I begin again with the smallest numbers.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year”

Hello, there, internet! It’s been a while.

I’m Iris. You might remember me from here, or maybe (reaching really far back) even here. I’m a writer, an editor, a lover of books and words; a feminist, an Asian American—a woman of color who writes and for whom faith, poetry, and the pursuit of social justice are inextricably intertwined. I also like to make things: literary “interventions” and art; food and music; drawings and crafts; simple hand-lettering and typography.

It’s been a few years since I last made a habit of keeping a blog, but today is the first day of the lunar new year, a time of sweeping away the dust from the corners and starting afresh. 2015 (the year of the sheep) was a year rife with change for me. I got married; I moved in with my new husband; he got a job across the country from our beloved adopted hometown in Kentucky. Fast forward to December, and we found ourselves road tripping across ten states, through flooding rains and icy mountain peaks, across endless swaths of open prairie and the dusty Nevada desert, to find ourselves here, in California: this old-new state where he grew up, where we went to school, where we first met, where we fell in love, where last summer, we returned to say our vows before the altar of his family’s home church. For me, it’s more than just a return to a familiar place—to shy winter rains, the wet surprise of February citrus dropping to the sidewalk at one’s feet. I’m coming home to the place where I first found my legs as a writer; the place where I discovered Asian American studies and read my first book of poetry by an Asian American poet; and where my first, rudimentary sense of insight into what it means to be a person of color living and writing in America first began to take shape and grow.

But there are new things, too. The streets are more crowded. The water crisis is more urgent. The rent’s even more hair-raising than it ever was before. I am transitioning out of the wonderful job (at a small university press) that I held back in Kentucky and am looking ahead with hope and much hard work as I figure out what’s next for me in my career.

In a way, it seems like a fitting time to return to blogging. I’ve been all over the map, and it’s as good a time as any to come home. I don’t know what this next year will look like, or the exact direction that this blog will eventually take. You might see a little bit of everything: writing updates; snapshots from my daily life; recipes; a sprinkling of DIY projects; thoughts on poetry, language, the business of publishing. Whatever the case may be, I do know that I have lots of ideas for the creative and literary content that I plan to share here, and it’s my intention to push myself in more new directions, creatively and professionally, than I ever have before. So I begin again—with a small breath, a word, a sentence, a first blog post for a brand new year.

Happy year of the monkey. Here’s to blogging and to beginning afresh.

—Iris