Associate editor Liz Ramirez talks to Aaron Kang Smithson about his essay, “Palimpsest,” featured in the Summer 2025 issue of Colorado Review.

Liz Ramirez: I was surprised to find out that your academic background has nothing to do with creative writing; you have master’s degrees in architecture and urban planning. How did you come to creative nonfiction, or were you always also a writer, too? 

Aaron Kang Smithson: I went into architecture and urban planning because I always thought of myself as a designer, but I also always loved writing in school. Most of my writing experience was expository and academic through high school and college, then moved more into journalism after college.  

And I always enjoyed the process of writing essays, making an argument, communicating something, you know, accessibly and well. But I found that in architecture as a profession, you don’t have a lot of natural opportunities to write. 

And I think architects are also quite famous for being pretty bad writers. 

LR: Really? I didn’t know that. 

AKS: Yeah. Or there’s a tendency towards verbosity and jargon. And so I think, when I was in architecture school, I was always searching for opportunities to write outside of that context. So I turned mainly to journalistic writing, and within journalism I think the types of writing that I had the most fun with were longer form and slightly more essayistic pieces. When you’re writing about something technical like buildings or cities, it’s always a challenge to integrate a more human perspective or to try to convey some sort of personal growth through an experience. So I guess that was compelling to me. 

I didn’t get a lot of opportunities to do creative nonfiction while I was in graduate school, but then in my final year I had a part-time semester and decided that because I was living a much more relaxed life, I could dedicate myself to writing practice.  I thought it would be nice to have a more structured environment to do that in, and maybe even someone to force me to commit time and space to getting to know myself a bit more and improving my craft. So that’s how I came to write the piece and think through some of these thoughts a little bit more deeply. 

LR: One of the reasons that I loved this essay so much is this depiction of you trying to find—to the extent that you can—your father through these little snippets of his life that were left. How long were you trying to recover him through these artifacts? 

AKS: It was something that I didn’t realize was really possible or something that I would be interested in until relatively late. I remember it was around middle school, maybe when I was 13, that my mom went and got a bunch of home videos burned onto DVDs so that we could actually watch them. And I remember that I had seen photos of him and had known a bit about him in the abstract, like that a lot of the books on the shelves were his, that he was very smart and multilingual and well-traveled, but he hadn’t come up in conversation in any more profound way. 

Watching the videos was the first time I really saw him move and heard him speak, including through interactions with me as a small child and my sister as a small child. So that was really a sort of revelation. I wasn’t just hearing a brief story about this person, but actually watching him move through the world. I specifically remember hearing him make people laugh, his sarcasm and wit. No matter how many people tell you that your dad was funny, it really doesn’t hit you until you hear it. So the videos were really the first artifact that sparked this deeper interest. 

There wasn’t a whole lot else that surfaced until my mom moved. And then suddenly there were all these things that had never been unearthed before. I wrote, for example, about the box that came out that had programs from his memorial service and a notebook he had kept towards the end. I remember spending over an hour just reading this stuff, then another several hours transcribing it on the computer so I could have a digital copy, just in case the real thing got buried or lost again. 

LR: I really loved that line about immigrants having opaque emotional lives in your essay. With my own family members who are immigrants, I have very much found that to be the case.  

Have you thought about how posterity will remember you, and if there will be a person someday, some future child or relative, sitting on the ground, surrounded by your effects, trying to recover some aspect of you from something you left behind? 

AKS: I have thought about that. I think part of it stems from a frustration with how little was left of my Dad’s actual thoughts. When I mention the chemotherapy notebook, for instance, it wasn’t this elaborate thing that had long and profound diary entries from each day. It was actually really sparse. There was a page with recipes for foods that he could eat while going through chemo and then a few blank pages and then another page with a couple songs to listen to while undergoing chemo and then another few blank pages and then a quote or something. So there was not a lot of information. 

In that same box where I found the notebook, I also found a postcard he had sent home while on a business trip, which had a note that was addressed to my one-year-old self in a sort of playful, endearing way. I’ve thought about how that’s the only instance I have of him having written my name down. I wish I had more evidence of his opinions or of the ways he thought through things, even simple things. I think it’s really special to see that after someone is gone, especially when it’s in their own handwriting. I try to take a lot of notes for that reason. I annotate a lot of the books I read, especially nonfiction. I keep one notebook at a time, so it basically has my entire life in it. I even make these huge to-do lists each week, which are so mundane and boring to look at now, but maybe in a few decades they will be fascinating. The digital footprint helps with that, too. I take photos obsessively, just to document things I see. And something as basic as a calendar might make a nice record one day, even just for myself. Like, oh look, I had dinner with that friend that one night. 

I think the same goes for this piece and writing in general, even the journalism and expository writing I’ve done in the past.  I think it’s something that I would have loved to have as a piece of someone that I didn’t get to know. I do think about that often. 

LR: And all the writings that you’ve left behind are little bits of you through which you will be interpreted by these future people—if, you know, the world doesn’t end and we all still exist and there’s still an internet and all these other things. Although you’re published in the Colorado Review, which is a physical magazine, so even if there’s not the internet, copies of that journal will outlast. 

AKS: I’m also terrible at journaling and, and so doing this, writing this essay and the other essays that I wrote in that workshop was like the first time I had properly taken initiative to put my thoughts on family and memory and life into ink.

LR: It sounds like maybe you and your dad shared not having a big propensity for journaling. 

AKS: It’s true. I think that’s sort of what prompted me to want to do more of this in the future. If I’m not going to write every day or leave some daily emotional record in that way, can I do it in bigger bursts? At the same time, I know part of writing practice is to do it more often, and I should probably be more diligent about that. Anne Lamott would want that. Bird by bird. 

LR: I completely agree. It’s just difficult, particularly, when you come from families where you don’t really talk about these things. 

AKS: Yeah. So much is just lost. And you don’t really have that communication bone built in.

LR: Was this essay cathartic at all to write and publish, or was it just kind of narrativizing things that had already happened? 

AKS: It was definitely cathartic. It’s funny, I was telling people during the same semester I took this workshop that I wanted to find a therapist, but I had no luck. In the end, writing this piece was probably more effective than getting a therapist would have been. 

Writing, and particularly personal narrative, is an extremely effective way to process ideas and thoughts. It’s nice when they exist on a page and aren’t just bouncing around the inside of your head. In conjunction with reading, it’s the best catharsis out there. It was also great to have friends read it. I sent it to some friends after it was published, for instance, and a couple during the drafting period. It was great to hear their reactions to thoughts that I haven’t expressed to a lot of people directly in my life. And now maybe a few strangers have read it, which is kind of a funny thing to think about.  

That’s what makes the process of publishing compelling to me. In one sense, you’re really putting yourself out there, but as long as your family doesn’t frequently peruse the world of literary journals, you can kind of get away with not revealing it to everyone in your life. I guess that’s sort of the point for me—communicating these thoughts to a broad audience, to people with whom these experiences might resonate, and also to myself. 

Liz Ramirez is a writer, a Texas transplant, and an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Colorado State University, where she writes about family, hybridity, and liminality in racial identity. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in OyeDrum, Olit, Women on Writing!, and elsewhere. An associate editor at the Colorado Review, in her free time she enjoys singing, reading fantasy fiction, and playing copious amounts of Stardew Valley.