Talk Story Tea Time is part of Fumi’s residency at Apa Kabar. “Talk story” is a Hawaiian Pidgin term for informal, improvisational conversation — part oral history, part everyday exchange. It’s a way people connect and share memories, stories, and simply pass the time.
This series invites participants into casual, durational dialogues between Fumi artist and Hawaiʻi-raised host, Mia Reiko Braverman, and a cohort of Portland-based artists. Each session is shaped by the relationship between guest and host, and by the relational, open-ended nature of talk story itself.
We’ll be serving teas from Apa Kabar’s own Moonstone Tea collection and burning a special incense blends.
$5–10 sliding scale. No one turned away for lack of funds.
5-6pm for each date.
* Due to limited space, RSVP (see below) is encouraged but we’ll do our best to accommodate walk-ins as space allows.
Featured Artists
Patricia Vázquez Gómez (she/her) is an artist and educator working between Tenochtitlán and the unceded lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, and Multnomah peoples. Her work explores the social life of art—where aesthetics, ethics, and politics meet—and is deeply informed by her longtime involvement in immigrant rights and social justice movements. Patricia works across painting, printmaking, video, music, and community-based projects, and currently teaches at Portland State University.
Website: patriciavazquez.art Socials: @la_pati_vg
Tahni Holt is a dance artist, teacher, and somatic practitioner born and raised in what is now known as Portland, Oregon, in the shadow and glow of Mt. Hood. Shaped by wild landscapes, punk adolescence, and ancestral lineages, their 30+ year practice explores movement as a site of intimacy, transformation, and unknowing.
Rooted in collaboration and community, their work spans performance, improvisation, somatic inquiry, and experimental gatherings. They have performed and taught across the U.S. and internationally, and are the founder and now one of four stewards of FLOCK Dance Center—a space dedicated to embodied practice, conversation, and critical engagement in the Pacific Northwest.
Their dance-making invites a state of unraveling where intuition, rigor, and embodied contradiction coexist—where dance becomes a way of touching what words cannot name.
Website: tahniholt.com Socials: @tahniholt
Lola Milholland is a writer, social practice artist, and founder of Umi Organic, a Portland-based noodle company committed to nourishing public school communities. Her debut book, Group Living and Other Recipes, was published by Spiegel & Grau in 2024.
Born in Portland to parents active in food justice and cultural history, Lola has long been drawn to the intersections of food, ecology, and collective care. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Time, Oprah Daily, Gastronomica, and Oregon Humanities, and she is a former editor of Edible Portland.
She’s had an intense fascination with the way that shifts in food culture reflect and influence larger cultural moments. The intersection of food justice, cultural history, and ecology is her favorite place to linger.
Website: lolasbeef.com Socials: @lolamilho
Maxx Katz is a multi-instrumentalist and composer whose work traverses metal, jazz, classical, free improvisation, and performance art. A classically trained flutist with an M.A. in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia, Katz explores the limits of communication through flute, electric guitar, and voice.
Their solo project FLOOM is an experiment in embodied heavy metal improvisation, using flute, downtuned doom guitar, and extreme vocals. Katz also leads Yelling Choir, a femme, women, and nonbinary ensemble reimagining voice, gender, and power, and collaborates with composer/poet John Niekrasz in Ixnay, a duo blending sound, text, and movement to challenge performance norms.
Katz has toured across the U.S. and Europe with various experimental projects and held residencies at the Banff Centre and Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Website: maxxkatz.com Socials: @maxxxkatz
Kyle Yoshioka is from California's North Bay and resides in Portland, Oregon. He thinks and writes a lot about belonging. For money, he works as a grants manager and consultant.
Kyle is the Founder and Editorial Director of Provecho Magazine, an independent publication about the intersection of food and identity. As an editor, he believes that hyperspecificity is a portal to universality. He has no interest in an institutional voice, preferring to empower writers to arrive to the page exactly as they are.
You can find Kyle co-hosting the BIPOC reading series at Literary Arts and read his personal essays on his Substack.
Website: kyleyoshioka.com Socials: @yearofthekyle
Muffie Delgado Connelly is a movement artist, somatic practitioner, and activist whose work serves as a curative strategy for resilience and expansive growth. Born a bi-racial Indigenous descendant of Turtle Island, Muffie understands the body as a frontline of resistance—an archive of memory, contradiction, and transformative potential.
Their practice channels raw exuberance and ancestral knowledge, activating shared, sensorial pathways that defy isolation and affirm the presence of those historically silenced or disappeared. Through movement, Muffie transmits a lineage of embodied resistance, possibility, and healing.
Website: muffiedelgadoconnelly.com Socials: @muffiedelgadoconnelly
Rory Sparks explores craft and collectivity in her work—how material transformation and interpersonal connections open spaces for thinking. In her book and print practice, she approaches publishing as being a mode of making that is about networks as webs of relationships. She is interested in investigating what shifts when we think about the book as a hybrid space, and publishing as a process of community building rather than commerce. Rory has co-founded several communal projects including A Garden is an Event, Produce, Working Library, and Em Space, which are each centered around co-creating social spaces that weave together pedagogy and making to inform and construct ways of thinking, being, and working. She currently teaches printmaking at Portland Community College.
Website: rorysparks.com Socials: @rorysparks