Play: Paisley Rekdal Interview

Paisley Rekdal's writing is sort of like that Björk song you can't get out of your head.

It's not the writing or the beat that sticks with you, it's the scene that stays - that moment that you've sat through before.

The award-winning author is able to deliver a strong, intimate scene in a mere 20 words or less.

Rekdal will give a reading at the University of Houston-Victoria's Alcorn Auditorium at noon Thursday.

At the reading, Rekdal said she hopes to incorporate a pecha-kucha style presentation of her book "Intimate."

"You get 20 slides and you get 20 seconds for each slide," Rekdal said. "It's such a hard book to read straight from, so I figured if I did a pecha-kucha, people would get a real sense of what the book is about."

Despite her Chinese and Norwegian ethnic background, the author said she considers herself mono-cultured.

"I've had a lot of experience living in both Asia and America," Rekdal said. "I'm very American, which is one of those things living in Asia teaches you very quickly."

The associate professor of English said her own hybridity has shaped the way she looks at the elements in her writing.

"It's a certain kaleidoscopic presence that you have," Rekdal said. "Your appearance is always changing."

In her book, "The Night my Mother Met Bruce Lee," Paisley wrote about teaching English in South Korea and a visit she took to Taipei with her mother.

Rekdal said she was constantly asked about her background because her ethnically ambiguous appearance.

"It's funny being a litmus test for other people's ideas of nationality and race," Rekdal said. "It's kind of exhausting but I have to say I sort of think of it as a gift."

• By Paisley RekdalAnd then I thought, Can I have more

  of this, would it be possible

  for every day to be a greater awakening: more light,

  more light, your face on the pillow

  with the sleep creases rudely

  fragmenting it, hair so stiff

  from paint and sheet rock it feels

  like the dirty short hank

  of mane I used to grab on Dandy's neck

  before he hauled me up and forward,

  white flanks flecked green

  with sh-- and the satin of his dander,

  the livingness, the warmth

  of all that blood just under the skin

  and in the long, thick muscle of the neck-

  He was smarter than most of the children

  I went to school with. He knew

  how to stand with just the crescent

  of his hoof along a boot toe and press,

  incrementally, his whole weight down. The pain

  so surprising when it came,

  its iron intention sheathed in stealth, the decisive

  sudden twisting of his leg until the hoof

  pinned one's foot completely to the ground,

  we'd have to beat and beat him with a brush

  to push him off, that hot

  insistence with its large horse eye trained

  deliberately on us, to watch-

  Like us, he knew how to announce through violence

  how he didn't hunger, didn't want

  despite our practiced ministrations: too young

  not to try to empathize

  with this cunning: this thing

  that was and was not human we must respect

  for itself and not our imagination of it: I loved him because

  I could not love him anymore

  in the ways I'd taught myself,

  watching the slim bodies of teenagers

  guide their geldings in figure eights around the ring

  as if they were one body, one fluid motion

  of electric understanding I would never feel

  working its way through fingers to the bit: this thing

  had a name, a need, a personality; it possessed

  an indifference that gave me

  logic and a measure: I too might stop wanting

  the hand placed on back or shoulder

  and never feel the desired response.

  I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine

  and inflict on me, the sudden jerking

  of head away from halter, the tentative nose

  inspecting first before it might decide

  to relent and eat. I loved

  what was not slave or instinct, that when you turn to me

  it is a choice, it is always a choice to imagine pleasure

  might be blended, one warmth

  bleeding into another as the future

  bleeds into the past, more light, more light,

  your hand against my shoulder, the image

  of the one who taught me disobedience

  is the first right of being alive.