KYLE M. JOHNSON
STAFF WRITER

On Thursday, April 26, authors Craig Santos Perez and Susan M. Schultz performed readings of their respective works for the final Community and World Literary Series event of the semester.

After being introduced by Mark Wallace, Perez stood before the audience and requested that everyone in attendance boo and heckle him, all of which he filmed to post on his Facebook.

Before beginning his reading, Perez shared how he moved from Guam to California when he was in high school, and that he used poetry as a means to stay connected to his culture.

“That’s why poetry’s so important to me; it kind of connects me to home,” Perez said.

The first poem read by Perez, from his unfinished, third book, was largely about SPAM, the canned precooked meat product, and its significance in his culture. However, Perez later revealed that the poem consisted entirely of found language, meaning that none of the words in the poem were his own, but a compilation of phrases he found while researching the product.

Perez then read from his book “Unincorporated Territory [Saina].” He introduced the excerpts to be read as influenced by paddling classes he took when he was an adolescent, and the important role of canoes in his culture.

Wallace then introduced Schultz, who spoke to the audience about the influence her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease has had on her writing, namely her books “Dementia Blog” and “Memory Cards,” the latter of which consists of prose poems that fit on index cards.

For Schultz’s first reading, she read from a transcript of dialogue between two Alzheimer’s patients in a clinic. The piece is titled “Love in the Time of Alzheimer’s.”

She then shared about reading primarily two children’s books to her kids, “Are You My Mother?” and “A Mother for Choco,” and how she decided to create a hybrid reimagining of the two to tell the story of her own mother.

Schultz concluded her reading with selections from “Dementia Blog” and “Memory Cards.” She stated how it is interesting that her obsession with memory has led to her writing about forgetting.

The readings were followed by a Q&A in which members of the audience and the featured authors spoke about such topics as the use of social networking and blogging to expose one’s work to the public, the form and placement of words in poetry and the balance of language when writing bilingually.

Photos: Left, Craig Santos Perez and Right, Susan M. Schultz. Photos by Kyle M. Johnson.