This Saturday, June 13 at 2pm, I will be reading at the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. I was graciously invited by festival co-founder Heidi Durrow, whose novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, is the most recent Bellwether Prize winner and will be published next February by Algonquin. It will be lovely to meet another Bellwether sister, and to be part of a day dedicated to celebrating multicultural stories. I have to admit, I do find myself struggling a bit with not feeling worthy of speaking at this event, since my own roots are pretty homogeneous, and all the old internal voices that told me I had no right to write The Book of Dead Birds, etc. are rising up inside me again, but I'm trying to quiet them so I can bring an open, humble, non-defensive heart to this beautiful, open-hearted festival.

Happy 70th birthday, Mom!

To honor my mom's birthday, I put together this little video (well, I should say Michael actually did most of the technical putting together.) As you can hear, whatever vocal training I received for Annie Get Your Gun has flown out the door, but it was fun to sing a song to my mom that she sang to me when I was little, and such a treat to go through all of these old photographs.I hope this whole year will be a very sweet one for you, Mom (and I look forward to your own movie finding its way into the world!)