Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m a writer and also what could broadly be called a cultural worker. More specifically, I primarily write plays and poems, sometimes essays, and I run education programs for the Nikkei National Museum. I’m a fourth-generation Anglo-Japanese Canadian, and I’ve lived most of my life in the Lower Mainland of BC, as has most of my family. My paternal grandmother was born in Steveston in 1920, and her family went back and forth between there and Japan in the decades preceding, so in my family, the relationship to this area began well over a hundred years ago. My mother’s people came here by way of England and Newfoundland.
How did you come to the project of The New Canadians?
Many things in my life converged to form the original idea for the show. When I graduated from UBC—where my coursework in
