originally published on nwasianweekly.com
December 4, 2004

BACK TO ANN-MARIE STILLION: WRITING

Photo by Sita Kumar

Noted Canadian author to visit Seattle

By Ann-Marie Stillion
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

Hiromi Goto was attracted to writing as a child, but found her first steps toward professional writing difficult. She claims she was a poor student until she found her way.

She started writing seriously in her early 20s, when she was accepted into a creative-writing program. Since then, awards and accolades have followed the 37-year-old’s efforts with each new publication.

Goto’s Canadian contemporaries are writers Larissa Lei and Nolo Nopkinson, whom she is often compared to and also, happily, enjoys as a reader. But she also counts American Maxine Hong Kingston and Canadian Joy Kogawa as early foremothers. A Canadian who immigrated from Chiba-ken, Japan, in 1969, she has pioneered approaches to both language and culture in her stories and books.

Sometimes called a feminist science-fiction author, Goto finds that her own reading of late is mostly what she considers “edgy fiction.” “When I feel depressed, I like to read feminist science fiction to feel better. It imagines a better future for women,” she said. She is quick to point out that she doesn’t subscribe to the idea that feminism is something from the past.

Her first book, A Chorus of Mushrooms, published in 1994, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canada, along with many other awards. Its themes — the geography and experiences of a family that is bound up in multiple cultures and values, along with a healthy love of fantasy — continue to fascinate her. Goto sees the alienation found in each of us.

The friction between belonging and not belonging — that is what fuels her delicate and clear-eyed prose.

Goto describes her fascination in psychological terms: “The idea of alienation and the objectivity that triggers that feeling of being alienated ... the agitation between those two things. That sense of being not quite right. Whether or not you can cross a border or not. Or it can be within the family. Or it can be with your partner. Or with your child. There are these contracted tense moments where the person can tip either way. It can turn into a situation full of grace or be monstrous.”

On her writing for young audiences, which includes The Water of Possibility and another title that’s soon to be released, she said that she didn’t want to be a children’s author when she first began.

“When I first started writing, I was adamant about not writing for children, but after I became a mother, I began to look for books for my children and couldn’t find books that were written for or about children of color. In particular, I couldn’t find stories that were adventure stories or fantasy. It was just about children where color was an issue or had some kind of crisis. The narrative centered around their ethnicity. Children want to have adventure. So I decided if I can’t find these books, then I will write them,” Goto said.

The title of her most current collection of adult short stories, Hopeful Monsters, illustrates her keen interest in human experience, which edges toward the unfamiliar. Something real but not quite familiar informs her characters’ decisions. In another story, Drift, the magic is in the simple spaces of a family headed to an unknown destination and all the uncertainty that surrounds intimacy in everyday life.

Hopeful Monsters is published by Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press and was released in Canada in the spring of 2004. Goto has published three novels, including The Kappa Child, which won the James Tiptree Jr. Award. She lives in Burnaby, B.C.