Passion for the Arts: Carolyn Nakagawa

Carolyn Nakagawa is a fifth year English Honours student. She is also one of the first students in the new Asian Canadian Studies minor. She was recently featured at the Student Leadership Conference as one of the “Faces of Today.” I sat down with her this week to discuss her involvements on campus.

Carolyn is President of the UBC Players’ Club. She explains that it is “the oldest club on campus. The amateur student theatre group is entirely student-run. “We don’t have a faculty advisor or anything like that. It’s me and a bunch of other people doing all the things that theatre arts do. We produce, direct, write,” she explains. “[And] act, obviously.”

“I was involved in theatre in high school, and the Players’ Club seemed to be the way to continue that in university.” However she found the Players’ Club to be a wholly different experience from the one she had had previously. “When I was in high school, theatre was acting, and maybe writing and directing, but we never took care of any of the production sides…even the technical side was not something we were involved in.”

She is also an editor for the Garden Statuary, the literary journal for English undergraduates. “It’s mainly a student run initiative,” says Carolyn. They call for creative submissions from undergraduate students, though most submissions come from English students.  

She explains that The Garden Statuary was started a few years ago by English Honours students who wanted to give English students –so many of whom are writers- a way to show their work. “I saw that happen as a second year,” says Carolyn. “It was just really amazing; I was impressed by the work that we were able to find in the student body. I wanted to be part of making that happen.”

Speaking about her perspective on extra-curriculars, Carolyn says that, “I think that school is important, but it can’t be the only thing that you do. And for me, my extra-curricular involvement has in many ways been more important than my class work. As much as we are here to learn, there’s a lot of skills that we learn outside the classroom.” 

“I feel like it can sometimes be a lot more pressing an obligation to keep up with things that I’ve committed to do with my peers, than, necessarily, handing in an essay.” She adds, “I really love the chance to study and learn, but I feel like that’s the part that I almost want to put aside a lot of the time, and it’ll get done, but the thing that’s actually going to give me more growth is my extra-curriculars.”

I asked her what she would suggest to other students who want to become involved on campus. “I feel like ‘find something you’re passionate about’ is the clichéd response,” says Carolyn. “I’ve always guided my involvements by the people I meet.” She suggests that students do not simply find “just a thing that you’re passionate about, but [rather] people you can see doing things that are valuable and see how you can support them.”

At the moment Carolyn is working on her senior undergraduate thesis. “My thesis is about certain Vancouver poets and how they engage with a sort of Euro-American literary tradition.” She adds that, “People become writers because they love literature, and most literature that we learn about, especially in school is from this specific canon that is selected mostly from England and the United States. But at the same time when you’re a Canadian writer, I think you need to be looking at things from a different perspective and challenging the limits of that canon because we’re not coming from the same place.”

Speaking about her ideas for her future, Carolyn says, “I want to continue to be involved in communities that are committed to the arts.” She wants to “create communities based on the arts because I’m passionate about theatre and poetry and literature.”