MY FATHER'S LIGHT...IS ALSO FOR SHARING WITH YOU

K. Terumi Shorb, a multidisciplinary artist based in Austin writes about The Light.... at his BLOG WHERE HE AWAITS HIS LOTTO WINNINGS over HERE.

I still feel conflicted about, as Shorb puts it, letting my "father's time of passing become fodder for [my] art". All I can say is that I didn't write with a book in mind at the time of writing the play-by-play coverage of my father dying....it's just that, afterwards, what I'd written -- on real time as it was blogged as it was written -- spun out its own book. So I let it spin out....and glad that I did so....just this afternoon, I was driving from one spot to another as I rushed through errands and, at a stoplight, suddenly realized that my cheeks were wet: I was missing Dad so hard. I am missing Dad so so hard. I am glad I wrote a book for Dad.

And it's interesting to discover Shorb's post today. It seems synchronistic, since I somehow didn't realize until this afternoon, when my memories caught up with me, just how much Dad had done for me -- without going into details, I loathe how I couldn't realize his Goodness while he was alive.

Unlike, it seems, with me, Shorb experienced how his mother's death "marked a sudden dearth in [his] creative life." He honors me -- and my father -- by concluding his post with: "reading eileen tabios has forced me to wonder, what would happen if i just grit my teeth and walk down that path? who would i meet, and what would they say?"

Poetry as a way of life: you do it, just do it, to discover what it is you had wanted to say -- to form your life so that you can speak, and what you speak is something you want to say.

Even when you look at something you created and wish you didn't create it -- and I experience this a lot about my works -- you still, at the end of the day, do not begrudge its existence. As the saying goes: it didn't kill you, but it made you stronger.

Anyway, I can say it gladdens me that my work can so touch a reader as it did Shorb. No, I will say it gladdens me that my work can so touch a reader in this way.

Thank you, Daddy. You are like Poetry: the Gift that keeps giving.

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Speaking of gifts, it really tickles my mom and me that Dad's face is part of this award logo that Michelle designed for (and is in) Jean's book, Prau:



Prau is, of course, what I'm giving many relatives and family acquaintances for the holidays this year. I hope it'll also tickle them that the family patriarch is hangin' out in the poetry world. And may I unsubtly suggest that you also allow Prau to guide your Holiday gift-giving -- you could do so, for instance, by picking up a signed copy in Berkeley this Saturday; details HERE.

Dad would be the first to say: read Prau because Jean's poems are very VERY special.