Aloha

The Hawaiian literary scene

This month we word-travel to Hawai’i for poetry and prose from two literary journals: the electronic Hawai’i Pacific Review and the print Bamboo Ridge. While the editors of each accept poetry and prose by writers from anywhere, each publication offers readers the editorial perspective and some of the creative output of the multicultural Hawaiian literary community.

Founded in 1987 as a print annual, Hawai’i Pacific Review went exclusively online in 2013. Work has been featured in Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The Best American Series. Edited by students and faculty of Hawai’i Pacific University, in Honolulu, its Editor-in-Chief is Tyler McMahon. Interest is for poetry, short fiction, and personal essays that speak with a powerful and unique voice by writers from Hawai’i, the mainland, and around the world. Accepted pieces are published one at a time on a rolling basis and the website is in blog format to accommodate this, though you can also click on the category buttons. Assessing editorial interests in a journal that functions this way is different than with one that has numbered or seasonal issues. It’s all about the new even though all work is archived. I’m including the most recent posts, as of this writing. Past authors include Cathy Park Hong, John Coyne, and Francine Witte.

The first five pieces on the page I’m looking at are split between nonfiction and poetry, yet I’m having us start with fiction, currently accessed through “older posts” or by clicking FICTION on the heading. We’ll start with “Memories” by Brazilian author Fabiana Martínez. The dominant element of fiction, or the one that takes over the beginning paragraphs, is language, appropriately for an author who is a linguist with a degree in comparative lit. She begins with a quote from Plato, from Phaedrus, about how writing things will interfere with memory and turn them into reminders, and starts the story with dialogue and instructions. It’s a domestic story centered on a single character, Ted, whose wife of 42 years has just died in the hospital from an undetected tumor, but it is not a love story. It is a story of missed chances when doing the right thing. I like the tactile messages in the hands and the notes and the soul. Martínez’ prose style is straightforward in observations, speech and actions, and grows somewhat poetic deeper into the story.

The next story “On the Interpretation of Dreams” by Daniel Webre, is in the speaking voice of the main character trying to explain something that doesn’t make sense to him, but what he’s started to believe; it is as if in a monologue, therefore language dominant. It is also a single character story, and written in a direct or plainspoken prose style. A relationship story, with two parts to it—the one with his cousin in the dream as they work together to cut the pineapples with machetes in the field, and the one in waking life with Allison who isn’t on the same wavelength.

Both stories are subjective, and neither is long. The man in each story is trying to work out something that doesn’t compute; each man in the story was not simpatico with the woman he was with. One story is third person, the other first. But then there’s “Cold Uterus” by Ann Yuan, a Long Island writer. This one is first person yet is immediately engaged with the character, a woman who can’t get pregnant and believes the blaming terminology of her Chinese heritage—after all she’s always had cold hands and feet. She attempts to warm her entire reproductive system by drinking increasingly too hot water, causing physical injury, losing taste, and sense. A story of obsession with a result, real or imagined, this story has a domestic subject and a poetic prose style through much of it. What follows is “Two Syllables” by Virginia Laurie, a visual artist, who writes her unhappy story in images, a tinge fabulist to begin, getting more real as it gets worse. It’s a longer length than the others.

The first literary work on the home page I’m reading is the lyric essay “Interstice” by Kiy Pozzi, who lives in Rockford, Illinois. A cataloguing of interstices of light, sound, time, and grief felt, intangible and philosophical. Linguistic, too: “…and if something can fill the space, then the word’s definition must expand to hold it, becoming, too, a site, a transition, an opening or an aperture.” The flash lyric essay, “As the Sky Loses Its Blues” by E Townsend is two sensual paragraphs deftly playing with perspectives, clarity, religious disagreement, and the sun setting behind Pikes Peak and on her time left with her father. There’s also the longer essay “A-Okay” by Court Ludwick that is written as from the sense perceptions of young girl in trouble with her mother, and the conflicting messages she receives in return, of embrace and seize, A-ok and stop right now. There is a poetic darkening of intention and reaction as well as of daylight, and impending adolescence, with setting and action dominant. In each of these nonfiction pieces, the perspective is continually readjusted, whittled to an acceptance, even if that is, in two of them, for being unlike or unliked.

There is a lyric love poem, “This Morning Rendezvous” by John Grey, laid out in stanzas of uneven line lengths and number. The tender waking moments are physically observed, his before hers, taking in the scene. Another lyric “Parrotfish Eulogy” by scuba diver Courtney Hitson, is vivid with similes, and lets us kick alongside her undersea. It’s one line short of a sonnet. There’s also “October 13th” by Rachel White, that catalogues numerous losses, personal and humanitarian, and a sonnet on being twice visited by the mythic bird “Ka ‘Iwa ‘Alua,” by Oahu poet Eric Paul Shaffer.

Hawai’i Pacific Review uses Submittable, and it appears that their backlog of submissions has temporarily closed the portal. The submission window is August to February, which should give you plenty of time to write towards their interests or put finishing edits to current work.

Bamboo Ridge was founded in 1978 to publish literature by, for, and about Hawai’i’s people. They are a press and a journal with two volumes published each year: one issue of the journal and one book by a single author or an anthology focused on a special theme. While special attention is given to literature that reflects an island sensibility, Bamboo Ridge is broad in scope and embraces a variety of work from writers across the nation. Poet Cathy Song is the editor and she chooses a guest editor to for each issue. The guest editor of No. 126, the issue I have, was Victoria Nolan Kneubuhl, a well-known Honolulu playwright and novelist. Issue No. 128 that’s complete, and due in June, is co-edited by Song and Naomi Shihab Nye.

Bamboo Ridge gets its name from the fishermen lining the perimeter of the point at Halona with a multitude of bamboo fishing poles, and the journal uses the place for its name because fisherman casting lines every day without guarantee of success is symbolic of the writing life. In Kneubel’s introduction to Issue No. 126, she writes that she picked pieces of high technical quality that contained human resonance, a factor crucial to the literary arts and the wider world of art. She reflects on the time when she started writing forty years earlier when those in Hawai’i who wrote about who they were and where they came from were made to feel they were second class, and writers today are not, thanks to the community created by the people of Bamboo Ridge Press.

I can’t link to any content on the website, so I’ll have to give you excerpts and descriptions, then quote from others because too many images will weigh down this post. Out of the 37 writers published in No. 126, 25 identify as Hawaiian or resident at one time. There are stories and poems written in Pidgin English, others about the Japanese-Hawaiian populations in the islands, the Portuguese, the Chinese, and poems half in Hawaiian, half English. There are two short plays— “Tourist Shell Shock” by Sean Joseph Choo, which was developed and produced by The Skeleton Rep(resents) in New York City as part of their “Explore Modern Myth” short plays series. The characters are “TĀRO SMITHSONIAN: an arrogant colonizer. The type that buys land in exotic locales to build golf courses and resorts. Obsessed with Japanese culture. There is a hint of a comic book evil villain about him; MAMA HONU: A mama turtle;” three other turtle characters with different dispositions, a “DRAGON PRINCESS, who is a royal politician, and SHISA STEVEDORES AND BARTENDERS, laborers who work for the princess.” The other short play is “Dykes in Waiks” by Lee A. Tonuchi, and “stay one previous winnah of Kumu Kahua Theatre + Bamboo Ridge Press Go Try PlayWrite contest. The characters are “THE BRIDE, 22, a young country bumpkin from da Midwest. She stay wearing her wedding dress while seated on one barstool in one empty Waikīkī dive bar. She’s gently weeping while DA BARTENDER, 39, one surly, tattooed Local woman from Pālolo tries for ignore the annoying sobs. Da crying grows in intensity until finally DA BARTENDER slams one empty glass on da counter in front of THE BRIDE who snaps out of her pity party.”

The first story in the issue is “The Rules of Invisibility” by J. G. Alderburke. The way the story begins—a regular life scene in a park where a man new to the city has claimed the best spot and shows no inclination towards sharing it—you might expect it to be about something that goes wrong in that setting.

The title could relate to those two sentences halfway down the page: “Martin looked at the groups of people around him. He recognized no one, but more importantly, no recognized him.” However, this story changes into a category of story I refer to as “twisted domestic” two pages on, at the bottom, when Martin, the main character, who really wants nothing to do with anyone, hops out of the shower and becomes invisible. He’s alarmed at first, and he briefly reappears when someone he’s met before comes in contact with him, but after that he’s erased from view, and heads to the bank... The main elements on that first page are setting and theme, and the sentences use some metaphor and simile. Another story, “The Bad Things Happen at Night” by Don Mitchell, an anthropologist and writer who graduated from Hilo High on the Big Island and now lives in Ithaca, New York, is multilayered, stories within a story, hidden and exposed.

The excerpts of June’s memoir that the main character reads aloud, responds to, and converses with June about, are in titled sections, and two time periods, including an historic May 1960 Tidal Wave, a soccer game in 2018, and a sexual assault. These dramatic layers, destructive waves, narrative stops and starts, voices present, remembered, and rediscovered, then spoken by another, makes language and storytelling the main structure and subject, with the silverswords setting secondary. Other texts and experiments are also of interest at Bamboo Ridge, such as with “Hawai’i Tourism Authority” by Chloe L.M. Balisacan, a four page story inside a Department of Agriculture plants and animals declaration form. This story also contains a few outcomes, following the possible stories of tourists or tech billionaires or surfers or homesick Hawaiians.

Many of the poems are written in a dialect or an otherwise speaking voice, and address social and political issues, food and identity. There are forms, such as a“Laundry Room Haibun” by Juliet S. Kono. And there’s a cento “Otakaheya/In the beginning” by Donna Cate Henderson using lines from Layli Long-Soldier, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Amanda Gorman, and others. (I’m on the fence about centos, and the lines pilfered from other poets even when cited, and especially when made into a beautiful lyric like this one. You can share your views on them in the comments.) It is, however, another piece of writing in this issue that contains other voices. An uplifting poem that I was content to read in this chaotic time.

I hear the scold of the retired principal that Darlene M. Javar is, in her cataloging narrative, “Scavengers.” It has a close perspective, physical and observant, and is also about creating another story or identity from the original.

It’s difficult to leave you there when the range of subjected style continues, but I hope you will get an issue or subscription, as I have. The issue closes with the richly descriptive “The Backstreets of Waikīkī, by retired high school teacher, Lloyd Yamashige. Here’s the first page:

They look for thought-provoking and unforgettable writing that sustains them. Work that inspires and connects. Not just poems, stories, essays, and plays, but comics, too, experimental forms and hybrid/mixed genre. The deadline for the journal issues seem to be in June of each year. At the moment, the new submission information, including guest editor, has not been refreshed on the page. But submissions are made through email, and that is BRPsubmission At gmail.com. I’ll likely get a response to my query as soon as this newsletter is sent. You can also ask a question with read@bambooridge.com.

I hope you are inspired by what you’ve read in this long newsletter and will be sending your writing to Hawaii Pacific Review or Bamboo Ridge.

Where did the time go? I thought you would have been reading this on Tuesday or Wednesday, but the news has been dreadful, and my thoughts scattered.