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Excerpt from Window by Sloan Asakura

Image is a color photograph of a window; title card for the CRAFT 2024 Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest Winner, "Window," by Sloan Asakura.

Sloan Asakura’s excerpt from Window is one of three winners of the CRAFT 2024 Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest, guest judged by Donald Quist.

“Every bomb makes an echo—too quiet for anyone to hear….” Through vivid imagery and fragmented reflections, Sloan Asakura braids layers of personal grief, family history, the traumatic echoes of war, and the legacy of those who came before. The text is a haunting meditation on survival, memory, and the cyclical nature of trauma. Through poetic prose and visceral metaphors—barbed wire, exploding pomegranates, bees defying physics—the author reflects the search for meaning within devastation. This excerpt is a poignant narrative of both personal and collective reckoning. As Asakura grapples with the weight of inherited pain, the reader is also challenged to confront their own understanding of loss and the quiet persistence of trauma.  —Donald Quist


SLOAN ASAKURA (she/he/they) is a poet and memoirist from Los Angeles. They are a 2022 Periplus Fellow, a 2023 Tin House Resident, an upcoming 2025 Tin House Workshop participant, and a 2026 candidate for an MFA in literary arts at Brown University. Their work has been published in magazines such as Lantern Review, Zone 3, Joyland, Tupelo Quarterly, and more. In their free time, they can be found in conversation with the local sunflowers, contortionist trees, and their resident gargoyle (cat). Find them on Instagram @eating.shadows.

By | ME&EC 2024, Longform CNF, CNF | June 27, 2025

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Author’s Note

This excerpt is from a longer in-progress dreamoir, tentatively titled Window. Overall, the project seeks to make sense of the beauties and tragedies of living and reconciliation of trauma through a lens of C-PTSD, looking to the natural world, semantics of diction, and the reader to understand the mirrored occurrences in the speaker’s life. Operating in fragments shattered across the page, the piece speaks to itself and the reader begging for a different possible ending. I wrote this piece in honesty—facing times when I could not tell dream from reality, song from silence, pain from love—or whether they are even separate. 

This excerpt sits on the foundation of my wound—the wounds that came before me, that built the context upon which I was formed. Intergenerational trauma is written into the genetic code. The wounds of your mother, her mother, wounds of your father and his, etched into you to hold. Your family histories are not impersonal—they did not happen to someone else only. They also happened to you—an echo into dark where your shadow had yet to cast. I had to learn how to include myself into that word family, since often it can seem so distant. But yes—what happens to me also happens to my family. Loss from me, loss from my life, it wounds my family too. Interconnectivity, tree roots holding tightly beneath the surface where even a tremoring earth can’t dislodge us—our bones are stitched together. What beauty—what pain.

Writing from the diptych, writing from the archive and pre-memory, writing across time, this portion of the longer story speaks to embodiment and embeddedness—can we separate our bodies from inherited and experienced pain? What types of grief can the body endure before it breaks? And what of love—the craving of it, the pre- and post-grief of losing it? When we anticipate the loss of the closest people to us, what becomes of the self if not a contortion into the absence they leave in this world? How do we live afterward and through it? How do nonhumans do it? How do you? Dear reader, help me answer these questions. I keep writing and the words keep falling into an open fault line. 

 

SLOAN ASAKURA (she/he/they) is a poet and memoirist from Los Angeles. They are a 2022 Periplus Fellow, a 2023 Tin House Resident, an upcoming 2025 Tin House Workshop participant, and a 2026 candidate for an MFA in literary arts at Brown University. Their work has been published in magazines such as Lantern Review, Zone 3, Joyland, Tupelo Quarterly, and more. In their free time, they can be found in conversation with the local sunflowers, contortionist trees, and their resident gargoyle (cat). Find them on Instagram @eating.shadows.