Ya-Wen Ho - Tapa Notebooks

solace ladder	settlement	Whāia te iti kahurangi	terramind	grate danger	small 團聚 (reunion)	whose hot ashes

eat affordable love	[script]	push/pull	B	ack ack ack	heel guard	&body &body power

Ya-Wen Ho is a letterpress researcher, graphic designer and poet currently living in and working from Wellington. She is part of the Chinese Scholars' Studio project at Wai-te-ata Press, Victoria University of Wellington, where she is cleaning and archiving a unique collection of Chinese metal type once used to print the New Zealand Chinese Growers Journal (1949-1972). The Wai-te-ata Press' heritage type restoration project is committed to telling the stories of local Chinese, so she also researches the Chinese New Zealand history of the Growers Journal, contextualising it within broader Chinese-language print histories.

Always seeking to bridge academia and broader communities, Ya-Wen practises as a poet and freelance graphic designer. Her first book of poetry last edited [insert time here] was published by Tinfish Press (Hawaii, 2012). Literary awards include a Horoeka/Lancewood Reading Grant in 2015 and the Ema Saiko Poetry Fellowship at New Zealand Pacific Studio in 2016. She designs print matter, from community zines to the first English-Mandarin bilingual edition of 25 Best New Zealand Poems (Wai-te-ata Press, 2016). A Taipei-born New Zealander, she works bilingually between Mandarin and English, merging the two languages in performance.

Ya-Wen writes:

I remember my experience with the Tapa Notebook vaguely, the same way I remember every other experience at that time. It was a dark time: I was grappling with what it meant to be clinically diagnosed with depression and had just started antidepressants. Familiar modes of expression, once fluent and abundant, felt impoverished and impossible. I felt I had no words worth putting forth into the world. I still often feel that way. Walking around Wellington with a blank notebook, a stick of graphite and my physical self freed me from my own expectations of worth - I was simply recording and lightly curating together letterforms which caught my eye. The notebook filled quickly when I gave myself permission for it to be a faithful record of walking, existing, and still loving letters while feeling capable of not very much.

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Photo credit: Dennis Thorpe