Shin Yu Pai Talks Publishing, Design, and Poetry as a Balm
Photo: Daniel Carrillo
For the first time in its decades of existence, the Washington State-based independent press Empty Bowl has published the work of an Asian American female author.
The work in question is Virga, a full-length book of poetry written before and during the pandemic, and the author is Shin Yu Pai, a writer, photographer, and editor with no shortage of accolades. Virga is Pai’s eleventh collection of work, and her first full-length book of poetry in eight years. It follows and consists of unpublished poems written during the time that Pai assembled her last project ENSO, which was released by Entre Rios Books at the beginning of the pandemic and made Boston Globe’s “Best Books of 2020” list.
In meteorology, the word “virga” refers to “a dry thunderstorm.”
In the eponymous poem, Pai asks her reader, “… if this is dormancy, the self / unrequited, who would we be / if we became cloudburst?” And indeed, in its grappling with grief, mothering, and daily spiritual practice, Virga is about breaking open, a phenomenon made all the more urgent by the book’s proximity to the pandemic.
As she worked on ENSO, Pai put aside poems that didn’t fit the project but still explored “writing as it converges with spiritual practice.”
“These poems started to accumulate, and as the pandemic raged on, I found that the poems I was writing about family and parenting also took on an urgency,” she explained.
By the beginning of 2021, she knew she had enough poems for a book. She queried a short list of presses that included Empty Bowl at the recommendation of her friend, the late poet Mike O’Connor.
“Mike passed away last year, but I’d always been drawn to the idea of doing a project with Empty Bowl,” Pai said. She reached out to Empty Bowl’s current editor, Michael Daley, and expected to wait a few months, if not longer, to hear back. But then anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.S. rose.
“My sending my manuscript coincided closely with the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and the tragedy of the Atlanta shooting,” Pai remembers. “These events may have led to a quicker editorial decision about my book.”
Daley contacted Pai in March and asked her if she’d like to release Virga with Empty Bowl. She agreed and asked painter April Gornik to lend her painting for the cover, before enlisting Lauren Grosskopf of Pleasure Boat Studios to design the book.
“We actually bartered,” Pai said. “I do freelance publicity work for literary presses and offered to put together a publicity plan for one of her titles in exchange for her design work.”
Pai, who enjoys maintaining a level of control over the design process of her books, tends to seek out collaborators and publishers who are willing to share that control. She has had a direct hand in designing and making most of her books.
“There is one concrete instance in my publishing history in which my vision could not be honored, and in that case, I pulled the book from the publisher before it went to print,” she remembers. “I would not have been able to live with it, nor would my collaborator. It’s far more important to me to be involved with the final outcome. I’m not just interested in putting out books.”
Because she tends to choose the path that gives her more creative control, Pai said that she often finds herself more involved in marketing and publicity matters.
“Securing the blurbs, writing the jacket copy, developing and executing the publicity plan, setting up readings, and doing outreach to critics and press — these are all fundamentally creative acts for me that I see as part of the process of giving birth to the book in a way that fully honors it,” she explained, adding that she learned how to do those things by working for a small press publisher and as a marketing director for a nonprofit.
“So many mysteries of publishing and publicity were clarified for me through that work,” she explained, “whereas I was somewhat scattershot in my approach to publicity with earlier projects, now the methods which I learned in publicizing books and projects for other artists are strategic approaches that I can apply to my own work. As a result, Virga received some attention from both The Rumpus and CLMP before it came out.”
Still, she is aware that the pandemic might impact how the book is ultimately received.
“A larger publisher might have chosen to delay publication for a more advantageous time, but Empty Bowl is a small press that does small-batch publishing using POD technology and can be fairly nimble in their publishing schedule,” Pai said. “This is the fastest that I’ll ever have published a book from acceptance to publication, and that is gratifying to me because timeliness matters.”
Design: Lauren Grosskopf, Art: April Gornik
Over and over again in Virga, perspective takes center-stage. Considering that Pai is also a talented photographer who has published photographs alongside poems in other books, this is no accident.
“Seeing is a very primal sense that tends to be a default mode for me,” she said. “My mother is a visual artist, and I grew up going to museums. My father gave me my first camera by the time I was in the second grade. I was a museum educator, and I was trained in visual thinking strategies for my work with the public.”
In addition to inspiring that aspect of her writing, Pai’s parents also show up in her work itself — alongside other family members, though she said she’s always careful about what she includes.
“All writers have to be conscious of what stories they can tell about their family members, loved ones, and communities,” she said. “There are poems that I choose not to publish for various reasons. Not everything that I write reaches a larger audience.”
Still, she doesn’t shy from exploring personal topics. As the child of Taiwanese immigrants who settled in California, Pai is “deeply attentive” to place and land in her poems. She has written about everything from “a century-old heirloom apple orchard in Seattle” to a “diamond field in Arkansas.”
“I’ve often felt a disconnected quality when it comes to my relationship to place,” she admits. “My parents were permanently displaced when they left their native home of Taiwan. I grew up in Riverside, California, a place with very few Asian Americans when I was growing up. Because places never felt like home culturally or linguistically, I have over time grown more attuned to the ‘placiness’ of the locales that I have chosen to make my home. Place is not necessarily about people for me, particularly when it comes to hostile environments. Connecting to place is a way to reclaim a relationship to place, on my own terms.”
Speaking of hostile environments: Pai’s most recent “big project” was a lyrical response to the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes impacting Asian American women, and the alliances and solidarities between Asian Americans and the Black Lives Matter movement. It was a commission for The Slants Foundation (a nonprofit supporting AAPI musicians and artists) and Kristin Leong’s Rock Paper Radio project, and Pai collaborated with kora player Ibrahim Arsalan.
“We rehearsed for three days and then recorded the whole thing in my backyard studio,” she explained.
Platforms and opportunities like these, which were difficult to come by when Pai began working in poetry 25 years ago, abound in the arts world now.
“Not only are there communities like Cave Canem, Canto Mundo, and Macondo that offset largely white MFA experiences, there are also BIPOC-led speaker agencies that have risen to create opportunities for BIPOC authors, as well as small press publishers with commitments to diverse authors,” she said. “We’re in a time when publications and institutions that support poetry are undergoing a racial reckoning. Places ranging from The Poetry Foundation and Poetry Magazine to Hugo House here in Seattle. There are many more opportunities for BIPOC writers than when I became a writer. We have an indigenous Poet Laureate in Joy Harjo and Amanda Gorman presented her poetry to an audience at the Super Bowl.”
Still, there are things to consider when it comes to the intersection of race and poetry.
“I think what we have to be conscious of now is how BIPOC voices are being deployed and used. Which narratives, whose narratives are circulated. Who is given power and how is it shared? Who’s doing the vetting? And how? Who does it serve and how does it further underrepresented discourses? Are BIPOC voices just being appropriated as a part of virtue signaling, or are BIPOC individuals genuinely engaged and incorporated into long-term decision making and power sharing that is enduring and impactful, and structured in a way that it upends white supremacy and makes strides towards institutional change?”
As for what role poetry might play in times as fraught with danger as these, Pai remains largely hopeful.
“I produce a poetry podcast for Town Hall, called Lyric World. And in every episode, I ask my guests [what the role of poetry is.] The responses have been similar. Poetry as balm, curative, act of witness, act of the imagination,” she said. “I don’t know that I have an answer that’s any better than anyone else. Though I do think of poetry as shamanistic in its capacity to enact into the world that we create together.”
Recently, Pai stepped into a new role as program director for Town Hall Seattle, which also hosts her podcast series Lyric World, and is focused on planning a literary festival that will take place in 2022.
Her role as a cultural worker has kept her busy, but she still makes plenty of time to write.
“I have been working on collection of personal essays about my relationship to Taiwanese identity and gender role expectations as narrated through my experiences of visiting Taiwan, my parents’ native homeland, over five different journeys taken over a 20-year period,” she explained. “I think of the book as a faux travelogue that digs into my experiences of being a Taiwanese-American woman and thinking about what it means to be a daughter, sister, wife, and mother. It includes photographs of my travels through Taiwan.”
“I’m hoping to write more in the fall, once there’s a vaccine for younger children, and my son can go back to school,” she said. “We’re still in survival mode.”
Find Shin Yu Pai online at shinyupai.com and on Twitter @shinyupai.
Hiba Tahir is a YA author, a freelance journalist, and an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arkansas.