Introduction

At the end of the second grade my family moved from Kailua, Oahu to Idaho Falls, Idaho where we lived for a year and a half. The house we rented for the first three months was huge and haunted—white wooden siding, green linoleum floors, dingy beveled-glass doors leading from one echoey room to another. The house sat on an acre of land, squat between an overgrown apple orchard on one side and train tracks on the other. At night, while we slept, the train roared past, rattling the glass doors for what seemed like hours. Some mornings, droplets of water slid down the mirror over the fireplace in the living room. I slept on a mattress on the floor of the dining room with my younger siblings tucked in beside me. We held onto the dining table legs when the trains passed. We believed if we weren’t gripping tight enough, we’d end up carried out the windows by the force of the whooshing cars. It was our first summer away from the ocean. I remember sitting under the apple trees, waiting for the trade winds, hoping for an apple to bloom from the branches above me and fall into my hands. But an apple never dropped. I don’t think any grew, either. My parents didn’t know how to live in a place like Idaho, let alone in a sprawling house in the middle of an apple orchard, so far away from their old life with all of its humid familiarity. Pruning the apple trees and spraying for aphids and mites with the hope of those trees bearing fruit was not something they thought about. Those apple trees were last on their list of things to take care of—there was too much work, and too many kids, and even less money to be able to do anything extra. But I loved those apple trees. I loved the possibility of those apple trees. I was from ocean and mountain, from sweet lychee fruit and mangos, their skin pierced with

my mother’s fingernail and then peeled back so we could stand there in our swimsuits and eat the insides like we would an ice cream cone. At our new house, with its dusty blue sunshine and the way I could see the heat rise off both the grass and the train tracks, those apple trees were a sign my life could change. I was only eight, but I already knew the ache of wanting out of my old life and into a new one. That summer in Idaho Falls was when I started living my life inside of stories. With enough space in both house and yard, my imagination grew. I understood stories could do more than take me into a different life; stories made it possible for me to live a different life. There was the story of the girl who lived in the middle of an apple orchard, and there was the story of a girl who was still back home in Hawaii. When one of those lives got too much, I could close the page and wake up in the other. The few months we lived there still feel like a dream place. When I think of that house, I smell apples. The house we live in now has two gnarled and unwieldy apple trees deep in the backyard. Our first summer in the house, I wanted to be the person my mother must have imagined herself to be all those summers ago; harvesting baskets overflowing with apples, slicing their sweet flesh thin as fish scales to build into a pie. But like my mother, and much like the apple trees next to the lonely white house in the middle of staying put and going anyplace else, the apples never grow past the hard, green ball stage, or bloom from the branches unpecked or un-wormed. The apples lie on the grass in the backyard with their scrunched up faces, gnawed at by the dogs or the two deer we’ve seen on occasion since we started staying home back in March. Eve Ensler says apples are the fruit of memory. In her retelling of the story of Eve and Adam, Eve eats the apple because she wants to remember what came before the story that’s told—in her retelling apples become a portal into the possibility of another story—not one of temptation and sin, but one of joy and intelligence, of power and agency. Of love. I like to think of apples that way—by eating one I can choose which story I want to tell. Apples can be the possibility of something else.

I’ve been home since March 15; ten days before Idaho’s stay at home order was issued. On my first trip to the grocery during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, I bought a 2

bag of apples because I knew they would last for weeks in the refrigerator. They were something fresh and healthy we could eat, when we had no idea how long the stay at home orders would last, how long it would be before we were living in the world before this one. Those apples were a way of saying—this is how it is right now, but also, can’t you imagine what else it could be? When I taught in the Cabin’s Writers in the Schools program, I started each residency by talking with my students about their job as writers. I told them every poem is an imaginative act. Every story is an imaginative act. I told them the power of the imagination is this—you’re able to visualize things in your mind that aren’t there. They learned the imagination’s language is the image, and an image is anything perceivable by one of the five senses. They knew writers used the five senses to be more alive on the page and in the world. Between my weekly visits to their classrooms, they went out and tried it. They paid attention to the world. They wrote. And they came back breathless. They imagined a story one way, and then imagined it another. Reading the pieces in this year’s WITA anthology is a way to remember the promise of something extraordinary in the ordinariness of an apple. Reading these pieces is to live in the memory of what we were doing before this global pandemic—when we were out and vibrant in the world—the temptation of a conversation with a friend, or dinner at a restaurant, tucked in the dark at a movie theater, or standing in a classroom full of writing students. Each poem or story uses the apple as a way into something concrete; sometimes funny, often times heartbreaking: from a memory of someone lost, to the desire for someone else, the hope and regret of things said or ignored, all of them grappling with the miracle of an everyday object seen for the first time. There is still so much unknown about what’s going to happen once the world starts opening back up. So we tell stories. My friend K believes this pandemic can be the portal to something new, and this is the moment to plant the seeds of possibility to begin to live into the world we want right now. There are the stories we wrote in the world before this, and the ones we can tell once we’re on the other side.

BLOSSOM

Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.

SOLOMON