Meet Kazue Watanabe
Our long-standing tradition of giving a member the mic before our keynote speaker helps us get to know what our colleagues are working on. Our 5+5+5 guidelines (5 minutes of backstory, 5 minutes to read, and 5 minutes of Q&A) help emerging writers polish their professional skills.
Kazue Watanabe will take the Member Spotlight before our April speaker, John Curl. Get tickets here.
I was born in Hokkaido, a northern island in Japan. I came to the United States by myself in 1994, to attend SUNY Buffalo, where I majored in linguistics. After graduation, I moved to the SF Bay area. I moved to San Francisco in 2005, and that’s when I started writing poems. The initial inspiration came from the streets of San Francisco, the mixture of charming, chaotic, and dirty, and public transportation (e.g., the MUNI bus), and I’ve continued writing since then. I joined the Club last summer.
24TH STREET. MISSION, SAN FRANCISCO
You walk down east on 24th street from 24th and Mission Bart station. You see a tree-lined street that might remind you of somewhere else. Maybe somewhere in South America. Maybe somewhere in Spain. Somewhere anonymous, somewhere far away, but still somewhere familiar. Away from the chaos of hip mission, away from the usual chill and fog of San Francisco, away from the shiny stores and restaurants, this sunny corner of the city, a still unknown favorite secluded for the locals, is an oasis, to those of us who want to hide, who want to acquire solitude at no cost.
What one thing has helped promote your writing most? Meetups like Poets Wanted, the Typewriter group, etc. Note: several of our members host writing meetups monthly; check our calendar!
When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? I never wanted to become anything, I think I wanted to live as myself, whatever that could be. Probably because of the constraints of my native culture, I knew that was very hard to do. So just staying and living true to myself was the goal I had when I was a child and it still is!
If you could truly be the writer you wanted to be, what would your career look like? To be honest I have never envisioned myself as a writer. Writing to me is something very basic and something I just do, just the same way as I eat and take a bath. It’s hard to think of that as a profession. I want it to be like that, since as soon as it becomes a profession, I might get bored and stressed out. The worst thing I could think of is writing to make a living and please other people.
What other writers inspire you? I like satire a lot, and writers like Bret Easton Ellis, Michel Houellebecq, and Thomas Bernhard inspired me greatly.
Kazue is interested in meetups, private critique groups, and open mics.
Meet Kazue when she Opens for John Curl on The Craft and Career of Activist Writing

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