“On Materiality and Source” : Essay in Snail Trail Press, FALL 2019
”…Interestingly perhaps, the word ‘material’ - in its relation to the word ‘matter’ - shares lineage with the root for the word ‘mother’ : mater : origin, source. So, in working with our materials, in our endeavoring to hew something original with or through them, are we not also seeking some relation (or re-relation) to a source that once had the power to produce us?” This essay was initially given as a talk at the 2019 MFA Spring Festival at Univ. of Washington Bothell.
Creative Capital Artist Presentation, Jun 2019
A 5-min. presentation on in-progress work, Postwar Tablefruit, for the 2019 Creative Capital Artist Retreat at Bard College: “Diasporas often begin with seas …”
“THE HELICOPTER & THE PILOT: Contemplating April 30th” : Essay for diaCRITICS, 30 Apr 2018
“The photograph at the top of this post, of the helicopter and the pilot, I have returned to it time and again, because for me it represents the Vietnamese identity being both dissolved and made possible, in a single frozen image. The pilot has jumped out of the helicopter, and both bodies are posed in midair moments before they will descend each into the sea. … The identity of a nation in free-fall.” …
2018 ///\/\/// BEYOND : Editor's Note for diaCRITICS, 1 Mar 2018
“...the word diaspora: I will say I favor this word because it locates itself within the tenuousness of identity, within its changing-ness, in the middle of the action of going out from one place to another while carrying within one 'spora' (the etymology of which connects to “scattering, sowing” as well as “sprout”) from the originating point. ... diaspora adheres to no geography, diaspora carries its place-ness, as well as its across-ness, its possible seed-ness, within the word itself.”
DE-CANONIZING: "VIETNAM" IS A 7-LETTER WORD : Blog Post for De-Canon, Nov 10 2017
An essay gathering Vietnamese American responses to the Ken Burns' PBS documentary on 'The Vietnam War'.
DOHEE LEE’S MU/巫 : REVERBERATIONS OF THE SINGING BODY : Art Review for TBA:17 (Time-Based Art Festival), PICA Blog, Oct 19 2017
“A woman in white walks down a New York City sidewalk. Her dress is a construction of paper strips, fragments layered into a plumage, each strip inked in Korean script. The woman is Korean. As she walks she performs a ritual that involves waving red paper. She moves down the street toward a building. A building with an alleyway.” ...
"Dao Strom's Seven Works of Hybridity" : Essay for VELA Magazine's Bookmarked Column
“Hybridity is a way of saying we are neither this nor (completely) that; at the same time we are this AND we are that, maybe even that other that, too. And it’s all subject to change. We might dissolve or evolve any boundaries. We will not stay put where you think you’ve safely placed us, named us, tried to corral us. Neither this, nor that. Neither of here nor there, wholly.”
"Iowa Pastoral" : Essay in GUERNICA
“... In short: the reason he had decided not to attend any more of her classes was because she had demonstrated herself unable to place him, due to her perception of the color of his skin, anywhere in the context of Western art....”
"Triangulations from the Diaspora: Childhood" : Experimental/Image-Text Essay in NUMERO CINQ
"[Fragments from the Encyclopedia of Censorship]" : Essay in MINOR LITERATURES
“It was during my time studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the mid-1990s that I stumbled on the one essay I’ve found written in English that acknowledges the contributions of the “Five She-Devils” — five boundary-challenging women writers — to the literature of South Viet Nam. My mother was one of these five.” ...
"(notes) from the other shore" : Essay in 3:AM MAGAZINE
“Language – from the very point we attempt to codify, capture, call it our own, or insist via our version of it — becomes potentially unreliable. The same event, traumatic movements of people on either side of a forming chasm, no matter how you choose to frame it, has no one definitive name. Can really and truly be given no name. Because maybe there are no words for it.”
"OUT OF THE MARGINS" : Launch of Literary Series on diaCRITICS.org (Dao Strom, Series Editor)
“The reality of a cultural identity is complex and contradictory, no doubt. Yes, we are/were of that wound; and yes, too, we are so much more than you have been willing to see, of that wound, from it, beyond it, aside from it. So the goal here really is simple: to enter into the stream of American literature, art and culture as we are — no less, no more, and all. To make a space where the full nuance and scope of our experiences, imaginations, and perceptions may have their place.” ...