126. Birthing Language w/ Aimee Suzara

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On this episode of Writing Remix, Dan talks with Oakland-based Poet, Playwright, & Educator Aimee Suzara. The beauty of this episodes wildness is raw and poetic, because their conversation goes into the power of multi-hyphenate creative being, how Aimee is fueled by her Filipino-American identity to learn, create, and archive in her work, the impact of flipping the gaze in her research, and re-examining folklore and mythology outside their restrictive parameters.

Aimee speaks on her poetic evolution from her book Souvenir to her forthcoming book Birth Language and its multilingual poetic landscape. Aimee speaks about the role of archival research, ceremony, and invocations play in Birth Language and she unpacks the book’s cover design by artist Malaya Tuyay and its relationship to the  This is the part of the podcast where both Aimee and Dan are swept up in the exchange of ideas, experiences, and Aimee’s reading of two poems that totally leave Dan speechless. There’s an improvisational energy to the episode, a freeness that steers Dan and Aimee into a conversation on mothering and the action of it, and how many of us are mothering outside our traditional knowledge of what it means to mother.

Approximate Rundown

00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

01:47 Aimee’s Background and Work

03:21 Multi-genre Writing Today

04:45 From Souvenir to Birth Language

09:17 Archival Research & Flipping the Gaze

14:36 Myth Folklore & Language Loss

19:25 Teaching Multilingual Remix

21:12 Folklore Water Beings & Birthing

27:45 Poems on Birth & Tricksters

33:42 Manananggal & Birth Rituals

34:36 Hospital Fluorescent Horror

35:34 Poet Breaks Down Form

37:37 Why Mix Folklore

40:35 C-section Detachment

41:41 Translation & Endnotes

44:02 Art Portals & Blood

47:27 Sacred Birth Without Shame

51:35 Revolutionary Mothering

56:49 Where to Find the Book

59:55 Final Thanks & Outro

Filipino-American poet, playwright, performer, and educator Aimee Suzara is the author of the forthcoming poetry book BIRTH LANGUAGE (Tia Chucha Press, Aug 2026), SOUVENIR (Wordtech Editions 2014), which was Willa Award Finalist, and two chapbooks, Finding the Bones and The Space Between (Finishing Line Press 2013 and 2008).
Her poems, prose and plays have appeared in Kartika Review, California Language Association Journal, Orion Magazine, Raising Mothers, Poets.org, Mom Egg Review, and Women Re-Creating Classics (Bloomsbury 2025), among others.

Her commissioned play THE REAL SAPPHO was supported by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Works program and the National Endowment for the Arts. Suzara was a 2025 San Francisco Foundation / Nomadic Press Literary Award winner, and has been awarded fellowships and residencies by Poetry and the Senses at UC Berkeley, Mesa Refuge, the Key West Literary Seminar, A Room of Her Own Foundation, Hedgebrook and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. As a multidisciplinary performer, she has collaborated with dance theater and music ensembles such as Deep Waters Dance Theater and the Grammy-Award-winning Kronos Quartet. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Mills College. 

Based in Oakland, California, she teaches writing at Bay Area colleges and universities and through her coaching business Wild Tongues www.wild-tongues.com, www.aimeesuzara.net

July 11 AAPI playwrights festival in San Jose, CA (link here) https://www.catsasiantheaterscene.org/playwright-festival

Preorder: Birth Language

People, Texts & Podcasts Mentioned in the Episode

“Multidisciplinary work is something I also do a lot. I bring my poetry with dance, theater, or music. I’ve done a lot of collaborations […] because I do have movement practice and [a] musical background too; I have always meshed really well with interdisciplinary theater and performance.”
-Aimee Suzara

“I think for all of my decades of teaching, it’s really been my love to help open up people’s voices, help them discover their voices, and tell their stories.”
-Aimee Suzara

“In the exhibit [at the 1904 World’s Fair] people’s humanity was pretty much denied. They were put on display. They had to perform their lives and their rituals and their culture. But I also saw trends with how that relates to contemporary life, and my own journey, and many of our journeys as children of immigrants, and figuring out who we are, finding ourselves, exoticized, stereotyped, seen invisible or too visible; all of these things.” “
-Aimee Suzara

“That’s a passion for me in writing and teaching and making art, […] flipping the gaze, like the colonial gaze or the oppressive gaze.”
-Aimee Suzara

“Giving birth is such a supernatural thing anyway. It’s so clinical, and it’s also supernatural at the same time.”
-Aimee Suzara

“No matter what way one gives birth, [it] is like [a] near-death experience.”
-Aimee Suzara

“I feel like birthing is one of those things that’s like both bloody and disgusting, and technical and clinical, and it’s frightening, and also like, whoa, it’s like the most spiritual thing ever, you know? And every person in the room starts feeling like they’re an angel or a symbol or a healer or […] reconciling and knowing that that’s all happening.”
-Aimee Suzara

Episode Reflection Questions:

  • Take some time to write your mind, body, spirit reactions to the following terms. Write anything and everythign that comes to mind without editing yourself:
    • Folklore
    • Mythology
    • Birth
  • Our lineages (familial, personal, friendships) are a patchwork of stories. Some of these stories get told so many times they become part of our bloodwork. Write one of these stories. Try to write it as told to you, as you remember it, and try to not fill in any gaps (yet).
  • Take that previous story and begin to fill in the gaps. This can mean in the body of the story, in the space before its beginning, and/or the space afterwards. Be detailed. You can also reimagine it in a whole other form. Maybe it’s a multilingual story, multimodal, multi-genre. Whatever it needs, whatever the story is calling out to be, do that.

126. Birthing Language w/ Aimee Suzara
(Transcript)

126. Birthing Language w_ Aimee SuzaraDownload

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