Courting a Man Who Doesn't Talk

Description: Courting A Man Who Doesn’t Talk began thirty years ago as midnight journaling to puzzle out an budding romance between a fortyish, Asian American single mother and a twenty-something white man. The personal experiment has stood the test of time, but the larger social battle for equality and respect between women and men is still being waged, one day at a time, one person at a time. Many men don’t have words to express what’s deepest in their hearts. Lover or husband, father or son, employer or co-worker—each has different styles of wordlessness and different reasons for it. In today’s polarized world, breaking through the silence is essential, especially across divisions of race, class, generation, culture, or religion. ​ Bio: Shizue Seigel, founder/director of Write Now! SF Bay, is a third-generation Japanese American writer, visual artist and community activist who explores complex intersections of history, culture and spirituality through prose, poetry and visual art. Born just after her family's release from WWII incarceration camps, Shizue grew up as an Army brat in segregated Baltimore, Occupied Japan, California farm labor camps and skid-row Stockton, before finding home in San Francisco in 1956. She's a college dropout who learned from experience in the Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, Indian ashrams and the counterculture in the 1970s, corporate advertising in the 1980s, and HIV prevention in the 1990s. She has helped tell community stories for 25 years. She’s written, co-written or edited nine books, Including In Good Conscience, My First Hundred Years, and five Write Now! anthologies. Her poetry and prose have been widely published, most recently in Ginsoko Journal, Porter Gulch Review, and Colossus: Body. Her work was recognized with a KPIX Jefferson Award in 2021, and her literary and visual art papers are archived at the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, University of California, Santa Barbara Kimi Sugioka is a mother, educator, songwriter and poet. She earned an MFA from Naropa University and has published two books of poetry; the newest of which is Wile & Wing on Manic D Press. She has been published in numerous anthologies and is the Poet Laureate of Alameda, California. As an active board member for literary arts organizations, she curates and hosts readings for the Alameda Island Poets and the San Francisco International Arts Festival, among others. She believes that creating community through art is a revolutionary act. Born to a Japanese American father and Scots Irish American mother in North Carolina, Kimi Sugioka grew up in Chapel Hill and Berkeley, California. Constantly moving between the two starkly different cultures and not blending into either, Kimi often found herself in liminal circumstances that squarely placed her in the category of other. Family divisions and trauma contributed to her feeling a lack of home and identity. Consequently, she was always trying to fit in and please whoever she was with. Finding herself drawn to children and moved to try to improve the circumstances of others, she eventually became a special education teacher. She felt more at home with children who were also struggling to survive in the mainstream despite their differences and lack of inclusion. Singing and writing gave her a way to express her feelings of confusion and cognitive dissonance, as well as giving her comfort. Through these mediums she was, and is, able to inhabit her interior world. Sharing word and song with audiences allows her to voice her concerns about the world in a way she hopes will cultivate community and inspire collective activism.

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