Feliz Lucia Molina with Alli Warren: April 11, 2019

After an introduction by Steve Dickison, Feliz Lucia Molina speaks briefly on her lifelong friendship with Alli Warren before contextualizing her reading of her unpublished manuscript Thundercastle as the successor to her book Undercastle. She then reads "Heterotopia in the Valley," "Hello Kitty Virgin Mary," "Poem for our 8-ball Emoji," "House Hunters," "Marriage a fragment," "Dad sends update about Fatima," "Pauline," "Online there was an endless dog," "Lemons," "The Pigs in the Bahamas are Dispersed," and "Please listen to 'I'll Remember' by Madonna while eating at Denny's or Sizzler," all from Thundercastle.

Feliz Lucia Molina and Alli Warren discuss Molina's work, and take questions from the audience. Prompted by Warren's observation of Molina's overall creative work as having a preoccupation with place, Molina speaks on home and its various physical and digital incarnations. Warren and Molina comment on their experiences growing up as artists in non-artistic families. Molina speaks of her time as a Kundiman Fellow as a formative moment in creating Asian American artistic community and seeing Asian American representation in the creative sphere. Molina and Warren discuss social media's impact on interpersonal communication as that of an accelerant on capitalist structures of social relation. Molina talks about her own social media accounts as a platform for both personal reflection and artmaking, describing her "emojiscapes" photo series. She then discusses the connections between her training in clinical social work, her Catholic upbringing, and her creative work. The conversation ends with an anecdote Molina shares about the creation of the cover art, by artist Photographer Hal, of Tokyo, for her book Undercastle, and the significance of the titling of that book's sequel, Thundercastle, presently in manuscript.