Profiles

Using food was a way for me to have access to the story, to these stories.

In the Bible, water transforms by cleansing, but you can always become dirty again. But if you put something through fire, it comes out completely different. When you burn something to ashes, you cannot undo that. I am really fascinated by the transformative quality of fire.

unthaitled x KAUM Film+++festival 2023 Wandering Salon is a collaborative project between the collectives unthaitled, Soydivision and curators spanning film screenings, performances, workshops, talks and other activities. It departs from a conceptual space reminiscent of the salon, the room in a house where guests - friends and strangers alike - are welcomed and entertained. These places exist in households all over Southeast Asia (ห้องโถงเคลื่อนที่, Salon dạo, Salon Keliling), as temporary communal spaces of encounters that fosters conversations and new forms of togetherness and solidarity.

Much had to do with physically leaving San Francisco and the poetry scene in the early aughts. That was a period of extreme gentrification where block after block was seemingly falling to this phenomenon as if they were dominoes and I found myself among the casualties. Looking at where San Francisco is now, those days seem rather leisurely in its pace.

The art of translation is like having two separate brains. When I’m translating or reading, there is always another brain running in the background. A temporary state of split personality disorder is extremely helpful in poetry.

After having written my first book, I feel as though I'm in this incredible transition or transformative phase. In preparation for this novel, I am reinventing myself in a sense, and shedding all the layers of the person that I was when I was working on my first book.