Alia Luria's Blog

When I published Compendium, I was proudest not of the words themselves. Rather, it was the years of thinking, free writing, and fleshing out the story and characters that made those words possible. It was all of that private scaffolding that never appears on the page but lives on in my mind as the intellectual fruits of my labor. The very first spark hit me in an ordinary moment one day at the office. I was setting up a Kindle Fire device that a few of us had purchased for my then legal assista...

Youkoso means “welcome” in Japanese, and you might see it printed on greeting signs at the airport as a sign of welcome to a city. Geri o Shimasu is finally out in the world, and so I say youkoso! In fact, some folks who ordered it from Amazon actually got the book early and have already been sending me photos of their copies. If you have a copy winging its way to you or already in your hot hands, please share it with me via email, text, or social media! I’d love to see your pictures and share t...

In the Beginning…

It feels so surreal that Geri o Shimasu: Adventures of a Baka Gaijin is less than a month from launch. This book will always be something extra special for me. Even before I wrote the first story in 2020 during COVID, it was a project I had always thought about. I spent almost six months in Tokyo absorbing everything I could like a sponge. Mere days after getting back to the states, David Sedaris released his book When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I remember listening to his book...

🎥 Series Alert: Haiku Reactions ✍️

Ever wonder where poems are born? In this series, I break down the why behind the 5-7-5.

Each haiku has a story, and I’m telling them, one video at a time.

#HaikuReaction #PoetryInMotion #BehindTheVerse #PoetLife #MicroPoetry #CreativeProcess #SpokenWord #HaikuVibes #StoryBehindTheHaiku

I just got back from watching the movie Sinners with Vince.

First, I will say that my taste in horror movies is very specific. I’m a fan of movies that make you think, and a lot of horror movies just don’t have that weight to them. I’ve felt that way about a very few horror movies, such as Midsomer and possibly the first Smile movie. Smile 2 was terrible, and nothing you might have to say about it could convince me otherwise. I’m happy to have a really long conversation in which I point out to yo...

The first bromeliad of the season is blooming—the first of many I will enjoy this year. The yard is filled with them, stuffed into planters and smattered around. Boxed in with the live oaks in the back. They are clustered all over due to their easy multiplication and heartiness. The first bromeliad I ever had was a gift from my grandmother when I bought my first house in Orlando. It sturdily lived in its pot for the entire 11 years I owned that home, even though I never bothered to repot it or p...

This past week, I found myself in Washington, D.C. for a privacy and security law conference. This was the kind of conference where acronyms like CCPA, GDPR, FTC, and CIPA fly as freely as opinions, and the stakes for safeguarding personal data grow higher with every passing year. After three days of panels, workshops, and highly informative presentations that had me madly typing notes to take back to my colleagues, I gave myself Saturday to do something equally meaningful but far less frenetic:...

Tokowaka is a Japanese concept originating in the Shinto belief system that to remain eternal and fresh, and to maintain divinity, an object needs to go through a regular process of renewal. It technically means “always young”, but what westerners would consider eternal youth entirely fails to convey the complexity of the idea of tokowaka.

When Japanese people think about what to them embodies the concept of tokowaka, the usual example is the Jingu shrine in Ise. This shrine undergoes a tokowaka ...

My aunt, you know, the former probation chief, says that they probably served you a white bread sandwich for dinner and maybe powdered eggs for breakfast. She speculated that it probably had two pitiful scraps of nutritionally devoid bologna between the stale, tasteless slices. Subsistence fare. I hope you looked at that sandwich, in all its over-processed, non-organic, carbohydrate-filled glory and regretted every decision that brought you to it. You probably didn’t eat it. It didn’t come from ...

You know what they say about opinions! If you don’t know, maybe ask google the question “Why are opinions like assholes?” Too lazy to open a search bar? Oh, fine, it’s because we all have one, and if you’re feeling really colorful, it’s also because they all stink.

Despite the common knowledge that everyone’s opinion is different, and that every work of literary criticism is an opinion, book reviews are still very much treated as an authority on whether a book is worth our time as a reader. As a ...