Julia Robinson Shimizu, was once described as a ‘Clark Kent in pumps.’ Her long career as a non-profit leadership professional kept her suited up during long days spent in service.
Homeless men and women, abused children, teens in foster care, people living with HIV/AIDS, formerly incarcerated, people living with mental illness, and underserved and disenfranchised communities have called to her. Determined to save the world by day, by night Julia continues to write as if her life depends on it. And of course, it does. As any writer knows, creative work is the food of the soul, and no day is complete without one fine sentence, one more chapter, one moment finally alive on the page.
Julia's subdued personal style, she actually often wears pumps, flies by the wayside as she launches into the inner lives of characters with a uniquely urgent voice. In 2017, she wrote and performed a One Woman Show, "WACKY" about loving someone with a mental illness. She has published a collection of interviews with formerly homeless individuals, "All it Takes is a Home." She has also performed excerpts from her collection of essays and stories, Screaming and Stomping. Quotes from her memoir, Drowning as Fast as I Can was included in an exhibt at the International Museum of Women 2008.
Above and beyond her professional work in non-profit communication and public relations, she dedicates a significant portion of her time to volunteer service and to charity. Her 2008 Charity Skydive helped to raise nearly $10,000 for environmental education. She has served on non-profit boards including NAMI-SFV (National Alliance on Mental Illness, San Fernando Valley), DOVIA (Directors of Volunteers in Agencies) and Los Angeles Women's Theatre Festival and has dedicated years as a Pro-Bono Communications Consultant for NAMI-LACC and NAMI Walks Los Angeles. She actively advocates for the rights of individuals living with severe mental illness (#MentalIllness #EndStigma), and against the prevalance of Gun Violence.
Julia's work is most often focused on short form narrative non-fiction. "The art of the essay. The beauty of truth. The creative eye of the storm. When I am not writing, editing or spell-checking, I am reading, taking long walks or listening to opera or blues."
Published work and other links
Never say NO to cake.
"The difficult we do right away. The impossible may take a little while."
Memories are our treasure, each moment our creation. Now is the time.
How do any of us arrive at this moment in our lives?
Hey baby, baby where you been last night? You got your hair all tangled and you aint talkin right
Robert JohnsonAll tangles, tangles - and tangles my thoughts of love (kamino midaregami katsuomoi midare omoi midaruru)
Yosano AkikoI ain't good-looking. And my hair ain't curled
Bilie HollidayWhat else could explain the intersection of paths of a wandering woman with a skin-of-the-teeth high school education from the blue collar suburbs of Washington DC and the soul-searching, educated son of a post-expressionist painter / professor of art from Tokyo, Japan?
Ichiro didn’t fit in Japan. He worshiped The Rolling Stones, Andy Warhol, Alan Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau and Yukio Mishima. I didn’t fit in anywhere. I worshiped movie matinees, evenings with vodka and Billie Holiday.
When Ichiro announced his intent to love me, he gave me a full set of Yukio Mishima's Tetrology, "The Sea of Fertility." I was delighted not just with the promise of love but with the realization I had convinced this fascinating man I could read.
We married, had our treasured only child and the cats and the dog and a picket fence and I was ready at last to complete my long-abandoned education. I quit my job, and decided to study Japanese language. I wanted to understand Ichiro better. I wanted to learn his language. I laugh now that we can at least argue in two languages.
At UCLA, I read modern and classical Japanese literature and became a fan of poet Yosano Akiko, whose major work "Midare-gami (Tangled Hair)," was published in the 20th century but written in ancient classical form.
One of my favorite songs is a blues tune by Robert Johnson, "Hey, baby...baby where you been last night? You got your hair all tangled and you ain't talkin' right..." I wondered at the intersection of that and Yosano Akiko's poem "Tangled Hair (midaregami)" It refers to a passionate night with a lover, maybe a husband. Robert Johnson's refrain reflects the betrayal of a lover sleepless with worry. The intersection of passion, blues, tanka, American cultural art forms and Japanese classical literary forms turned my head around.
My Japanese literature professor always referred to the poet in Japanese naming convention but in standard Western format, she would be Akiko Yosano. For her particular history, it matters that family name comes first. She was not just a wife, but a second wife who stole her husband away from another woman and carried him through a long and devoted marriage that defined her career. She was also a working mother (they had eleven children!) And she was - most importantly - a renowned poet and author. Wow. Yosano Akiko, who was also a peace activist who protested Japan’s agressions in World War II, lived a full life crowded with home and family, responsibility, passion and love.
I have always been a tangle-head. The only thing my uncle Jack ever gave me was a comb.
Hair? That wasn’t what I was focused on. I had an odd, early passion for Shakespeare. I made my stage debut at age five in a chorus of rote-rehearsed preschoolers lisping Hamlet's speech to the actors, "and do not saw the air thus with thy hands." I don't remember how I happened upon the opportunity to take on kiddie Shakespeare, but I do remember begging my mom to sign me up for it. Shakespeare lead me to the library. There, I fell in love with books and vowed to read every single one that ever existed. Until teenage-ness cancelled that out with sex and drugs and rock n roll. I made another vow then, but won’t bore you with the details. By the time I arrived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I had partied my way up and down the Eastern Seaboard and had skipped in and out of mischief in every major city from New York to Miami. It was time for a change.
So in walks Yosano Akiko, a woman who would inform and inspire my creative work. She was the mother of eleven children. She was a poet, author, publisher and oh the list goes on. She even raised a few extra children handed off to her by family members. By the time I discovered her, I had taken on the habit of moaning and sighing, thinking I was the only one in the world juggling school, family, work and marriage.
And once I discovered her work, and her life, I could no longer imagine any other life but one lived in love and in words.
If Robert Johnson, an uneducated itinerant musician from the Mississippi Delta could connect across cultures and languages and social conventions to illustrate moments of passion in parallel phrasing with an over- achieving urban Tokyo supernova like Yosano Akiko…surely there must be more unlikely crossroads ahead for me.
Akiko-sama, I thank you very, very much.
Julia Robinson Shimizu
@JuliaThinksThis