We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People by Dao Strom
A summary
In this
unique hybrid work, author/musician Dao Strom navigates the spaces between
shores, mother and father, two cultures. The daughter of writers, she fled
Vietnam with her mother at the end of the war. It was not until years later
that she learned her father was still alive and had spent a decade in
Communist “reeducation” camps as persecution for his work as a writer in the
pre-1975 era of Saigon. This rift—caught between the forward-looking mother who
severed ties with the past, and the only tenuous presence of a father who could
not turn away from the past—is the initiating ethos behind this memoir,
which renders itself also as an experiment in literary multimedia, combining
text, image, and song to ruminate on the intersection of personal and
collective histories. The result is a work that draws disparate “voices”
together into one confluent, challenging whole.
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| Were Meant To Be a Gentle People |
We Were
Meant To Be a Gentle People is accompanied by a music album, East/West.
Dao Strom is
the author of two previous books of fiction, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner
Books, 2003) and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint
Press, 2006). She is also a writer of songs. She has received awards
from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Oregon Arts Commission,
the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener Fellowship, and the
Nelson Algren Award. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She
lives in Portland, Oregon.
Genre:
Memoir/Essays/Multimedia/Asian-American Literature
Author: Dao Strom
Pages: 200
Price: $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-9909555-1-1
Release Date: October 20, 2015
AVAILABILITY
For the Album: CDBaby / Bandcamp / iTunes /
Amazon / more TBD
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