Items related to We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People
Synopsis
A memoir in text + image + song. In this unique hybrid work, author/musician Dao Strom navigates the spaces between shores, mother and father, two cultures. The daughter of writers, she fled Vietnam with her mother at the end of the war. It was not until years later that she learned her father was still alive and had spent a decade in Communist "reeducation" camps as persecution for his work as a writer in the pre-1975 era of Saigon. This rift--caught between the forward-looking mother who severed ties with the past, and the only tenuous presence of a father who could not turn away from the past--is the initiating ethos behind this memoir, which renders itself also as an experiment in literary multimedia, combining text, image, and song to express the nuances and buried emotions of aftermath. Strom juxtaposes documentary images next to family memorabilia to ruminate on the intersection of personal and collective histories. She travels between the Pacific coast and the Champa ruins of Viet Nam to capture original photographic images that re-imagine folk myths. Her autobiographical essays are candid at the same time they are enigmatic, playing with white space and the shapes the text makes on the page. The result is a multidimensional work that draws disparate "voices" together into one confluent, challenging whole.
We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People is accompanied by a music album, East/West, that explores the mythos of two "geographies." The book's "chapters" correspond with song titles on the album, with lyrics interwoven amid the essays and fragments. All songs written and performed by Dao Strom. Recorded at Type Foundry Studio in Portland, OR; co-produced with Dylan Magierek. For a full experience, we recommend listening to the songs to accompany your reading.
The book is available as a full-color, perfect-bound, 8x8 paperback; 200 pages.
The digital album is available at: daostrom.bandcamp.com
Please visit paperdollworks.com or theseaandthemother.com for information about a limited art-edition printing of the book.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Dao Strom is the author of a novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003) and a collection of stories, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2006). She is also a writer of songs. About her 2006 fiction collection, The New Yorker said, "Quietly beautiful, Strom's stories are hip without being ironic." She has received support from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener Fellowship and the Nelson Algren Award, among others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She was born in Vietnam and grew up in northern California. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Review
"Dao Strom's We Were Meant to be a Gentle People is an astounding work of fracture and reconciliation. Filled with provocative images, sharp juxtapositions, and eloquent prose, this poetic memoir challenges our assumptions about aesthetic form and preconceived racialized, gendered notions of Vietnamese refugees in America. So many of Strom's lines and lyrics and pictures are already blazing through my head like lost stars searching for a sky. A poignant and powerful work."
- Bao Phi, spoken word poet and author of Sông I Sing
"Dao Strom travels across oceans and decades in search of ever-elusive answers about her origins. As she leads us through this strangely beautiful excavation, sifting through fragments of memory and received history, the questions she raises about her past unsettle the ways in which we understand our own stories. The very notion of memory becomes more open-ended, mysterious, and compelling when we see such a gifted archeologist of the self at work on the page." - Jacob Slichter, author of So You Think You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, and drummer in Semisonic
"Dao Strom has crafted a gorgeous memoir with prose, poetry, photos, and music--eclectic, authentic, disarming and utterly heart-wrenching. I could not imagine this narrative in any other way. A brilliant success on every level."
-- Andrew X. Pham, author of Catfish and Mandala and The Eaves of Heaven
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherMPMP
- Publication date2015
- ISBN 10 0990955516
- ISBN 13 9780990955511
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages200
- Rating
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