Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ida Yoshinaga. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Ida thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What sort of legacy are you hoping to build. What do you think people will say about you after you are gone, what do you hope to be remembered for?

One of the early mentors I had, a marine science engineer and state policy advisor who specialized in everything from nuclear submarines to ocean thermal energy to the international law of the sea, was what we’d today call a disruptor–but back then, we just would say “iconoclast,” “genius,” “mad scientist.” As one of my first bosses, he told me when I was 18 that you should live your life backwards. That is: Do all the important things you dream of doing in life first, then you can get to the other, practical stuff later. So I had a backwards pathway–I lived overseas in my 20s to explore the land and history of my ancestors, then spent my thirties researching the legacy and political impact of Japanese American settlers in Hawai’i. I learned who I was in terms of genealogy, legacy, and social responsibility in the world, the US, and the Hawaiian islands. In my early 40s, I realized that I needed to take myself as an intellectual seriously. I’d been a pretty bright kid as a teen, but grew up in the countryside on an island, and didn’t know anything from anything beyond the imaginative stories and comics I’d read. So through my life, I prioritized lifelong learning over accumulating money and status. By the time I got out of my 40s, finishing up a slow, savory decade in a Ph.D. program in cultural studies and creative writing, I realized that I wanted to diversify both the production of science-fiction and fantasy genre tales, and the ways that screenwriters get recruited, trained, and mentored as screen storytellers. I was 56 when I was selected as a tenure-track assistant professor of literature, media, and communication at once of the best public science and technology universities in the nation–because it had a science-fiction studies specialization, and due to my passion, I’d become moderately known in that field–and began my journey, one that usually starts in one’s 20s or 30s, to conducting research and writing books on what I love and what I care about. Most people my age start to look back and question their legacy; but for me, that’s been my whole voyage, thanks to that out-of-the-box-thinking scientist.

Ida, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I teach cultural screenwriting and genre blending in creative-writing and short-fiction writing classes for my school of literature, media, and communication. Most people think of the fantastic genres as having set character types, storyworlds, motifs and iconographies, and narrative structures–you know, Star Wars or The Hunger Games for science fictional futuristic dystopias; The Lord of the Rings or Beauty and the Beast for fantasy or folklore/fairytale worlds of magic and myth; The Shining or The Haunting of Hill House for the spiraling fear journeys of horror and the Gothic; etc. We all hear the titles and automatically know of who’s the protagonist, what their journey is, what the audiovisual screen space, or written-out-on-the-page description, might make us see or imagine of that world.

But I teach my university students to bend and break the boundaries, to draw promiscuously and wildly from all genre modes–stories from legends and fables of their ancestors; gossip from their ethnic and regional communities; well-known folk knowledge in their workplaces that’ve been transformed into industry tales; information gleaned from groups and generations of cultural members. Screenplays can reflect the richness and complexity of the real world, not just topically (what it’s about) but also formally (how a story unfolds, how the teller orients towards specific audiences, and simply put, style). Fantastic genres can be mixed, blended, with other ways of telling stories–regional tall tales, the neighborhood story that goes from house to house, how-to guidelines on making or producing products rightly (or badly) within an employment market. Fantastic and speculative genres hybridize into digital narratives such as massive online games but can also float across old storytelling technology such as stageplays and radio (aka podcasts these days).

When I teach film studies or TV studies, I get my students who wish to tell mass-media stories to imagine narrative artists such as directors and screenwriters as cultural ancestors with aesthetic traditions. Of course it’s important to understand the work–such as a specific movie or particular episodes from streaming series–to be able to “read” a film, story arc, or documentary closely. It’s also critical to grasp the auteur (artist with a distinct style or set of messages), as well, as films schools and film theories for the past decades have celebrated and emphasized. But most important is getting to grapple with the deeper movements or traditions of artistry–what does it mean that dozens, hundreds, even thousands of filmmakers or mediamakers have selected this set of onscreen styles (mise en scene), these camera or editing techniques, this performance tradition, this subject or topic of the movie or series, that genre mix (for instance, sci fi mixed with animation mixed with Latinx folk knowledge), and where does that tradition come from, in terms of human expressive need?

I think I learned this from my long time studying under not just professors of creative writing in multiple genres–I can teach not just fiction and scriptwriting, but poetry, creative non-fiction, and political essay writing with a fair amount of expertise–but also under community activists, cultural healers, non-research-university college teachers (I worked for almost a decade at an open-access community college), and other pathbreakers in their fields. I spent a lot of time aiding elderly people and their middle-aged adult children with aging and death — getting to the big questions of existence, such as what it all means, how to be human, and why we’re here, fairly early in my own adulthood, before attending to career selection and pruning. The “living life backwards” directive has brought me insight, intuition, confidence, and an unrepentant, marveling look back on what my quiet little path has been.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

One of the deepest human impulses is to take whatever materials we have–memory, voice, our bodies, printing presses, radio, small and large screens, interactive gaming platforms, the Internet–and turn them into ways of expressing meaning over the human condition. About who we are, what we value, what we’ve been through. Crafts and artistic practices, each with their own aesthetic standards for different genres and media, are so wonderful to unravel, to try to understand–and they’re all around us!

As someone who both teaches art (cinema arts, broadly speaking, including videogames, streaming/cable, YouTube/TikTok, as well as TV and film) and how to make it (largely scriptwriting and fiction writing), I’m constantly looking at other media platforms, other narrative and aesthetic traditions, to try to grasp how things are made. Humans are remarkable spiritual and inventive and surprising in their artistry, if you pay attention to the past record, the archives, of expression. I spent a whole year or two as a doctoral student of film looking at the use of color in make-up art and in fashion, on TV or whatever movie or cable show I was watching. I did not understand, having grown up as a geeky book-obsessed girl who did not care about such things, the semiotic power that make-up and fashion wielded. It was an historic power, a gendered power, a deeply performative and expressive language coded in ways that had been foreign to me. But while studying the great directors’ and movies, I really focused on that, and the language gradually revealed itself to me over time. Now it is true that the vast majority of commercial arts witnesses a lot of waste: Of talent, of production, of creativity. They’re often employed towards stupid or prejudicial or exploitative ends. So the other part of the creative life is to cherish your labor as an artist and try to give or sell it to a venue, an employer, a media, that properly honors and values it.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Just to be courageous, help people, and learn. Do the right thing, not the easy thing. These are all harder goals to achieve than they seem! But they come with a lot of joy, because the junk has been discarded once you move away from personal fears and attachments, acquisition and ambition impulses, and selfishness.

Image Credits
Kenrick H. Yoshida