Welcome to Kultura

Writing is difficult. In fact— more than difficult, writing is painful. What then, does it matter that another writing platform gets surfaced in the internet aether? 

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of hosting a writing workshop for an organization focused on cultural preservation and community building. Through this workshop, I was meant to talk briefly about the mission of Kultura Dallas and the ways that community members could contribute to the platform. I described the platform to many folks as an early hybrid site (starting first with blog style posts gone through a slight editorial pipeline then rotating to multimodal submissions such as voicemail reflections, zine work, and other digital art composition pieces accompanied by a statement or more developed essay. 

Kultura Dallas consists of me and our assistant editor, Katie Manz. 

Needless to say, I was excited about the sorts of people who could’ve attended the workshop, as that would’ve meant a growing interest in writing but really, a sharper engagement with cultural preservation. Storytelling, actually, was what I am after. 

As I strolled around the event venue, I got caught up in a conversation between two friends. One whom I knew from an online workshop and another who was a complete stranger. After a few minutes, I interjected myself and asked this stranger something along the lines of, “what brings you here/how did you get to be involved with this event?” We exchanged answers and, after I had explained that I was here to host a brief writing workshop, I was met with an quite incredulous reaction, “writing? Like write?” pencil writing/scribbling/gesturing in the air 

“Nobody writes anymore. We just let AI do it for us,” this person said. 

Of course. 

I shouldn’t have been surprised after all. 

But I was — knowing that I pitched my workshop as cultural preservation, creative practice, and exposure to hybrid histories, modalities, voices, and perspectives, the one person I spoke to at this event was, my most accounts of first impressions, against an actual practice of community building. Of preservation. 

Now, let me be clear, this sort of overdetermined term of being “anti-AI” is fraught and inasmuch as we pretend to abstain from artificial intelligence, all threads of our digital and mediated lives are touched by algorithms, language modeling, and intense digital interactivity that structure our relationship to ourselves and to each other. So, I am aware that there’s a time and place, opportunities, and affordances, investments, and divestments. 

But the goal of Kultura Dallas is to remind us that we have our own voice that should be cultivated first and foremost. Elevated and uplifted. And to house voices that have traversed borders, oceans, thresholds, and expectations.

Briefly outlining my own family history here is one thing. To be able to recall the ways that childhood, upbringing, attitudes, and entertainment media shaped perceptions of myself can, perhaps, be generative. It’s also another thing to jot down notes from the Dallas Asian American Film Festival's (DAAFF) public lecturers and chalk them up into a review meant to blur the lines between the academic modes of thinking and historical and cultural resonances. 

For me, it’s more than a sense of duty for my own recollections, and instead, this platform serves as a reminder that there’s always another way to build togetherness in the face of alienation. 

So, when tattoo artist Sam Olog (Instagram: @marihposa) writes about how she cultivated her own path to success and how she sought after her own version of the American Dream, I am reminded how struggle, uncertainty, and precarity can be overshadowed by passion, tenacity, and creativity. It's also worth noting one of my own most recent tattoos (a nice roadrunner) is from her hand as well.

So, when sketch artist Nico Cando (Instagram: @dagger.panda) reminds us about the balancing act of identity as someone in the Asian American diaspora, I am reminded about the ways we, collectively, are in constant oscillation and seeking a sense of belonging. Neither here, nor there, what community building and artistic outlets are we drawn to in order to relieve such shifting pressures? 

And further still, when DAAHS co-founder Stephanie Drenka reminds us about our civic responsibilities as people of Dallas, we are gifted with an opportunity to look into the infrastructures of the city, the shape of our lives, and into an atmosphere of justice and history where we can and should be empowered to express our point of view. 

In all of these cadences and assemblages of voices, I am reminded that we do write. And to write is to think, and to think, is, in its most Cartesian fashion, to be. 

As I hand our readers over to Katie, it’s critical to mind her ideas of (dis)orientation and making-sense of this cluster. Kultura isn’t a linear project. And as Katie observes, and to put in other words, the difference of preservation and stewardship here attempts to perceive Asianness differently and to indeed, to decenter narratives are perhaps displaced. Doing archival work can feel perfunctory. Readers of Kultura may be attracted to different perspectives and it’s through this difference that resonating identifications can occur.

This is a starting point. This inaugural cluster isn’t perfect and it doesn’t pretend to be. Through these flashes of perspective, there’s always room for improvement and through the particularities, passions, and individualities represented here, I want to call a kind of cultural attunement to our readers.

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Hello. My name is Katie Manz. You, reader, are poking around the Kultura webpage trying to make sense of it, as I did when I first discovered this project. And in that process you might find, as I did, that the ‘making sense of it’ tends to be left up to the readers and the writers. So let’s begin. 

As Kultura publishes its very first cluster of works, we refocus on the questions of purpose that guide any focused archive: what are we preserving, and why? The answer to the first seems simple: we platform and preserve Asian American perspectives and reflections. But then one question spirals into countless others—what does it mean to be ever-so-broadly ‘Asian American,’ and who dictates that, and what makes people more or less ‘Asian,’ or rather ‘Asian enough’—and eventually we find that it isn’t so easy to define the Asian American experience, much less explain why it’s important. Nevertheless, each of our first five stories make their own attempt answering these questions. 

The beauty of these short, individual pieces is that they do not have to represent all of Asian American experience. They don’t even have to represent the writer’s entire perspective on it. Instead we get to read about a talk, a career, or an artistic outlet, contextualized by both the experiences we bring to reading and the platform of Kultura. 

So when I read Sam Olog’s Between the Ink and the Skin, I think about the things I have grown up being told to do in order to satisfy the model minority myth. I take that to Jered’s On Tables and Rooms Where Things Happen, which invites the reader to ask who, exactly, decides what it is to be an Asian American stereotype. Armed with those questions, I can approach Nico Cando’s An In-Betweener with equal parts affection for the described bonding practices centered around ‘Asian media’ and skepticism about who, exactly, gets to control the ways Asianness is framed in that media. 

Your experiences may lead you to terminate in a completely separate thought or analysis. In fact, they likely will. And maybe that analysis will lead you to write something and share it, and we will all learn to see the world a little differently. 

This cluster, preoccupied as it naturally is with the meaning of the archive, looks to the past for answers. The writers of this cluster reify their cultural and individual experiences, designating them worthy of discussion and preservation. From there we, the readers, look sideways to the experiences of others, inward towards our own reflections, and finally forward, where we all build the story that is the future. 

— Jered Mabaquiao and Katie Manz (editors, August 2026)