Born and raised in Los Angeles, Leanne Ogasawara studied philosophy with the great Hubert Dreyfus at U.C Berkeley and Japanese Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Where has the time gone? She spent most of the past twenty years in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan where she worked as a freelance Japanese translator and sometimes writer and student of Tea. Now, back in LA, she still loves traveling –though mostly in her imagination via books, art and music. Her creative writing has appeared in the Millions, Michigan Quarterly Review, Kyoto Journal, River Teeth/Beautiful Things, Hedgehog Review, Entropy, the Dublin Review of Books, aPleiades Magazine and Gulf Coast Journal. Her short “Bare Bones” was the winner of the 2020 Calvino Prize, judged by Joyce Carol Oates. > Email: leanneogasawara [at] icloud.edu
Website: http://www.leanneogasawara.com
by Leanne Ogasawara I've been dreaming of al-Andalus my entire life. I'm not even sure where I first heard the name–and indeed, the name is like a one-word poem. A magical incantation; for it is enough just to say it–or better, to whisper it. Al-Andalus. I might have learned about the glories of Muslim-ruled Spain…
by Leanne Ogasawara When I was a young, I don't remember why, but I scribbled a poem by Osip Mandelstam on a piece of thick, mauve-color Nepalese mulberry paper. And as I wrote it, I thought to myself, "This is a poem to cross a desert with." Depriving me of sea, of a space to…
by Leanne Ogasawara Once upon a time, the world was full of miracles. And oh, that was the miracle of those two spires of Chartres Cathedral! Separated in time by some four hundred years, the spires can still be glimpsed past fields of wheat, rising up over the low town; a town which itself has…
by Leanne Ogasawara It was 2011. I knew it wasn't going to be easy moving back in with my mom after all those years away. Two decades was a long time and now I had a little boy in tow. But at least it was home, I thought. My son would be going to the…
by Leanne Ogasawara Einstein was adamant. He did not want a large public funeral. He wanted to be immediately cremated with his ashes scattered before anyone had time to make a fuss. Fair enough, right? Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson reminds us of the 1727 funeral of Sir Isaac Newton. Like Einstein, Newton was a superstar…
by Leanne Ogasawara I wrote about Piero della Francesca's the Flagellation of Christ in my post about my botched Piero Pilgrimage of 2015. A woman of many mangled pilgrimages, this one continues to haunt me. Perhaps Piero's most famous picture, there are numerous explanations for what is being depicted. The conventional understanding of the left…
by Leanne Ogasawara This is a true story. I first noticed Marco a few years ago when he was playing in a local university orchestra here in town. It was around Easter. My mom happened to be playing as an extra second violinist in the orchestra since they didn't have enough student musicians. And while…
by Leanne Ogasawara There were not many things that drew me back to America, but the thought of joining a bookclub seemed like one potential perk of moving back. I am not sure if bookclubs exist to this extent in other countries, but in the US they are incredibly popular! More and more people I…
by Leanne Ogasawara Does anyone have any good eclipse stories? My 2017 expedition had its start in a conversation about supernova. "Wouldn't it be amazing to look up one night and see a supernova as bright as the full moon?" I said to him. An astronomer, he looked worried and began mumbling about how hard…
bby Leanne Ogasawara I admit, the only reason I picked the book up off the shelf was because of the photograph of Mont Saint-Michel on the cover. Ah, Mont Saint-Michel. We had just returned from the legendary floating island, and I had found myself utterly obsessed by the place. A fairy castle rising up out…
by Leanne Ogasawara A man cloaked in myth, what if I told you that many of the stories we tell ourselves about Galileo are simply untrue? That not only did the great scientist not drop any balls off the top of the Tower of Pisa but he didn't invent the telescope either. And not only…
by Leanne Ogasawara It has been three long years since I was last on the summit of Mauna Kea. But at last, we were heading back up the mountain to see my husband's new instrument being installed on one of the telescopes at the KECK observatory. An experimental astro-physicist at Caltech, he and his team…
by Leanne Ogasawara It is every astronomer's dream. To be granted your own island, you are then given practically unlimited funds so to be able to design, build and run your own observatory. Who could have such luck, you are probably wondering? Well, Tycho Brahe, who stands as one of the most fascinating and quirky…
by Leanne Ogasawara Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg had a wonderful piece in a recent edition of the New York Review of Books about "the trouble with quantum mechanics." Trouble? You ask….? Well according to science writer Tom Siegfried, "Quantum mechanics is science’s equivalent of political polarization." He says: Voters either take sides and argue with…
by Leanne Ogasawara Are we deranged? In recent days, watching friends and family reeling over the Trump win, I keep thinking that climate disaster will be a disaster-of-denial just like this. Shell-shocked and busy blaming, who will be in a position to lead the way forward when the unthinkable happens? Why do we remain in…
by Leanne Ogasawara For years now, I have been dreaming this dream that our national park rangers would rise up and lead a coup. Whenever I used to return to the US from Japan or Hong Kong -it was always so appalling flying into LAX (a truly banana republic experience), our infrastructure seemed as shabby…
by Leanne Ogasawara About five hundred miles north of Saigon lies Vietnam's old imperial capital city of Hue. Famous for its walled palace set along the shimmering Perfume River, it stands as a 19th century Vietnamese emperor's imperial dream of China. In days past, the beautiful palace moat was filled with tall, fragrant lotus blossoms.…
by Leanne Ogasawara Two months ago, I wrote a post in these pages called The Romance of the Red Dictionaries. It was about the possibility of romance without a shared language; that language can make things more complicated and, well, less, fun and romantic! In my case at least, things went downhill fast the more…
by Leanne Ogasawara Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness. —Italo Calvino Just a short walk down the portico-covered arcades of Via Roma leads to one of the most elegant Baroque squares in Turin– if not, in all…
. by Leanne Ogasawara On the day of the second presidential debate, my mom and I decided that it would be just too lewd for my son to watch. I suppose I should mention my son is 14! Never in my life, have I seen anything like the insane circus that is surrounding this presidential…