Reimagine Candlelight Vigil with Poet Victoria Chang
Reimagine has been hosting candlelight vigils throughout the pandemic in order to break down taboos and hold space for all that we've lost. At this special gathering, poet and writer Victoria Chang will read her work, revisit themes explored in Reimagine's Asian American Table Talk series, and discuss the power of writing to discover meaning amidst grief and trauma. Our additional guest is Tida Beattie, an end-of-life doula, community educator, and grief activist
Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang is the author of the forthcoming Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions, 2021), a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. Her poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. OBIT received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN Voeckler Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. She is also the author of a children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee and named a New York Times Notable Book, and a middle grade novel, Love, Love. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Katherine Min MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA program.
Tida Beattie
Tida Beattie is an American-born daughter of Thai immigrants who came in the mid-60s. Tida is an end-of-life doula, community educator, and grief activist. She is a co-founder of MESO, a company that supports immigrant families to cultivate emotional, spiritual, and cultural wholeness in order to live and die with compassion, peace, and freedom. Currently, MESO is offering a compassion-led peer support group entitled, “Grief: Loss of Your Immigrant Parent.” Tida trained with Doulagivers, Denise Love’s Life Options, and hopes to volunteer with Zen Caregiving Project this fall. On the Reimagine platform, she presented community-education events such as “Multicultural Immigrant Experiences with End of Life”, “How to Talk To Your KidsParents About SexDeath”, “Grief Through An Immigrant Lens”, “Go Back To Your Country”, “My Dreams, Your Dreams”, “Remembering Our Mothers: A Writing Practice”, “Next-Gen Grief”, and was a panelist for the Asian-American centered TableTalk, “Family Ties”.
Tida serves on the AANHPI leadership council for the national non-profit, “Compassion and Choices”, which is working toward the legislation of medical aid-in-dying laws in all 50 states. Tida has had a rich career prior to turning to end-of-life work: she is a recovering restaurant manager and a former Accenture consultant. She earned her MBA from Thunderbird and her BA in international relations at Johns Hopkins University. Tida lives in northern California with her spouse, 2 teenagers, and 18-month-old bernedoodle. She loves exploring local farmers markets wherever she is, listening to BTS, and eating really good food. She is dreaming of creating a spiritual grief retreat in Bali.
