The 5th Celebration of Casti Authors was a great success! A huge thanks to everyone who shared their work. Check out some photos from the event.

Comic creators and appreciators: throughout the month of March, Peninsula Libraries will be hosting a Comic Arts Fest! Check out events like author visits, comics and storytelling workshops, DIY screen printing, a small press comics expo, and a documentary screening of She Makes Comics featuring interviews with some of the most influential women in the comics industry.

Find the complete schedule of events here.

This week we hosted an exceptional author visit at our library. The Class of 2025 heard from Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann about their brand new book Go With the Flow, which focuses on menstruation, equity, activism, and friendship. In preparation for the visit, our 7th graders had the opportunity to read Williams and Schneemann’s critically-acclaimed graphic novel. For more context, they watched the Oscar-winning short documentary Period. End of Sentence. which covers a group of women in Hapur, India working to make affordable feminine hygiene products available in their community. They also read about how this issue plays out closer to home, including the challenges inherent in managing menstruation for individuals faced with poverty or homelessness. Opening these conversations undermines taboos that result in harm to women and girls. An emphasis on awareness and solidarity left us all feeling energized.

Go With the Flow is available for check out at Casti Library!

We’ve been lucky to host a number of author visits already this year! Our TA Lishan ‘20 sat down with one visiting writer. Read the interview below!

In early September, I had the opportunity to interview Chrishaunda Perez, the author of We Come as Girls, We Leave as Women when she came to visit Castilleja. Chrishaunda told me she had always enjoyed writing, filling many journals with her thoughts, and noting that she “just evolved writing into a profession.” She attended an all-girls boarding school in Connecticut and she said that experience and the teachers there influenced and cultivated her writing. After graduating from college, she ended up becoming a public relations professional in the fashion industry, combining both writing and fashion. When Chrishaunda had her first daughter, she took to writing during the quiet and introspective moments that caring for her daughter provided. She said that she wrote “a lot of things that I hated, a lot of things that I would never share with anyone…but at least I was getting my ideas on the paper.” After gaining a little more confidence, she began writing essays and started a blog that often touched on taboo topics regarding women. Chrishaunda one day thought to herself, “I wanna write something that’s just longer.”

It took Chrishaunda seven years to write her book We Come as Girls, We Leave as Women. The book takes place at a boarding school and has many girls from around the world and of different backgrounds, including voices that she thinks we “don’t have enough of in literature.” She adds, “Often times [in literature], their lives are being seen through the eyes of their white friends.” She expressed to me that she did get a bit of push-back from people who believed some of the experiences she was writing about were not commercially viable, for example, people who told her to make the black girl in her story “rougher.” At this point, I mention a video that I watched for English last year called “The Power of a Single Story,” which emphasized the consequences of having only one narrative that is being used to draw conclusions about a group of people or a place. Chrishaunda has watched this too, and she says “It’s not even the power of a single story, it’s the danger of a single story.”

Chrishaunda’s book is authentic to what she knows from her high school experience. She said, “I’ll tell you what it’s not, because I didn’t experience these things. I don’t talk about drugs, I don’t talk about bullies, the book doesn’t talk a whole lot about obsession with boys, because that’s just not my experience.” Instead, We Come as Girls, We Leave as Women explores themes of being there for one another, body shifts, culture, sexuality, friend and parental tension, and more with complexity.

One of the most impactful things Chrishaunda told me was the deeper purpose behind her work. She said, “I thoroughly enjoy communicating and spreading information to people that will help uplift them through comedy, through drama, and you really just talk about topics that are otherwise difficult to discuss, because it’s all about healing.”

As Thanksgiving break approaches, I encourage you to borrow Chrishaunda’s book We Come as Girls, We Leave as Women from the library!

Emily Jungmin Yoon at speaking at Castilleja Library

This past Tuesday, the Class of 2019 was fortunate to hear poet and PhD candidate Emily Jungmin Yoon read some of her recent work. Yoon’s first full-length collection of poems, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, tells the complex stories of Korean “comfort women” during World War II. She is an inspiring writer who is open about the challenges she has faced as a young Korean Canadian poet trying to find her voice.

Yoon is part of Asian American Writers’ Workshop, a national nonprofit organization with the goal of helping Asian American stories be told. They “believe Asian American literature is vital to interpret our post-multicultural but not post-racial age,” and act on this belief with devotion “to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans.” They want to start conversations about immigration, cultural pluralism, assimilation, and complex identities. As “one of the top five Asian American groups nationally,” they have the influence to empower and assist writers like Emily Jungmin Yoon.

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop began in 1991 when a group of Asian American friends and writers decided they wanted to be hearing more representations of their stories than just The Woman Warrior or The Joy Luck Club. They began the organization together, and within eight years their membership had quickly grown to a group of 600 operating out of a basement under a Gap store in New York City. They run their own bookstore, hold workshops for high school students interested in writing, and offer grants to writers in need. Most significantly, the organization helps writers publish their works.

These publications take the form of two literary magazines, The Margins and Open City. The Margins, their first magazine, is “dedicated to inventing the Asian American creative culture of tomorrow” and bringing Asian Americans out of the sidekick role and into the spotlight. Their literature includes essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, and more. Open City “takes the real-time pulse of metropolitan Asian America as it’s being lived on the streets of New York right now,” telling the stories “of the Asian and immigrant neighborhoods that comprise one million New Yorkers and 13 percent of the city, but that rarely find their way to mainstream media.” Both of these magazines are published on their website and are open for writing submissions. You can find The Margins here, and Open City here.

As America’s “melting pot” culture develops further, it becomes even more important to hear a variety of diverse voices represented. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is working to make this true for Asian Americans pursuing literature. Although Asian American can mean a number of various identities, there’s a certain power in bringing them together in a community that has something in common: writing. Andrea Louie, a Chinese-American writer who is a part of the organization, is quoted in the New York Times: “I’ve enjoyed the diasporic experience of different groups. Even though it’s different, we’re very much the same.”

Sources:
https://aaww.org/about
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/25/arts/helping-asian-americans-into-print.html

-Lia S. ’18