GIACOMO KYLE HATANAKA

I began writing Sandstone as a way of coping with the heartbreak and alienation of moving from Portland to Boise as a Japanese-American during Portland’s economic collapse of 2020-21. Growing up Asian in a small, white town for much of my life didn’t prepare me. Portland was the only place I’d ever called home, so leaving it was unbearable. That’s where art tends to enter our lives: a way to bear the unbearable. Hence, this book’s theme of searching for a way back home, even when there is none. I put that theme into the book, and the book put its theme of transformation into me. I’m not the same person I was when I started it.

That’s why I started this book. But I finished it for something else: a promise to my mom. As she lay there intubated in the hospital on her final day, in her final hour, the doctors said that even though she was in a coma, she could still hear me. So I thanked her. Thanked her for the gift she gave me. The life she gave me. And I promised her I wouldn’t let it go to waste. That her sacrifice would mean something. I wasn’t intending to ever finish Sandstone. It was too unwieldy, too hard, too pointless. But as I sat beside my mom, so choked with grief that I could hardly talk, I felt like I owed something to her. On that day, I couldn’t get all the words out that I wanted to tell her. So I finished this book instead.

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