NAOMI DAY: Can you tell me about your personal artistic practices, and who you are as artists? 

AMY HIRAYAMA: I'm a writer, and I write a lot of poetry, but I also write short stories and essays. And then, more recently, I do a lot of collaborative writing; a lot of my projects are co-written with other people, and I have one main co-writer, his name's Sky O'Brien. We have a couple of full-manuscript projects that we've worked on that are very playful. We both center the idea of play and take it really really seriously. We've noticed lately that we’ve not been as playful in our writing, and that the writing is then not very good. But it's hard to force yourself to “play,” so we’re kind of stuck right now. 

And then I think about community organizing as an artistic practice, and that's from talking to Garfield Hillson at [Writers in the Schools]. We were just talking about being busy and doing so many things and not having time for our writing practice, but someone else had told him, “Well, you can think about other things in your life as an artistic practice.” You can approach those things and think about the craft of those things, and not everyone organizes an event artfully or with creativity. This is also part of my practice: organizing and creating opportunities for people to connect.

DANIEL TAM-CLAIBORNE: I would say I'm a writer too. I feel like I've been going through this identity crisis as to whether or not that still feels like the primary thing that I want to orient my life around in some ways, but at least for now, I’m still holding true to that. But like Amy, I think there is a whole lot around the writing space that I've only really started leaning into since being in Seattle, and I really credit this place, and the literary institutions here, and the degree of literariness in the city for allowing me to have those opportunities. 

I think back to my old boss at Hugo House, Rob Arnold, who calls himself an “all-around literarian,” which I think is such a great title to use. I feel like there is part of that embedded in my relationship to some of the cultural institutions in Seattle: whether it's helping to produce different kinds of series, moderating conversations, or being part of groups and boards engaged both in local literacy and connections elsewhere. It's been a great journey, and I feel privileged to be embedded in the way that I feel like I am now. It's taken 10 years, but here we are.

ND: I really like that both of y'all spoke to community organizing and creating space, curating space. Related to that, y'all are coming into CHUM as co-editors. Can you tell us more about what this structure looks like in practice? How are you going to be collaborating? 

DTC: We’re trying to operate on this quarterly cycle, where we're each editing one piece and soliciting one piece individually, and then we're also collectively soliciting and editing one piece. So that would make up three pieces, and then we just repeat that every season. We’ve both talked about how we like working independently — obviously, you know, life is busy — but then there's also this opportunity to not be in this silo. I think the whole desire to want to have more of us doing this, other than the fact that certainly I couldn't do it alone, is the fact that we have each other to bounce ideas off of and to learn from each other, and to hone our practice, and I’m excited to see how Amy edits. I’m really thrilled about that aspect.