Dream Pop Origami

This experimental memoir combines lyric personal essays with autobiographical lists about growing up as a hapa teenager in small town America, falling in love in the big city, growing through the pain of cultural hyphenation, traveling to Japan for the first time as a Nisei, and teaching/serving abroad in Argentina and Burkina Faso. Dream Pop Origami is textual choreography between author and reader, an anti-memoir that resists narrative linearity at every turn, and also a series of intersecting circles, vignettes, and confessions about mixed-race Asian identity. DPO is told with a voice, an ambition, and an affection for the world that is larger than life, each narrative strand intersecting into an innovative, cohesive, and multimodal tapestry about multicultural self-discovery and racial metamorphosis.

Publication Date: 26 July 2022

Blurbs

“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 beautifully made star. See for yourself.”

—JENNY BOULLY, author of Betwixt & Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“Empty of permanence and interlinked with infinite beings in a net of belonging, Jackson Bliss imagines the world of in-between places. In Dream Pop Origami, ceaseless migrations and reincarnations actualize playful transformation tales just like the samadhi of freedom folds across any and all barriers. A memoir of renga-like linked verse, a song of becoming and love.”

—DUNCAN RYUKEN WILLIAMS, author of American Sutra and Hapa Japan

“By turns sly, sorrowful, pensive, and forthright, Dream Pop Origami makes us rethink the possibilities of nonfiction writing, and of how we name and shape our identities.”

—BETH (BICH MINH) NGUYEN, author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner

“At the risk of sounding trite, this book is just so much fun! But, like, for real—fun is just a diversion tactic for Dream Pop Origami’s honest profundity and Jackson Bliss’s expert storytelling. Each adventure is delivered in its most perfect form, ready for your interactive pleasure: To feel the complicated pleasure of nostalgia, go to chapter 22. To feel the adolescent pleasure of a game, go to chapter 28. To feel the naughty pleasure of reading Jackson Bliss’s prose, go to chapter 35. To fulfill satisfaction, read this book.”

—LILY HOANG, author of A Bestiary

Reviews

“At its best, Dream Pop Origami has the density of Nabokov, but chunked into bite-sized morsels for swift consumption on the go for the modern-day reader.”

—The Southern Review

“Dream Pop Origami . . . [is] so intimate and present, I wondered if the author and I are friends (not yet) . . . It’s an explosion of words, thoughts, needs and dreams, joys that are wondrous and beautiful,”

—Lit Reactor

“In many ways this memoir is a love language to words.”

—Not Sarah Connor Blog

Buzz

—Dream Pop Origami is one of the best books of 2022 according to the LitReactor, 22 December 2022

—Dream Pop Origami is one of the thirty best books of 2022 according to the Independent Book Review, 8 December 2022

—Dream Pop Origami interview in This Podcast Will Change Your Life with Ben Tanzer, 16 November, 2022

—Dream Pop Origami excerpt published in the Adroit Journal, 6 September 2022

—Dream Pop Origami is the #1 best-selling softcover nonfiction book in Northern Michigan, Traverse City Record Eagle, 28 August 2022

—Dream Pop Origami interview in the Lives of Writers podcast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & Lives of Writers, 2 September 2022

—Dream Pop Origami reviewed in The Southern Review, 25 August 2022

—Dream Pop Origami excerpt in Hyphen, 18 August 2022

—Dream Pop Origami reviewed in Ben Tanzer’s “A Nonfiction Roundup both Wondrous and Beautiful,” LitReactor, 17 August 2022

—Dream Pop Origami interview in The Rumpus with Marie Mutsuki Mockett, 10 August 2022

—Dream Pop Origami included in Books & Scarves, 7 August 2022

—Craft essay about Dream Pop Origami published in LitReactor, 26 July 2022

—Dream Pop Origami interview in Authors Answer, 26 July 2022

—“The Big Idea: Jackson Bliss’ Dream Pop Origami" published in John Scalzi’s Whatever, 26 July 2022

—“If My Book: Dream Pop Origami” published in Monkey Bicycle, 26 July 2022

—Dream Pop Origami excerpt published in Juked, 23 July 2022

—Author interview published on the Unsolicited Press website, 10 July 2022

—Dream Pop Origami excerpt published in Hypertext, 8 July 2022

—Dream Pop Origami interview in Hypertext, 8 July 2022

—Dream Pop Origami mentioned in Vol. 1 Brooklyn July Book Preview, 7 July 2022

—Dream Pop Origami mentioned in the Hasty Book July List, 1 July 2022

—Dream Pop Origami excerpt published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, 21 June 2022

—Dream Pop Origami included in Big Indie Books for “My Top-5 Literary Influences,” 16 June 2022

—Dream Pop Origami mentioned in Awesome Gang interview, 15 May 2022

—Dream Pop Origami interview in Book Q & As with Deborah Kalb, 5 May 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs mentioned in Apparel for Authors, 26 April 2022

—Dream Pop Origami is one of Independent Book Reviews Most Anticipated Books of 2022, 21 April 2022

—Dream Pop Origami is mentioned in Shoutout LA interview, 18 April 2022

—Amnesia of June Bugs & Dream Pop Origami mentioned in Past/Forward & A World Without Books & Past/Forward podcast, 12 April 2022

—Dream Pop Origami included in Taylor Swift as Books, 24 June 2021

—Dream Pop Origami included in Taylor Swift as Books, 24 June 2021