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Dream Pop Origami
Dream Pop Origami is a beautiful, ambitious, interactive, and engrossing lyrical memoir about mixed-race identity, love, travel, AAPI masculinities, and personal metamorphosis. This experimental work of creative nonfiction examines, celebrates, and complicates what it means to be Asian & white, Nisei & hapa, Midwestern & Californian, Buddhist & American at the same time. In this stunning collection of choose-your-own-essays and autobiographical lists, multiracial identity is a counterpoint of memory, language, reflection, and imagination intersecting and interweaving into a coherent tapestry of text, emotion, and voice.
"Jackson Bliss paints with words. He is the Kendrick Lamar of the literary world."
—REGINA KING, Emmy-award-winning actress & director
“Jackson Bliss seems to have dispatched Dream Pop Origami from a future where technically adventurous nonfiction blends so perfectly with vulnerable self-discovery that it’s impossible to imagine the two functioning without each other. By intricately folding his experiences into delicate hybrid forms, Bliss has made a memoir about how to nurture the different worlds that occupy a self that is beautiful, fascinating, heartbreaking, essential.”
—JOHN D’AGATA, author of A New History of an Essay
"Jackson Bliss has written a book I dreamed about my whole life. From the moment I got obsessed with Choose Your Own Adventures as a young child to my obsession with Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch in college, I always wanted a larger canon of alternate reality storytelling. Jackson not only delivers this but also gives the device the occasion of a moving memoir about identity. Dream Pop Origami is not just a book—it's a whole immersive creative experience and the good news is once you put it down you can dare yourself another go through its seemingly endless labyrinths. The more attempts I made, the more I understood why this fragmented self-portrait required the rearranging of so many mosaic tiles. Throughout it all, Jackson's story of what it means to be hapa in our world is not lost—this book is not a compromise of style and substance but a triumph of their collaboration into something definitely brilliant."
—POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile & Identity
“Jackson Bliss knows that staying alive is much harder than anyone says it is, and DREAM POP ORIGAMI moves with an exuberant voice that keeps on singing, because it knows there might not be anything on the other side of singing, and what do we have left but gameplay, lists, quizzes, graphs, and a valentine kind of love for the dying world? It’s exactly the kind of company I need right now.”
—PAUL LISICKY, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
“The crackling sound you hear is me feverishly and compulsively turning the pages of Jackson Bliss’ utterly original, genre defying riff on autobiography, memory, language and detail. It might also be Bliss himself, verbally folding and unfolding his story the way one shapes and reshapes a single piece of origami paper into any animal or object. I’m equally sure this is a magic book and that the spells all work. From an exploration of video games to Tibetan higher planes, Bliss expresses the varied ways in which the second sight of his hapa artist self animates the landscape, while taking readers on a journey through unabashed emotion, memory and a life lived with intensity and great feeling. This book is incredible.”
—MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT, author of American Harvest
“Bliss masterfully captures the kaleidoscopic gymnastics of his multicultural (hapa) identity, inviting the reader into humorous, heartbreaking, and insightful moments strung along a choose your own adventure. Punctuated with quizzes, lists, and charts, Dream Pop Origami seems to invoke the innovations of Ben Marcus and Karen Tei Yamashita, but these deep dives into self, race, and pop culture are a 100% Bliss.”
—SEQUOIA NAGAMATSU, author of How High We Go in the Dark
“Take a life and fold it in half then fold that half into another half. Keep going until there is nothing left. Make it into something beautiful, dreamed, imagined; it can be any vision you want, that is, until it's time to take it apart, to examine just how such a self was constructed. You'll never be the same dreamer again. Jackson Bliss nonetheless exposes the creases, the wearing away of self and soul, the deterioration of appearances and the texture of the fragile nature of the idealized self against the reality into which we are constructed. Do you want to do this? he seems to ask, allowing us to spy or avert our eyes. If life is an adventure, what does it mean when you have to unfold, uncrease, unravel, destroy your life in order to live it? With candor and honesty, Bliss investigates how plans go awry, how following the pattern never leads to the perfection we seek. It is only through undoing, revisiting, and shredding our scraps that lead one to oneself. Dream Pop Origami is a ...
"Jackson Bliss paints with words. He is the Kendrick Lamar of the literary world."
—REGINA KING, Emmy-award-winning actress & director
“Jackson Bliss seems to have dispatched Dream Pop Origami from a future where technically adventurous nonfiction blends so perfectly with vulnerable self-discovery that it’s impossible to imagine the two functioning without each other. By intricately folding his experiences into delicate hybrid forms, Bliss has made a memoir about how to nurture the different worlds that occupy a self that is beautiful, fascinating, heartbreaking, essential.”
—JOHN D’AGATA, author of A New History of an Essay
"Jackson Bliss has written a book I dreamed about my whole life. From the moment I got obsessed with Choose Your Own Adventures as a young child to my obsession with Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch in college, I always wanted a larger canon of alternate reality storytelling. Jackson not only delivers this but also gives the device the occasion of a moving memoir about identity. Dream Pop Origami is not just a book—it's a whole immersive creative experience and the good news is once you put it down you can dare yourself another go through its seemingly endless labyrinths. The more attempts I made, the more I understood why this fragmented self-portrait required the rearranging of so many mosaic tiles. Throughout it all, Jackson's story of what it means to be hapa in our world is not lost—this book is not a compromise of style and substance but a triumph of their collaboration into something definitely brilliant."
—POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile & Identity
“Jackson Bliss knows that staying alive is much harder than anyone says it is, and DREAM POP ORIGAMI moves with an exuberant voice that keeps on singing, because it knows there might not be anything on the other side of singing, and what do we have left but gameplay, lists, quizzes, graphs, and a valentine kind of love for the dying world? It’s exactly the kind of company I need right now.”
—PAUL LISICKY, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
“The crackling sound you hear is me feverishly and compulsively turning the pages of Jackson Bliss’ utterly original, genre defying riff on autobiography, memory, language and detail. It might also be Bliss himself, verbally folding and unfolding his story the way one shapes and reshapes a single piece of origami paper into any animal or object. I’m equally sure this is a magic book and that the spells all work. From an exploration of video games to Tibetan higher planes, Bliss expresses the varied ways in which the second sight of his hapa artist self animates the landscape, while taking readers on a journey through unabashed emotion, memory and a life lived with intensity and great feeling. This book is incredible.”
—MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT, author of American Harvest
“Bliss masterfully captures the kaleidoscopic gymnastics of his multicultural (hapa) identity, inviting the reader into humorous, heartbreaking, and insightful moments strung along a choose your own adventure. Punctuated with quizzes, lists, and charts, Dream Pop Origami seems to invoke the innovations of Ben Marcus and Karen Tei Yamashita, but these deep dives into self, race, and pop culture are a 100% Bliss.”
—SEQUOIA NAGAMATSU, author of How High We Go in the Dark
“Take a life and fold it in half then fold that half into another half. Keep going until there is nothing left. Make it into something beautiful, dreamed, imagined; it can be any vision you want, that is, until it's time to take it apart, to examine just how such a self was constructed. You'll never be the same dreamer again. Jackson Bliss nonetheless exposes the creases, the wearing away of self and soul, the deterioration of appearances and the texture of the fragile nature of the idealized self against the reality into which we are constructed. Do you want to do this? he seems to ask, allowing us to spy or avert our eyes. If life is an adventure, what does it mean when you have to unfold, uncrease, unravel, destroy your life in order to live it? With candor and honesty, Bliss investigates how plans go awry, how following the pattern never leads to the perfection we seek. It is only through undoing, revisiting, and shredding our scraps that lead one to oneself. Dream Pop Origami is a ...
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
314 pages, Paperback
First published July 26, 2022
About the author
Jackson Bliss
12 books24 followersJackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Book Award in Prose & the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Dream Pop Origami (Unsolicited Press, 2022), and the hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Kenyon Review, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Joyland, & Quarterly West, among others. He is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University. Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jacksonbliss & join his newsletter, MIXTAPE: https://jacksonbliss.substack.com/p/c...
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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May 21, 2022Really excited to be partnering up with Jackson to help promote his memoir. Remember the choose-your-own-adventure novels from back when you were a kid? Jackson breathes new life into that format here! It's pretty dang cool!
Hit me up if you're interested in reviewing it, interviewing Jackson, or doing some other fun coverage kind of stuff!!
Hit me up if you're interested in reviewing it, interviewing Jackson, or doing some other fun coverage kind of stuff!!
August 17, 2022
Super clever premise. Excellent prose. Recommended.
August 26, 2022
Wow, just wow. Best memoir I’ve read in 2022. Hands down.
At first I worried that this book might feel gimmicky since it’s a choose-your-own-adventure autobiography, which can only go one of two ways. I’m happy to write that Dream Pop Origami is frigging amazing! The writing is stunning in this book but so is the experience of reading it. It was so much fun to jump from California to Argentina to France to Japan to West Africa. Parts of this book feel like a literary travelogue.
But then there are all these love essays, lists of favorite books, colors, words, and albums, essays about the author’s obachan when he used to play piano for her and later when she lost her memory. There are quizzes, flowcharts and even these great moments of self-awareness and self-deprecation between chapters. Like Counterfactual Love Stories, his short story collection, each chapter is connected by a list of choices that the reader chooses from. One minute this book feels like a collection of personal essays about being mixed Japanese in America and the next, you’re jumping around from chapter to chapter like a kid on the monkey bars. If I had to pick just one word to describe Dream Pop, it would be exhilaration. To read this book is to fall in love with the English language all over again.
At first I worried that this book might feel gimmicky since it’s a choose-your-own-adventure autobiography, which can only go one of two ways. I’m happy to write that Dream Pop Origami is frigging amazing! The writing is stunning in this book but so is the experience of reading it. It was so much fun to jump from California to Argentina to France to Japan to West Africa. Parts of this book feel like a literary travelogue.
But then there are all these love essays, lists of favorite books, colors, words, and albums, essays about the author’s obachan when he used to play piano for her and later when she lost her memory. There are quizzes, flowcharts and even these great moments of self-awareness and self-deprecation between chapters. Like Counterfactual Love Stories, his short story collection, each chapter is connected by a list of choices that the reader chooses from. One minute this book feels like a collection of personal essays about being mixed Japanese in America and the next, you’re jumping around from chapter to chapter like a kid on the monkey bars. If I had to pick just one word to describe Dream Pop, it would be exhilaration. To read this book is to fall in love with the English language all over again.
October 3, 2022
I've been hesitant to mark this as "finished reading" for the sole fact that this is a choose your own adventure memoir. You bounce back through the pages like a little kid again, which makes it so fun to read but also difficult to read every single page as it's not really meant to be read straight through. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book. It had this nice duality to it - a silly side with tons of lists of random things the author likes (lists of their favorite albums or video games or pranks they did, etc.) and a serious side discussing his HAPA identity. I found this book to be beautiful in that I love the emergence of new language and communities to help those that have felt as though they are other feel more included. Bliss goes in depth about his Japanese American identity and how he is extremely white-passing so his Japanese identity was often deemed untrue by people in his life who were not close to him (i.e. schoolmates as a child, etc.) My only complaint (and the reason why I knocked a star off) is that the choose your own adventure form has made the book EXTREMELY REPETITIVE. And on one hand, I understand why. But even within one essay, he seems to sometimes repeat the same information and even the same phrases multiple times back to back to back. Still, if you want to learn and have fun, take an adventure through this book.
September 27, 2022
Very cool choose your own adventure with humor and depth
July 29, 2022
3.5 - A unique journey into what makes Jackson Bliss Jackson Bliss, filled with (many, many) lists, a quiz and flow chart, and essays, this memoir is filled with a lot of heart and a love for words, though it is repetitious at times.
Read the full review on my blog!
Read the full review on my blog!
August 25, 2022
Nonfiction isn’t my jam if we’re being totally honest. But I decided to take a leap of faith simply because this author is on fire. I thought Counterfactual Love Stories was thrilling and Amnesia of June Bugs was a masterpiece. Anyway, Dream Pop Origami is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read in a long time. Bliss writes in a way that both describes and ignites heartache, joy, sadness, beauty, and pain. I cried reading this. I laughed. I texted my friends some of my favorite passages until they went out and bought copies too and now they’re obsessed with it too. When I was done reading, I was a deeper human being. If Dream Pop Origami doesn’t win a ton of awards, I will pinch myself until I bleed.
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November 17, 2022Dream Pop Origami is an explosion of words, thoughts, needs and dreams, joys that are wondrous and beautiful. Bliss has things to say and he’s going to share all of them with us.
More - https://litreactor.com/columns/a-nonf...
More - https://litreactor.com/columns/a-nonf...
July 21, 2023
Wry and bittersweet, this choose-your-own-adventure experience left me excited to read more from Jackson Bliss.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews