Susan Kiyo Ito
Is It Worth It to Tell the Secrets?
January 16, 2025
4 PM PST | 5 PM MST | 6 PM CST | 7 PM EST
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My memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, is a story that took over 30 years to write and publish. I grew up as a biracial person adopted by Japanese American parents, and I always knew I was different from them. I searched for and found my biological mother when I was in college, and we began a tumultuous relationship that has spanned over four decades. Part of our unspoken “agreement” was that I would never tell her story, and it was an often painful tug-of-war as I lived with being a secret for most of my life. Writing has been a way of forging my identity, and sorting through the many puzzle pieces of a history I did not fully understand.
I have always been a writer, and this story has preoccupied the central narrative of my existence. I began by writing this story in tentative steps, through poetry, and then as a fictional MFA thesis, two drafts of a novel, a solo performance piece, until I finally realized that it needed to be a memoir.
Putting this memoir into the world has been an enormous and terrifying leap. The rewards of sharing this story have been surprising and validating, and the personal risks I took have weighed heavily on me. I will discuss the long road to completing this project, and what I have learned in its aftermath.
In this presentation, I will discuss:
- How I found perseverance and patience when I felt my book project was “taking too long.”
- How I realized when my story was truly “finished” – when I saw the narrative arc finally touching down.
- How I used photographs and decades-old journal entries to inspire my writing and also to keep me honest. Journals can be great fact-checkers!
- The joys and challenges of a year long “book tour.”
- Unexpected heartbreak, surprises, moving moments that occurred after the book was published.
Bio
Susan Kiyo Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen, The Bellevue Literary Review, Agni, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and Blue Mountain Center. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She teaches at the Mills College campus of Northeastern University.
Website: http://www.thesusanito.com
