A Place for What We Lose insists on telling necessary stories for fear of them being lost, destroyed, or stolen. As such, the archive needs tending to. As we share about our similar, yet different experiences of familial hoarding, Tamiko tells me: “I have a scrapbook from my aunt with photos, newspaper clippings, cards, letters, Valentines, all these things. And I have tons of photo albums – an abundance of family archival material. So I was kind of like, how could I not do something with it?” In many ways, Tamiko’s memoir activates these luminous archival materials, some of which still exist – like her father’s manuscript – and some of which exist only in memory. In “Voices Together,” Tamiko recalls a cassette tape where her father and her grandmother teach her to say her name. “I don’t know where the cassette is now, but I play it mentally for myself over and over. It’s the only recording I know of with their voices.” 

During those fifteen years of writing, activating both painful and tender memories required time and community connection. Tamiko tells me how co-writing in spaces and workshops like VONA (Voices of Our Nation), a virtual retreat for writers of color, allowed her to tap into deeper interiors of her memoir. She’s also a board member of the Tule Lake Committee, which educates the public about Japanese American incarceration during World War II, and organizes community pilgrimages to Tule Lake.  

In particular, her own pilgrimage to Tule Lake was a significant experience, where multiple losses in her life coalesced together into a kind of grief chorus: “When I went on the community pilgrimage, I had this huge ugly cry, this upswelling of all kinds of grief. It was collective grief about the incarceration right where our family was. I was missing my dad and I was also feeling the loss of my [academic] career. And that I got to teach again there was such a big deal.” In the latter half of the book, Tamiko writes about facilitating a three-hour conversation at Tule Lake, creating space for collective healing and listening – including her own release of emotions: “[This was] a place where I could feel not just one of my losses but the whole interconnected web of them.”

There is a moment in her memoir where Tamiko says directly and vulnerably to the reader that she struggles with telling the memory of her father’s death: “There is a memory I don’t want to tell but demands the telling.” And how that grief was felt in the body, in that longing for his return: “None of us would sleep in the exact place where my dad had slept.” In understanding this grief chorus and its reverberations, Tamiko considers how parts of grief gave her purpose: “Camp grief for me simmers consistently as a level of anger. It’s a generative anger, though. And I’m not alone in this anger…” In “Kite Flying,” Tamiko writes about the painful symbolism of her dad’s memories of kite flying contests during incarceration: “What is it to create something made to fly, mark the wind paths, ride the wind – something for prisoners to create, a visible symbol of tension between ground and air, between being free and being grounded?” 

With mass incarceration, mass deportation, and family separation happening right now, that anger and grief is ever-present. As is the necessity for community action, nourishment, and caretaking. As Oliver Vy takes photographs, Tamiko and I keep joking about making a mess. “That’s how you know it’s good though,” I laugh, glimmering in the specks of rice around us. Tamiko points us to a moment in her memoir where, on the bus during the community pilgrimage to Tule Lake, everyone starts sharing snacks. “We got snacks for each other. No matter what’s going to happen, knowing it’s going to be an emotional journey, we will be feeding each other, passing grapes.” Both Oliver Vy and I emphatically agree: “You have to have snacks!”

In reading A Place for What We Lose, I kept feeling portals of time open. And, as such, this is a book that doesn’t quite end. In “You Will Leave Here,” Tamiko writes a letter to her father, dreaming of going back in time, to find him at camp. She writes with loving insistence: “You will leave here. I will come back for you.” As we leave CheBogz, the sun is peeking out and Tamiko tells me about how she also wrote a letter to her book. “I am still learning from my book,” she says. I can’t help but hold that thought with me as a writer and reader, with the utmost gratitude. How can we be porous to all the teachings within a book and all that it touches?