (passerby, tourist, wanderer, child), motivated by an aimless yet open curiosity, might enter and, for a moment, disappear.

The collection was first conceived in 1988 when Shimoda received, as a gift from his parents, a copy of Keiji Nakazawa’s manga, I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor’s True Story (English translation, 1982). That same year he visited, for the first time, the city of Hiroshima. He was ten years old.

About BRANDON Shimoda

BRANDON Shimoda is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Desert (Song Cave, 2018) and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His first book of nonfiction, an ancestral memoir called The Grave on the Wall, is new from City Lights Books. His writings on Japanese-American incarceration have appeared in/on The Asian American Literary Review, Densho, Hyperallergic, The Margins, and The New Inquiry, and he has given talks on the subject at the University of Arizona, Columbia University, Fairhaven College, and the International Center of Photography. He is also the co-editor, with Thom Donovan, of To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014). Born in the San Fernando Valley, California, he lives, for now, in Tucson, AZ.

*******

This project was made possible in part by the generous support of the Whatcom Community Foundation and fiscal sponsorship from the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force.

Community partners include the Bellingham Public Library, Pickford Film Center, Whatcom Human Rights Task Force, and the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center.