The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Emi Sasagawa, MFA. Emi’s graduate thesis is a graphic memoir entitled Cachos: a graphic memoir about hair, heritage and identity.
Emi is a settler, immigrant and queer woman of colour, who came to the program with a background in journalism. Though she hadn’t drawn since middle school, the MFA became an opportunity to rekindle a love for graphic forms, and eventually she decided to create her thesis in the genre. Also while in the program, Emi continued to develop a book-length project that had emerged during her time at SFU’s Writer’s Studio. Her debut novel Atomweight, published in 2023 by Tidewater Press, explores identity and belonging through the lenses of mixedness, queerness, oppression and privilege, inviting reflection on the space we take up in the world.
Starting a family can be fraught. For those of in queer, transracial relationships, choices like determining a sperm donor raise important questions about identity. Emi’s graphic memoir, Cachos, examines the genetic and cultural gift we present to our children as parents struggling with articulating who we are. Framed as a letter to her unborn child, the graphic memoir uses hair to explore gender, race and queerness, how our notions of identity and belonging influence decisions about what parts of ourselves to pass down to our children, and ultimately how these decisions are interwoven in our ideas about self-worth, belonging and community.
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