The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Dawn Angelicca Barcelona are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thanks for reading.
Process Note for Roundtrip
by Dawn Angelicca Barcelona
Finishing Line Press, March 2025
As I packed up my apartment in Seoul in 2016, preparing to return to the U.S. after two years teaching English to elementary school students, the simple act of gathering hangers into a paper bag to sell on Craigslist unexpectedly spiraled me into an afternoon of tears. In my poem “Guro Station, Line 1,” a love letter to the train station I most often used, I wrote: “I wonder if it’s possible to love another city / or two different countries / so tightly.” Sitting with this tension—holding both the found home of South Korea and my birthplace in New Jersey—is what inspired me to start writing the first poems in Roundtrip.
The poems I wrote first attended to the intense reverse culture shock I experienced for months after I returned home. I kept trying (and failing) to articulate to people around me why small things upset me. The manners and gestures I internalized while living as an expat became jarring to others: I instinctively bowed to greet new people instead of shaking their hands, insisted shoes must be taken off before coming into the house, and passed everything with two hands. I missed my students deeply—I loved the classroom—but I also found myself torn on where to get my teaching license and nervous about how the state of education would be imperiled by the first Trump administration. Ultimately, I decided that I would pivot away from teaching for personal reasons. What had once felt like home in New Jersey had become painful. My independence shrank as I moved back in with my parents, had trouble landing a job in the tri-state area, and grappled with how I felt like life had really gone on without me.
I slipped into a rhythm of sleeping in, applying to jobs, and writing late into the night. Alongside emails from Indeed and LinkedIn alerting me to jobs that might match my profile, I also received emails from literary organizations about their first book deadlines coming up. I decided, with no real plan, that I would aim to write and submit a manuscript to one of these contests no matter what condition it was in. In one month, I had done it: I generated enough work to meet the requirements of a full-length manuscript and hit submit without editing it. Admitting this now is quite embarrassing, but just knowing I could generate a lot of work in order to process my reverse culture shock and grief was a satisfying experience.
In January 2017, I left New Jersey for San Francisco. It would be a fresh start for me, a place that held no personal trauma and a place I had first visited because of the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Her book Dictee felt especially poignant during my time in South Korea as I reflected on my parents’ immigration story, reckoned between my racialized identity, and the role imperialism plays in fracturing countries and families. My poem “Muse” is dedicated to her:
After all these years I still scan bookshelves for your name, walk up and down
staircases thinking of you. I revisit your book when I fly around the world
only to return back to the place I came from.
My poems were raw and diaristic, still containing much of the same themes as the manuscript I drafted in 2016: my yearning for home while always wanting to leave, my tendency to leave before being left, and the things I forgave while living with my parents that I decided to no longer tolerate as I built a life on my own. There is a circularity I’ve noticed in my work that comes from the constant desire to establish a home because my own sense of home and family of origin was painful. Through therapy, the idea of creating a found family became very important, and I chased it through participating in writing communities such as the Laguna Writers Workshop where I generated new work for three hours every Tuesday night, took classes to meet other writers through the Writers’ Grotto and Left Margin LIT, and when the pandemic came upon us, I wrote alongside others in different time zones through Zoom writing workshops. Writing in a community with others helped me confront fears (such as driving in “Bilateral Stimulation”), experiment with surprising metaphors (“Portrait in Sepia”), and listen deeply to the stories of others (“Dear Violet”). I printed out my drafts from each writing session and classes, organizing them in folders in my filing cabinet: Edit, Save for Later, Maybe Not. I began to edit poems on an individual level to submit to journals and literary magazines. As I participated in readings and open mic events, I saw how my work connected me to people and vice versa, and decided it was ready to look at that haphazard manuscript I wrote in 2016.
The book took seven years to complete: five to generate the bulk of the work and two to revise. The oldest poems are from 2016; the newest poem, “Woman Lost While Looking at Stars,” opens the collection and was composed in 2023. Editing early poems was hard—I didn’t want to strip away the intensity of visceral moments but I also wanted to prioritize clarity in order to have my work resonate with other readers. When it came to ordering the collection, my impulse was to first arrange poems chronologically, but that approach lacked cohesion. My next attempt was to group poems by phrases that proved to be too abstract such as “In An Alphabet-Driven Dream,” and “When Kinetic Madonna Arrives.” I also came to terms with the fact that even though I had a large volume of poems, I did not need to stick them all in the same book. This is when I decided that I would go for a tighter, chapbook-length collection to make this manuscript project more achievable. I took out all of the poems that had to do with the Kinetic Madonna character I had created since they were unrelated to the core theme of home, longing, and migration. I removed some of the more whimsical and surrealist poems as well, finding that embodiment was what was helping to link poems together.
Finally, I had a breakthrough after deciding to organize my chapbook by place, which corresponded to themes. This created an emotional arc for my journey with (im)migration: from growing up in New Jersey, imagining relationships with my grandparents in the Philippines, being unable to articulate myself in a new language in South Korea, my brief interlude back home in New Jersey, and finally landing in California, where I felt I had truly established a home and found family I could rely on. One major revision that I was extremely hesitant to make was changing the title of the collection. I often think of titles for my poems first and then write into them, and it gets difficult for me to change them even when they no longer fit what the poem has become. I made a list of alternate titles that were short and encapsulated movement. The idea of circularity came to the forefront, and thus the idea of booking roundtrip tickets and flights came to mind. The original title for my collection ended up becoming a line in one of the poems—I’ll let you guess what it was!
I hope readers find themselves reflected in the relationships and places I write about. I want to continue exploring mental health and how it travels with us. I want readers to ask: Where did this bruise form? What does it look like now? How can I hold it with love? I strive to be generous toward the version of myself that endured loss and sadness.
I still don’t know exactly what I want or need in a home, but I know that physical space leaves imprints on me to discover later. Only after I leave a place do I begin to understand its meaning. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t yet found that clarity, but I trust that living attentively will allow these poems to take root in the future.
Cake
we grilled our own meat at Restaurant
108
and drank beers and soju, sitting
Korean-style.
we spent too much time teaching our own language
to learn the language of this new
country.
we leaned on each other to pick from the few
words sown inside our mouths.
we were just kids wondering how to eat.
어떻게[1]?
we planted a new alphabet to help us
sprout through the soil
of Sejong, a province new to us and new
to the country.
with soft-spoken syllables, our courage boils up: 맞아요[2]?
back at home, we said “fork” and
“spoon” or “please” and “thank you”
now we only point and say “여기요, 이거 더 주세요[3]”
our tongues burn, digging for more words when we see a kitchen.
we set the cake down next to our grill.
here we sing 생일 축하합니다[4] instead of happy
birthday.
the song tastes like an expiration date
another birthday I wish I could be home
for, hoping after a year
it will still be waiting for me in the
fridge.
December
after Natalie Diaz
It is December and we must be brave.
In the twinkling lights of The City by
the Bay
I can see where the inlets stop the
power supply.
The city’s howling bridge: what the
engineers call
an
aerodynamic phenomenon. Golden hue majestic
enough to disguise the suicide nets
below.
The tree–always fake until this
year–drops its needles
and clutches the Win Long Hardware
Store string lights.
I braid wicks and pour wax into yogurt
containers,
sift through magazines and slice
dancers away from their stage.
The things I know aren’t easy:
a sibling neck-deep in conspiracy
theories
a father nauseous to the touch
a mother in N95 masks every night.
I curate a found family in my
adulthood.
I fly six hours and visit the house on
Lavender Drive.
The neighborhood streets are full of
namesakes: Wintergreen,
Azalea, Periwinkle, Honeysuckle, Ivy,
Oak, Boxwood.
What was once a small crack in the
sidewalk erupted with weeds.
How can I call this a home if nobody
says,
we
need to let go of what we never had.
If we are what we love, what does love
look like unreturned?
Is it me? I spread love with my tongue
licking envelopes
which is why I still write letters and
buy postcards from every state.
The first incandescent light bulb
illuminated my hometown,
a little known fact by people who still
live there.
This is why I dread going to Stop and
Shop or Dunkin’ Donuts
where I am no longer nameless in front
of my classmate’s kid.
What is happiness if not the absence of
natural disasters–
a lack of power outages and reliable
clean water.
I open entire drawers filled with
hospital soap bars and inkless pens.
I beg my mom to throw them out. But in Cebu, the kids will need this.
I read about Typhoon Odette and how it
chewed up then spit out their houses.
We heat our food on scratched up
Corelle dishes
then transfer it to the dishes from
Mikasa with gold trim.
Once, I made a plate spark like
lightning in the microwave.
I feel like that sometimes: breakable,
explosive.
In between spoonfuls of sinigang, my dad asks me again:
Why
are you still afraid to drive? Meaning, What did we do wrong?
as if Martha’s picture isn’t still on
my wall, the New York Times headline fresh:
Young
Dancers in Speeding Car Leave a Long Trail of Grief.
The cloudless sky beckons the
streetlamp to turn on.
It hiccups until it offers a path from
Lavender Drive
toward Wintergreen Avenue, winnowing
through the neighborhood
to feed the mouth of the Garden State
Parkway.
Somewhere far from Ilaya, Dumanjug,
Cebu,
an American family cleans up the dinner
table,
Saran-wrapping leftover kare-kare and steak.
The placemats, sticky with vinegar,
read
There’s
No Place Like Home.
(Originally published by Firemaker Troublestarter)
Dawn Angelicca Barcelona is a poet from New Jersey. She won the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award (2022) and Epiphany Magazine's Fresh Voices Fellowship (2023). Her work has been published in Epiphany, Tampa Review, Red Ogre Review, Atlanta Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and BRINK. She's currently a candidate in the Litowitz MFA+MA Program at Northwestern University. She is an alumna of the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Fulbright Program, Community of Writers at Olympic Valley, VONA, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Kearny Street Workshop's Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. Her debut chapbook, Roundtrip, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2025. She likes to dance, talk about mental health, and travel via public transportation.
· Website: dawnangelicca.com
· IG: https://www.instagram.com/dawnangelicca/
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Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com
