Voice to Text

Izumi Shikibu had an affair that soured her reputation. Then she wrote a diary about the romance which everyone read for the sultry details and the love poems. But she also wrote it to obfuscate the gossip, to put her story her way. This was in Kyoto, then called Heian, in the 10th century.  Because Shikibu wrote it as a diary, everyone read it as true. It’s a mix of poetry and prose, or what is sometimes called an uta nikki or poetry journal.

I’ve been writing a journal while out walking mostly in Berkeley and Oakland, anytime that I’m out in the world. There’s entries from Mount Tamalpais and Kichijoji.  For the journal, I speak into the notes app on my phone which makes a voice to text transcription. This was a breakthrough for me in trying to write as a new parent. The way I used to write when I had both time and space, required time and space. Now, I write out in the world while doing all of my other things. Sometimes transportation, sometime chores but most often night walks.

The transcriptions are full of mistakes and mishearing which could be fodder for poems but what’s been the most energetic so far is the layering of place and story that the memos record. They start and end mid-thought and mid-walk.  Most of the memos vanish into a constantly growing digital heap that will last as long as I keep paying storage fees. But I’ve revised a few of them into poems. With Izumi Shikibu in mind, they mix the real and imagined in a record that tells not my life but my story.

Visual images of the transcriptions, notes of the revision process, and a few finished entries (or poems) are in the show Mother at 120710 Gallery in Berkeley, California. This show opens January 10, 2026 with a reception from noon-5pm and will be open to the public for the month of January.