By Kusi Okamura

Though I haven’t always been a writer, I have been a reader for as long as I remember. In fact, much of my growing up was to the backdrop of books.

I was a prodigious but not discerning reader as a child: I would pretty much read anything. It was my chosen activity to relax, wind-down. Escape. There was Enid Blyton and her worlds of hockey-sticks and midnight feasts. The romantic plains of Anne of Green Gables.

But there was one book that I would not dare to look at: a book entitled, I think, ‘My Dad’.

When my father died, this book took on a terrible power. It had been an innocuous enough book before, telling us what fun fathers were, with their scruffy beards and their bear-like tendencies.

But after my father died, every time I came upon it, I remember being filled with an awful, sickening shame. Maybe shame is not the right word, but that was how it felt. Black, slick and churning, like dirty oil in my stomach.

So I turned it inwards, never with the spine facing outwards. It would have never occurred to me to throw it out, having had too much respect, even then, for the written word. I knew that if I even saw the word ‘dad’, written boldly in front of me, that it had the power to pull something out of me that I didn’t want to see.

* * * *

University for me, unsurprisingly, was a time rich in reading. I was studying English and Philosophy and a whole world of literature was opened to me.

As well as books on my course list, I sought out other books in the library. I remember finding Janet Frame’s biographies and sitting in the college’s impersonal and plastic canteen crying at her pure and true words.

But it was modern American literature where I really found myself. Sure there was Faulkner and Hemmingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald but it was with the books that reflected the melting pot that is America that I really connected. Where cultures butted up against each other and those tensions and struggles played out on the page.

I remember reading Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and the joy (the heart-pounding joy!) of having my own experience reflected back at me. For the first time ever. I had grown up in rural 1980s Ireland with Japanese parents and nothing in Irish literature had resonated with me like Tan’s words.

The world that she created of a first generation Chinese-American, with the cultural struggles, the drive and ambition of immigrant parents, the Suzuki method piano lessons, the chess, this was a world I knew and understood.

Years later when people, particularly African-Americans, cried when Barack Obama was elected president, I understood. The incredible power of seeing your world, your experience reflected out there in the world, is magical.

* * * *

When I originally thought of the theme of ‘Growing Up’ for the magazine, I imagined a variety of voices telling their stories. I wanted to hear from someone in their 80s or 90s telling us about their childhood. I wanted to hear what it feels like to grow up now, at this time, in this world that we have now.

For me the heart of the magazine is these voices from the different generations. I strongly feel that incredible importance of the stories of our parents and our grandparents. We lose what they have to say to our own detriment. But I also feel how necessary it is to listen to our children and to try and hear and see the depth of them.

And so this month The Wild Word magazine is about the power of stories, of the written word. It is no coincidence that our Artist-in-Residence this month is a storyteller.

I challenge you to not be moved by the words within this issue.

The optimism of Siofra Kildee-Doolan.

The fierce determination of Leah Bennett.

The quiet dignity of the reminisces of James Behan.

And all the other wonderful writing within The Wild Word.

Maybe you will see yourself reflected somehow, whether it be a memory, or just a feeling.

Happy reading.

* * * *

Blackbird

It was the spring after Father left that the blackbird

came and nested in the holly bush. Mother had slept

all winter, a bear in a cave, waiting for the thaw

again. She didn’t care to move for food or baths. Or

She woke for the blackbird though, who brought twig after

twig for its nest in the thorns. Then there were birds, babies

that squirmed with no feathers or fat. The blackbird brought worms

and beetles and bugs, flying in and out, in and out.

Mother would hold us as we watched, as though we would fly

off, as though we would cry as our skin split and sprouted

wings, as though we would rise up, burning our fingers on the

hot thin spikes of the sun. Then one morning we found them

outside, bodies bare and bloody, their small white bones through

torn black shells. I will never forget how she knelt on

the ground and opened and cried. This was our life she said

this was our nature, that we lived and died, lived and died.