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 Wendy M. Thompson are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Saint Mary’s College. Thank you for reading.
process (noun)
a series of actions or steps taken in order
to achieve a particular aim
There is always a process.
There is always a process to everything.
After my debut poetry collection Black California
Gold was born, after the initial fanfare
around the pub date, after the requisite social media book unboxing
video, after the increasingly urgent feeling around the need to generate interest, after
the celebratory book launch and the inaugural reading and the formal dinner
with the editorial staff, after the nervous anticipation and the underwhelm of
the first reading,
I felt utterly and disappointingly lost in navigating the post-delivery/post-
publication stage.
How does one continue delivering on a deliverable that has already been delivered?
What does a book mean after it comes out?
Yes, there’s the “It’s now in the world and has its own life” truth,
but what do you do with yourself and your spent and unspent creative energy?
Is the natural progression to become a salesperson with a pitch?
“Hey, I have this new book that…”
Or a performer who reads it, set list after set list, at open mics?
“Can y’all hear me? Good.”
Or does one just crawl back into the comfort of their own solitude and think about the next thing that was already brewing when this now-created thing was being created?
What else is there to say after laboring for so long?
^^^
What I do know:
1. That I will never get used to the sound of my own voice echoing into a microphone while on stage, each word cut from the page and emitted through the architecture. A different tone, frequency, pacing, and mistake every time I am in a different room.
2. That there is a vast portal that opens every time I mention my black migrant grandparents’ South. A directionality that faces every San Francisco Bay Area sunset back toward the boot. They may be buried in Colma, have been for years now, but I am always invited to slip through the void and take a seat at the big table. An earned place facing both the past and destiny.
3. That if a Chinese woman who was born in Burma in 1956 and taught by her in-law women how to cook ham hocks, collard greens, and read beans and rice can acquire the language of two continents, then ushering a book of poems on its journey can only be part of my intended learning at this stage. So, pay attention.
4. That the meaning of “These books ain’t gonna write themselves” is about going through the process.
So, go through it.
to process (verb)
to come to understand or accept something,
especially a difficult event or personal crisis over the course of a period of
time
In Northern California, during the gold rush, placer mining evolved with the frequency and access to the mineral as it was extracted from the earth’s rock surface. It was a testament of evolution:
men came west,
horse and pick axe followed,
Levis, boots, a gun at the hip
women and whorehouses followed,
tong wars, anti-Chinese sentiment,”hang ‘em by their queues!”
gambling and credit and debt systems followed,
panning for gold, borrowed stakes, stolen claims
clear cutting forests and the random and systematic
killing of Native people followed,
“Chop them down!” – for lumber, for wood burning, for being spotted in a clearing with their children
bigger gold claims and statehood followed,
poppy, quail, flag, motto—entering the union as free under the Compromise of 1850
corporate mining and city formation followed,
earth blasted through, Chinatowns burned, a black school
is built along with the founding of Third Baptist Church
coolie labor and gold rush turned gold drought followed,
a golden spike driven at the meeting of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory
Then word of end of the civil war.
It was never conventional or neat. But how it began is always the same:
The men came west.
And in some way, that was how my book began, except instead of tracing
it through my father’s father’s line, I trace my father’s mother’s mother west.
That is how it began.
The women came west. By way of Louisiana. By way of another drought and
another war, in search of different gold.
^^^
I suppose I should say something about my method here. Which is to say, I mostly follow a writing practice that has no clear method. I write about what catches my attention, what I remember, what hurts in the immediate moment that the hurt was created. I write to process my feelings and my reactions to those feelings, and then, my reactions to those reactions. I write as a way to process the accumulation of my experiences; the unit of my life filed into the larger data sequence of black and Chinese historical life in the San Francisco Bay Area: Chinatowns, joss houses, two block radiuses, street corners, bus routes, parking lots, jazz clubs, lakeside parks, pork, fish, steamed, fried, greens, rice, beans, chicken, music, beauty salons, church, Chinese schools. I should state that for a variety of reasons, and due to many different factors, I was not a happy child. That has now amounted to the fact that as an adult, I am not a happy writer. I was not taught to write happily, nor was I ever formally trained as a poet.
I was trained as a scholar, by historians and other interdisciplinary thinkers—mostly women—and you can ask them (they will tell you): I was a very difficult student.
^^^
So, my poetry is hard. My tone is hard. Not angry, like Jamaica Kincaid’s sharp knife cuts that point to anger and disgust at colonial desires and its violent projections, but straight-faced and matter of fact and deadpan like Sigrid Nunez’s childhood recollections of her parents—one Chinese and one German—both absolute and to the bone. (I suggest A Small Place and Feather on the Breath of God as light-heavy reading.) And I tend to use the craft of poetry like a historian, archiving things in the bodies of poems themselves: a poem is a time capsule, a cluster of footnotes, a historical bomb that detonates with sensorial elements of time, event, people, place, searing and scarring the reader with what feels like the thickest parts of a PBS documentary episode or a page from a textbook one is forced to read in sixth period, but is written with more color, more dramatic interludes, more shapes being shifted.
It is not for everybody.
It reminds us that history and memory are brutal, soft fleshed, interrelated moving things.
This is how the first poem, “Black California Gold,” came to be the one that opens the book. A composite charting of the development of the northern part of the state in a way that is brutal, soft fleshed, and interrelated. Moving.
Black California Gold
Directions: Match the following counties to the appropriate descriptions.
a. EL DORADO
b. MARIN
c. SISKIYOU/MODOC
d. SAN FRANCISCO
e. BUTTE
When they cried, “Eureka,” and exclaimed they’d found gold,[1]
Was it the hard muddy nugget scraped from a creek and examined in the cracked palm of a miner far from home who would shave off an edge to pay for whisky and a few minutes inside a whorehouse on top of a heavy freckled blond with a cleft palate called Pig?
Was it the passing of the Government and Protection of Indians Act which forced any and all Native people found loitering or orphaned into servitude?[2]
That man there, caught wandering near the horse stables.
That boy there, taken from under his mother’s skirt after both his parents were shot dead.
Underage children would be rented out, dropped permanently into a corner of a white woman’s kitchen where they would feed small logs as thick as their arms into a wood burning stove in exchange for stale bread and molasses.
Was it the money made during the bounty years by every white man who made a killing: 25 cents per Indian scalp, increasing over time to $5 flat?[3]
_______________
Was it the first catch of hairy faced shrimp dredged out of the mud flats around the San Pablo Bay by the Chinese?
The men who lived and worked at the McNear ranch knew the curve and currency and cartilage of each crustacean. Each shrimp, once sun-dried, would shrink down to the size of a woman’s thumbnail, ready for export to China.[4]
_______________
Was it the capture of Captain Jack after he and 52 Modoc men hid in the lava beds beyond Tule Lake, each black cave a mouth, each jagged ledge a chance, the sweeping formations guarded by long arms of fog leaving the Modoc ghosts to the advancing American military, white men who hunted and fought them like apparitions manifesting through the whiteness of each man’s destiny?
Who did they send but General Edward Canby and Reverend Eleazer Thomas to negotiate peace?
Who was promptly murdered between “We are here to inform you” and “If you agree to these terms”?[5]
_______________
Was it when the bottom of the city fell into the bay, a fireball of sediment and immigration records, leaving hundreds of thousands of houseless people wandering through the rubble as documents and non-documents turned to ash?
This stitch, this loophole, as large as a needle’s eye, would facilitate a flood of men from Guangdong who offered fabricated genealogical constellations to officers at Angel Island, each one suspected of being a paper son.[6]
What's the name of your village? 你的村庄叫什么名字？
Where is it located? 它位于哪里？
_______________
Was it when 50-year-old Ishi[7] emerged from the coyote bush behind a slaughterhouse and white men had him arrested and jailed before transferring him to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley where he was held as a specimen in a glass box in a good western suit?
They considered him a friend, studied him closely as though missing a link. Who is alive now who can ask Waterman and Kroeber how to say
—The gold mining has contaminated the water supply and killed the fish
—My dinner is poison
—The deer have been displaced
—I am sick with this white man’s disease
in Yana?
_______________
Was it when Shoichi Okamoto refused to show his pass while driving a construction truck out of Tule Lake[8] and a white sentry put a bullet through the wall of the Japanese Language School, the Buddhist Church, Narita’s Barber Shop, Matsunaga’s Store, Yoshida’s Produce & Flowers, his body?
Green onions, ranunculus, and strawberries in the fields would wither and rot, their last words a refusal:
to die back into the earth is a freedom pass.
死んで土に還るのはフリーパスだ。
_______________
Was it when the bulldozers razed house after liquor store after apartment building after childhood dream to lay out the Western Addition, erasing block after block of Japanese and black life maps, warehousing citizen enemies and friends in concentration camps in the furthest remote corners of other people’s deserts, leaving streets strewn with half-sold cars and never-created family heirlooms?
Who but tech support will inherit the multi-lane Geary Expressway?[9]
_______________
Was it the sighting of a 1958 Buick occupied by three black teenage boys, stopped at Griffith and Oakdale in Hunter’s Point, their bodies spilling from the vinyl seats at first sight of the police officer who didn’t think twice to shoot on sight?
There is a picture of my father as a boy running away from the camera not unlike Matthew “Peanut” Johnson running down a debris strewn hill away from the police, arms flailing, the joy catching in the thin air pocket between shirt and skin, the worn shoes barely touching the dirt.
Have you ever seen a black boy fly?
Patrolman Alvin Johnson did and shot him X in the back, his body collapsing into the earth like the waste and weeds around it.[10]
_______________
Was it when the white residents of Sherwood Forest (the subdivision but probably also those in the royal merry woods of England) heard that the developer refused to sell 175 Miraloma Drive to Willie Mays, a custom-built split-level 3 bed, 2 bath dream home with a balcony and a side-by-side garage on a street with a name that roughly translates to:
“Look, no n---ers live on this hill with its sweeping bayside views”?
_______________
Was it when Richard Oakes stood on the edge of that rock with its layers of sediment and past lives as
a pelican rookery,
a coastal battery and garrison,
a prison for Confederate soldiers, Hopi captives, and mobsters,
and told television news cameras that
he and fellow occupiers offered the following treaty:
to purchase Alcatraz for $24 and glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island around three hundred years ago?[11]
For this, America would be $24 richer.
_______________
Was it when that white man from small town Indiana took a congregation of displaced, church-fearing, elderly, and single-mothered black folk and their fixed and supplemental incomes, and disappeared them to the furthest corner of South America to build a paradise named after yet another white man’s dream that begins with an airstrip and ends with the children of sharecroppers forever trying to rid their mouths of the acrid taste of grape-flavored cyanide?[12]
_______________
Was it the first super bloom?
Was it the last wildfire?
Was it when the edge of the world, from Crescent City to San Diego, fell into the Pacific in a future of risen seas and a permanently warmed earth?
Was it?
Was it?
Was it?
^^^
A poem, however treated and taught as a tender, thin thing, broken into straight lines, is always capable of sharp knife cuts. And, although I tend to cut into the muscle, meat, and liver of things, I do sometimes write poems that sit quietly and polite, able to engage the mundane.
notes (noun)
short informal letters or written messages:
used to help someone remember something
A poem is a note but more delicate, beautiful by default, always better crafted. There is tremendous, careful attention paid to spacing, line break, word selection, mood, tone, intent. It is a note, meant for expression, not just a practical thing for single use and simple discard. A note can be a simple cataloging, a combination to the safe, a quick assembly of important directions to that place, a quote, a song or book suggestion, an urgent instruction to call or pay or leave or take in, and maybe, in dramatic fashion, on a napkin, a record of _____.
But I’ve often been bad at keeping my messages short. They’re not reminders or minimalist lists but endless returns to a previous note, and remarks about or additions to said note.
^^^
All
my life, I’ve balked at the delicate, at easily breaking nimble, gentle things.
I was, instead, always more interested prone to taking to ugly things—a
father’s perfect cruelty, the milk and the blood, the rings of cut trees, human
settlements closing in on nature, the desire and boys and men folded into a
young girl’s body, a mother’s language as friend turned enemy, what was before
and what is now because of gentrification—and finding them beautiful for how
they can lead us on our own journeys north.
^^^
I craft other notes with less care, mostly to-dos or brainstormed ideas for projects that will never be completed, lists of grocery items for me and my two kids. Bagels, milk, yogurt bars, dino nuggets, flaming hot chips, cranberry juice. With those, there are endlessly wide gaps and forgiving spaces. Nonlinear arrangements of unorganized objects made to be (semi-)organized. There is pure functionality, no mood, no tone, no intent other than the practical need to provide, to remember, to do in that Puritan work ethic way.
And, yet.
I note as a descendant of Louisiana migrants in the poem “Black Southern Migrant Gifts”:
1. I am one of the branches of my father’s family tree that has stood for centuries, each ring in its core, a memory:
( this one was the time we learned to read in secret from a book that told us we were evil
(( this was when we swiped that ornate candlestick we were made to polish daily and used it as a bargaining chip when we were captured after running away
((( this was when the master’s baby got sick and almost died and we were beaten because he thought we had poisoned it
)))) this was when we joined an insurrection because we knew we were human and wanted the master to pay in blood
I note as a child of a Chinese mother born in Burma in the poem “My Mother in English”:
1. Being trilingual, my mother is capable of understanding and making herself understood in:
1. Mandarin
2. English
3. Burmese
albeit in varying degrees.
However, for me, her eldest child and a native English speaker, Mandarin clangs through my body like a broken toy. It scrapes unfamiliar-like against the sides of my mouth.
What? Huh? What? 什么? Huh? 什么？
I note that the trees remember in the section break “In Oakland, there was once a forest of old-growth coastal redwoods”:
1. In Oakland, there was once a forest of old-growth coastal redwoods:
We lived through war, gold rush, earthquake, fire.
We stood and watched the city ex p a n d.
Then we were felled.
Our grandchildren
became
the backyard
neighbors
of rich white
people
who drink red wine at
night.
These notes form an important reference to history, genealogy, debt, language, and witness. Not that I’d ever forget. But we did, once, twice, a thousand times, forget the names of our people, bought and sold and freed and fraught, didn’t we? We did, once, twice, a thousand times, forget the language of our mothers when the convenience, luxury, and power of English urged us to throw them away, didn’t we? We did, once, twice, a thousand times, forget about the memories in the trees when we watched them burn along with the houses, didn’t we?
These poems keep a record.
These poems allow me to list.
This poetry allows for the process to be processed.
That is a note.
[1] Gold found at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California on January 24, 1848 would trigger the California Gold Rush.
[2] Enacted by the first session of the California State Legislature on April 22, 1850 to force any Native person deemed to be orphaned or loitering into servitude also determining employment and punishment terms.
[3] In 1856, the State of California issued a bounty of $0.25 per scalp which would increase to $5.00 in 1860.
[4] Chinese immigrant laborers worked on the land of John McNear who operated a dairy ranch and brick manufacturing plant in addition to shrimping in the San Pablo Bay, at one point exporting 90% of shrimp harvests to China.
[5] An expansion of the Gold Rush area into Modoc territory escalated and led to the Modoc War which went on between Modoc people and the US Army from 1872 to 1873 with armed conflict taking place in northern California and southern Oregon and ended with the execution of Captain Jack and three of his warriors. The remaining 153 members of Captain Jack’s band were sent to Oklahoma and held as prisoners of war until 1909.
[6] Paper sons refers to the buying of documents belonging to Chinese Americans who were US citizens that accelerated with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1906 earthquake. The Angel Island Immigration Station was established in 1910 to interrogate immigrants who were required to sit in sessions during which they were required to provide detailed testimony which was then cross-examined.
[7] Ishi, c. 1861-1916.
[8] Per the report of the investigation committee, Okamoto was confronted at Gate #4 by a white soldier who, upon being shown a pass, felt insulted by Okamoto’s tone, told him to step out of the truck and follow the soldier to the back where he assaulted Okamoto with a rifle before shooting him from four to feet away at 2 pm on May 24, 1944.
[9] Beginning in 1956, it would take around 15 years to complete the Geary Expressway, a multilane thoroughfare that dug deep through excavated neighborhoods before terminating close to the Cliff House above Ocean Beach.
[10] The murder of Matthew “Peanut” Johnson who was shot in the back on September 27, 1966 in Hunters Point, a neglected community comprised of old shipyard worker housing and deprived of food access, jobs, and amenities, led to the Hunters Point Rebellion. My father, who lived on the other side of San Francisco, was eleven years old.
[11] Peter Minuit, a Director of the Dutch North American colony of New Netherland, helped facilitate the purchase of New Amsterdam (Manhattan) for the Dutch from the Lenape and Pequot people in 1626 for “60 guilders worth of trade” or, in common account, $24.
[12] Jonestown, or the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, was an integrated settlement established in the tropical rainforest of Guyana by Jim Jones, a liar, an abuser, a preacher, and a faith healer, in 1973 who led the Peoples Temple, a San Francisco-based cult. There, Jones would orchestrate the suicide of over 900 members.
Wendy M. Thompson is a poet, writer, and historian of the San Francisco Bay Area and 20th century America. Her debut poetry collection Black California Gold (Bucknell University Press), maps out life in the Bay Area during the 1980s and 1990s and was a finalist for the 2025 Golden Poppy Awards. She is based in Oakland, California and is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at San José State University.
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