Writer Spotlight: Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

Interview by Skylar Wachtman

Photo courtesy of Janet Kim

Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi is an author and a creative writing professor at Western Washington University. His most recent novel “The Book of Kane and Margaret” won the Fiction Collective Two’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, an award given to pieces that push the bounds of publishing. He has also published a poetry collection by the name of “Disintegration Made Plain and Easy.” 

You’re known among the creative writing students for teaching a class on weird fiction, and generally just being a weird fiction enthusiast. What about the genre intrigues you?

I think one is that it's a blend of many different genres. So it being a blend of horror, perhaps like a romantic genre, surrealism. Often, there are elements of fantasy or sci-fi in them. They’re often sort of foggy and dreamlike. There's something about that that is attractive to me and I don't always know what it is, you know? So one is probably the blend of genres, but the other part is just the atmosphere. 

It's funny to say that I like it because usually, all those weird fiction elements are adding up to try and make the reader feel uncomfortable, which I do feel often. I'm like, oh, there's a little bit of discomfort here for me. You're like someone did something violent, or gross, or said something offensive, or there’s sexual content. That was a little too much for me, for my delicate sensibilities. I think there's also something there that is actually oddly funny and intriguing to me a lot of times too. 

I think part of it is I feel a lot of students that I work with are often writing weird fiction, even if they haven't heard of that genre before.  I think probably my interests are just already pulled there thinking about, “Oh, this reminds me a lot of student work that I see.”

So you're part of the Fiction Collective Two. Why did you join the collective? Did you find a good community of like-minded authors through joining?

I had tried to get my work published a number of times. It got rejected at a bunch of places. I’ve been told by other folks, by many folks, that “Oh your writing is quite niche.” Like my interests are maybe only going to be interesting to a slim group of people. I kind of knew that going in. I was kind of bummed. I had thought like, on one hand, a lot of the chapters in my book were published by literary journals. I said, “Oh, there’s something about the work that is interesting to people, at least the singular chapters. But as a whole tapestry-like project, there’s something about that that’s not as interesting to a bookseller or a publisher.”  

I had both confidence and not and I was bummed about it too. To be honest, I quit writing for a while. I worked on this thing for like 10 years and it didn’t happen for me. 

I was just lucky enough to have this friend who sent me this contest listing for the Fiction Collective Two and said, “I think you should try one more time and send it to the Fiction Collective Two, just to see if they’ll take it. They’re really interested in innovative work.” So I sent it in based on his recommendation and it won their book contest.,

I feel lucky that I got rejected a whole bunch of other times too, because FC2 has ended up being a really nice home for the work and I’ve met a lot of really cool people through FC2.  

I think this would be a great time to talk about “The Book of Kane and Margaret.” What was your inspiration for that?
That book took me a really long time to write. It evolved over a very long period. I would say, in some ways, it started when I was a teenager and I was taking the oral narratives of my grandparents, who were very important figures in my life. They were kind of my second set of parents, my mother's parents. So I was talking to them over a very long period. We would rehash kind of their “meet-cute” experience, way back in the ‘40s, every time we saw each other. 

The way they had met was they were relocated and interned during World War II, all the Japanese Americans on the West Coast were. So they were relocated to Tulare, California and were in this relocation center. Then they were eventually moved to the Gila River, which is in Arizona. There were these dusty, awful barracks there. But it was there where they fell in love. They weren't sure if they were ever going to get out of camp. So they got married there, actually in camp. My grandmother sent away for her wedding dress through a Sears catalog, the wedding dress and rings. They actually had their first baby in camp as well. 

There's something about that that was always just fascinating to me. One, it was just these important people in my life, but also these distressing circumstances.Through these distressing circumstances, these two folks still made this commitment to each other, ended up being lifelong. They were married about 70 years before my grandfather passed away. Though I was not there to experience it, that has been an important part of my life, just hearing the stories from the camp. 

The other thing is they were teenagers at the time. They were super young. My grandfather was kind of a degenerate and an alcoholic. So he was off having some pretty wild adventures in camp and I sort of wanted to capture some of those too. I’m just trying to capture a bit of who they were as people. 

I tried over many years to tell their story in a nonfiction mode. But I just don’t have a great nonfiction brain. I realized if I was going to tell it, it would be in these sort of fables. I stumbled upon this where it was partly historical fiction but also sort of fable. Every chapter in the book is a kind of different fable. But they’re all housed within this relocation center. The names Kane Araki and Margaret Morri recur throughout the book, but they’re different characters underneath those names. Every chapter is a reset. Different body, different personality under these names Kane Araki and Margaret Morri. I had to give myself that freedom to get at some of the stories I wanted to tell about them. So some of it is just wanting to tell these magical tales and the other part is trying to just capture just some of the vibes that I used to have when they were telling me their stories. Again, it took a long time. I wrote it mostly as I was getting my MFA. So it eventually became my MFA project in grad school. So that’s how it emerged.

Are there any other writer or artist communities that you're a part of in the Bellingham area?
I got here in the middle of the pandemic. A couple of faculty members, Andrew Lucchesi and Lysa Rivera, were putting together these “mentor pods” for incoming graduate students. So knowing that we could not meet in person, they were like, “Well, let’s pair up a group of three-four graduate writers with a faculty member. It can just be these informal meetings where we get together and talk shop and just check in, share our highs and lows as a way to foster community.”

 It was all on Zoom and eventually, I got to meet those folks in person. We still meet every once in a while virtually. Part of that group too are other graduate students who I’ve met and have graduated, but still want to stay connected to each other. So the group is probably seven or eight graduates, all alum now, and me. We used to meet three times a year and we’ll still maybe meet about that much virtually. But they’re kind of all over now.

I have another mentoring pod that’s current graduate students and those are all first years, so I get to meet and write with them too. That’s like these informal writer and artist groups that I’m a part of, but that’s still through the department. 

Unofficially, I have these other two writer groups that I’m a part of. One is with folks who I went to my first graduate program with. Actually, this is when I was in my late 20s. So it's been almost 15 years since we've known each other. We meet every Friday to do some writing sprints. 

Then there are some other folks that I reconnected with recently. We went to undergrad together. We actually just met yesterday to do a workshop. We’ve known each other since we were in our early 20s. I’m 41 now, so it’s been a while. 

So those are the writing communities I’m still a part of. It's one of the reasons why I really believe in trying to get connected to other writers and artists and how that pays wonderful dividends over time. I think if I had not had friends who I met all the way back in undergrad, I wouldn’t still be writing now. So I believe in the value of a writerly community. We all worked on an undergrad literary journal together, something like Jeopardy Magazine. 

What are the best ways that people can support local authors and artists?

I mean, I think part of it is to buy their books, right? That’s the most simple answer, buy their books, go see their readings. But also, if someone is an indie author, like at a small press like me, what would I want for myself? I’ll say some things that have been very valuable for me in my incredibly modest career as a writer. 

Some folks got a hold of my book and they did a book club. I was so flattered. This person reached out and said, “Someone had given me your book. I really like it. I’m using it for my book club.” And I said, “If you want, I’ll drop in via Zoom if you want to have that be a part of your book club.” It was so affirming to get to talk with strangers about this book. Other than my mom and my partner, I didn’t know who was going to buy this book. That it reached anybody, much less folks in this book club that I didn’t know of. It was really affirming. 

Every once in a while, I’ll get an email from some professor somewhere or another writer somewhere and they’ll say “I looked you up in Western and I really enjoyed your book. I’m working with some students on it, just for reading it. Would you want to come virtually and talk to them about it?” So I’ve loved that, being connected in unexpected ways to people through the book. 

For folks to actually buy the book, it’s not necessarily that lucrative. I haven’t made a lot of money off the book. But I feel really wealthy in terms of those little gestures like someone just writing a kind note to me. That has given me the energy to keep going as a writer. So how to best support a local writer or artist, I think sometimes it’s just writing a note. Like “I came to your event.” “I really enjoyed that thing you wrote.” “I’m going to follow your website and the next thing you come up with, I’m excited to see it.” Just a small positive note like that can be very valuable for someone at my level. 

My last question is actually one that I stole from you. What is one problem in the world that you would like to solve with your writing?
I ask that question because I feel like I myself don’t have a great answer for it. Well, you know that thing about mentorship where they say you should try to be the mentor you needed when you were 15? I try to think about that for myself as a writer too. So a lot of the things that I write, I’m writing the story or book that I needed when I was 15 years old. Part of that is, I had not seen a lot of Asian-American, Japanese-American representation. The books that I was reading when I was in high school, for example, the representation was pretty non-existent. Especially seeing representation that felt complicated, or funny, or strange. I hadn’t seen that for sure. A lot of them have ended up being Asian-American stereotypes. So I think part of it is just trying to contribute to a more diverse representation of Asian-American people, which is something I really wish I’d had when I was younger. Not having that representation, it got into my blood. I internalized it and it got into my psychology in a lot of ugly ways. I’ve sort of been unpacking that ever since. Like, my own self-worth is affected by it. That’s sort of what I think about when I write. Like, “What’s the kind of story that I wish I would have gotten that would have made me feel seen and acknowledged when I was younger?” 

It doesn’t have to be positive portrayals. I think it could just as easily be finding your negative ones, just ones that have rang true to me. I mean, a lot of the things that I write are strange or crude, kind of like my family, kind of strange and crude people. 

I think another part, more generally speaking, is that I’m more excited by literature when it feels like the anxieties and vulnerabilities of the author or the artist is agitating some sort of channel to my own anxieties and vulnerabilities. Basically, when I feel like I’m not lonely because I’m reading that work or experiencing that work. That’s when I get super excited about literature, is just feeling. Feeling as though I’m connected to this other person, to this other entity, that makes me feel not alone.