Hey writers and creative souls,
In case you missed it and are interested, Reiko was invited to deliver the Trinity College Distinguished Scholar Lecture this year. In it, she talked about trauma and healing narratives in connection with the 80th Day of Remembrance (Feb 19, 2022), which you can read more about below. Here is a link. She discusses how she became a writer, and how her own experiences and process affect the structures of her book. It’s the other side of the tarot persona, and definitely worth a look:
Rubble and Remembrance: Trauma Narratives and Healing On and Off the Page
2022 marks the 80th anniversary of the incarceration of the Japanese Americans during World War II, an event that would change Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s life, though she would not be born until decades later. Rizzuto grew up not knowing that her mother spent her first years of life as a prisoner of her own government in a pop-up camp in the Colorado desert, and once she learned the truth, the camp had been reduced to a makeshift graveyard and some concrete barracks footprints. Her quest to understand her family’s experience and the silences that surrounded it grew into three books, and took her to Hiroshima, Japan, where she was interviewing the survivors of the first atomic bomb used on civilians when the 9/11 terrorist attacks unfolded before her Brooklyn-based family’s eyes. At Trinity, Rizzuto will discuss her experiences chasing lost histories and missing memories, and her intentions, as a writer, to construct her narratives to depict and mimic trauma.
