Telling Lives - Hawai`i Council for the Humanities

Hawai‘i Council for
the Humanities Pavilion
8th Annual
Hawai‘i Book and Music Festival
May 18-19, 2013
Telling Lives:
The Art and Practice of Biography
and Memoir
The Unfinished Work of Telling Lives
Telling Lives
Kiss & Tell: The Naked Truth
Tell Me Your Story: Young Lives
Hawai‘i’s Story, and Mine
Breaking Records: Athletes’ Lives
Instant Lives: Deadline Biography
Living Memory: Honoring the Past
Life Quests: Memoirs and Beyond
Lives Online: Truth and Truthiness
Creative Witness: Docupoetry
One Place, Different Voices
True Lies: Lost In Translation
Perfect Pitch: Musical Lives
Truth in Montage: Documentary Lives
Why Write Lives: Mission and Bias
Program sponsored by
The Unfinished Work of Telling Lives
Robert Buss
Executive Director, Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities
“I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the
hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.
There was little singing anywhere. Besides,” he added sorrowfully, “you know that part of my life as well
as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away.” (Chief Plenty Coups, 1849-1932)
Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups,
the last great chief of the Crow nation,
reached out across the “clash of civilizations” and told his story to a white
man, a story retold in Jonathan Lear’s
book Radical Hope: Ethics in the
Face of Cultural Devastation. Lear
concludes the first chapter of his
study by saying: “Plenty Coups was
a witness to the collapse of the
Crow’s future: he witnessed a time
in which ‘nothing happened’….
There is reason to believe that
Plenty Coups told his story to preserve it; and he did so in the hope
of a future in which things—Crow
things—might start to happen
again.” No one, truth be told, either tells a life-story without some sense of why it matters to
weave that tale, or reads or listens to such a story, if it is at all
well told, without being transformed by its meaning to our
own time and place.
One way of looking at the humanities is as just such a
bridge to the past and link to our future through the stories
that we tell about our communities, our worlds, and ourselves.
It’s almost as if we no longer need to ask for whom the bell
tolls—but rather look upon the toll that has been taken in the
various responses to its fearful or joyful or annoying ringing.
The most intimate stories are those that set forth a biography,
autobiography, memoir, oral history, or life-story. For it is
lived and recalled experience that defines human existence;
the being-alive part we share with the many beings of our
world. In traditional Hawaiian thinking, a human being has
both ha (breath) and aloha (of which breath is just a part) and
both connote relationships rather than isolation. Probably this
is true of other forms of life as well, but we don’t have their
stories to know.
Still, if we walk the earth in memory of our steps, we
also walk in constant forgetting. Nothing happens without the
potential of our making it meaningful. And likely nothing
happens just as we recall it. And so no life can ever be completed in just one telling—that is, if it’s a life we wish to remember at all.
We engage the stories of lives that inspire us, that serve
as moral examples or as cautionary tales, that awaken our
imaginations and possibilities, by revealing how others before
us have lived and the lessons their lives draw out for us. And
from these we learn. Umberto Eco reminds us “Intolerance for
what is different or unknown is as natural in children as their
instinct to possess all they desire. Children are educated gradually to tolerance, just as they are taught to respect the property of others and, even before that, to control their sphincters.”
It is a basic human function to learn from the others who have
lived before us and around us. And with that, “the world is
beautiful and we are part of it. That’s all. Our work is not to improve, it is to participate” (Barry Lopez, Resistance).
The “unfinished work” of the humanities, whether in
civil rights, tolerance, critical thinking, or democracy itself is
an ongoing mission. The expression was coined or at least
masterfully used by Abraham Lincoln, during our nation’s
greatest trial, the legacy of which is still with us, in his famous
Gettysburg Address:
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have
thus far so nobly advanced… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Top Left: Hiram Bingham
(1789-1869), missionary
leader. [Courtesy Mission
Children’s Society]
Bob Buss has been executive director of
the Hawaiʻi Council for the Humanities, an
affiliate of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, since 2004, and before that was
its program officer for twenty years. He works
with local community and cultural centers,
museums, archives, schools, and libraries to
facilitate public humanities programs, and was
the founding coordinator for Hawaiʻi History
Day in 1990. His academic interests include
Confucianism and Buddhism, ethics, and philosophy of art.
2
Left: King David Kalākaua (1836-1891).
[Courtesy Bishop Museum]
Below: Queen Lili‘uokalani (1838-1917).
[Elias Shura photo, courtesy Bishop Museum]
Left: Prince Leleiohoku (1854-1877), who
composed songs that are still popular today.
In accordance with the main themes of TELLING LIVES,
we selected a dozen iconic portraits of prominent Hawaiian
artists, from the royal composers to a regal composer and
singer, to an important early missionary, a professional
writer, a Swedish actor playing a Chinese detective, an
intense pioneering slack-key musician, a Hawaiian tourist
entertainer, an early 20th -century kumu hula, two celebrated
modern kumu hula who are also international music
celebrities, a sovereignty activist, and the heir to a fabled
line of chanters and kumu hula. Each image spins a specific
story — the way they are intended to be remembered by their
portrayers, or by themselves.
3
Telling Lives
Craig Howes
Principal Scholar, Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities
For at least twenty years now, various reviewers and scholars
have been declaring—often unhappily—that this is the age of
memoir. Whether through “reality” TV, biopics, entertainment
tabloids or blogs, or probing autobiographies by celebrities
like the sixteen-year-old Justin Bieber, stories of real peoples’
lives certainly seem to be a public favorite.
There is a long tradition of representing lives—sometimes in stone or paint, most often though words, and most
recently through film and pixels. Though what many have
come to call life writing takes many forms—confession, testimonio, genealogy, gospels, most kinds of history—ultimately the question is whether you are telling someone else’s
life (biography), or your own (autobiography, memoir). Of
course, these categories overlap. When you begin writing
about someone else in a memoir, you’re writing biography,
and the choice of a biographical subject can often tell us a
great deal about the biographer. But perhaps the most important question is not what kind of life writing is going on, but
why it is going on at all.
Though their topics and their participants are diverse,
the panels for Telling Lives: The Art and Practice of Biography
& Memoir, the Hawaiʻi Council for the Humanities’ contribution to this year’s Hawaiʻi Book and Music Festival, all deal
with the joys, responsibilities, and dangers of writing lives.
The joy can come from recognizing the achievements of others, or ourselves. Encouraging children to learn the stories of
their families and communities is the driving force behind Hiki
Nō, the PBS Hawaii television series that Susan Yim tells us
about. In his essay on sports biographies and autobiographies,
Michael Tsai explains how and why the lives of athletes have
always fascinated us, and Chris Vandercook notes how learning something about a musician’s life can make our appreciation of the music stronger and more nuanced. An interview is
often a miniature form of life writing, since one person is asking others about themselves, and Beth-Ann Kozlovich explains that radio is still a popular medium in part because it
offers us insights into lives. And when Don Wallace describes
putting together a life story out of materials assembled by others, he also records a feeling common to life writers and their
readers—the joy of recognizing the accomplishments and inspiring experiences of others like ourselves.
But as other essayists note, preserving the lives of
others is also our responsibility. George Tanabe warns that
the lives, and the chance for preserving the life stories, of
Hawaiʻi’s famous Japanese-American World War II veterans
are both coming to an end. In her essay on archives, Sydney
Iaukea claims that because her own story is inseparable from
her ancestors, she continues their lives not only by living, but
by accepting her kuleana to remember and record their lives
as well. Susan M. Schultz talks about how even poetry, often
considered the most personal form of writing, takes on the
challenge of commemorating the lives of those who do not, or
cannot, leave their own account. In fact, those who write biographies, autobiographies, and histories are often driven by
a sense of responsibility to a belief, an agenda, or a cause, as
Mark Panek points out in his essay on why people choose to
write lives.
And yet, recognizing the joy that comes with telling
lives, and accepting our need to do so, do not protect writers
from challenges, mistakes, or controversy. As David Ulrich
observes, narcissism and self-promotion can often seem to
dominate memoir culture: “You had a difficult childhood.
Write a memoir. You traveled to interesting places. Write a
memoir. You need therapy. Write a memoir.” Bob Green’s
essay focuses on the problems and barriers that confront people wanting to move life stories from one artistic form to another. My own brief essay on life writing in Hawaiʻi looks at
how people decide, and differ over, what life stories they can
tell, while John Zuern notes that online, you often can’t tell if
what you’re reading—or writing!—is autobiography or fiction. And as Mark Panek himself has discovered, you can
never know what part of your biography or autobiography
will anger or hurt your sources or subjects.
Telling Lives: The Art and Practice of Biography &
Memoir presents scores of panelists working on the front lines
of life writing who will relate and debate their own personal
experiences as authors, journalists, and historians. We hope
you will share their joy, accept with them our responsibilities
as narrating animals, and be vigilant about the many dangers
that come with telling your truth.
Craig Howes, Principal Scholar for
Telling Lives, has been Director of the
Center for Biographical Research at
the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
since 1997, Editor and Co-Editor of
the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly since 1994, and a faculty member in the Department of English since 1980. The co-producer and
principal scholar for the television documentary series Biography Hawai‘i, he
has also been active in Hawai‘iʼs arts
and humanities communities. A past
President of the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council and a former board
member of Kumu Kahua Theatre, he currently serves as President
of Monkey Waterfall Dance Theatre Company and as a member of
the board for the Hawaiian Historical Society.
4
Kiss & Tell: The Naked Truth
Mark Panek
One sure sign that you’ve written a powerful book is that
everyone reads it from the index, combing the back pages to
check out how far you went in naming names and telling the
truth. That’s how I read Land and Power in Hawai‘i. It’s
probably how everybody read Broken Trust. Inevitably, when
I hand someone a copy of Big Happiness they flip right to the
back, looking to confirm if all the players prominently displayed on the coconut wireless have finally made it into print.
For those who write about real events, this fascination
is a minefield packed with one bomb after the next, and legal
concerns about libel and defamation are only the beginning.
What if your story involves “family stuff,” for instance, or if
it becomes important to reveal that somebody has been fighting an addiction problem, or has done time in prison? What if
the only way to make your point is to reveal that a real person has…flaws? Are you going to damage that person’s reputation, even if what you say is true? Are you going to cause
harm? Are they going to come looking for you?
Anybody who has written about real people will tell
you that at some point, they certainly will come looking for
you—sometimes after you’ve shared with them the pages in
which they will appear. And once the toothpaste is out of the
tube, the offended party will almost never be Randall Roth’s
Lokelani Lindsay or George Cooper’s Ariyoshi. More likely
it will be something like this: the daughter of the subject of
one of the most loving portraits ever filmed for the PBS
Biography Hawai‘i series will walk out in protest at its public first-screening because the ending didn’t match up with
what she was sure could be the only ending to such a story. Or
a phone call will come from a good friend whose previouslyignored accomplishments you have highlighted in two different books, except he’s irate because he did not see the
period between one sentence describing him, and a succeeding one contrasting him with someone who has heroically
beaten a drug addiction. Or a phone call will come from a
man whose wife came across his name in…the index…and
then went excavating to find it inside, only to learn for the
first time that he had once shot somebody.
This last bomb was stepped on by former Governor
Ben Cayetano, who described the encounter during an HBMF
panel discussion on the very subject of the complexities of
memoir writing. If any book has ever been read from the
index, it’s Ben, where the famously frank Cayetano pulls no
punches and absolutely names names. At the 2010 festival
that saw him win Book of the Year, though, he regretted having included just one of these names, even though the events
he recounted were already part of the public record. “He had
put it behind him,” Cayetano says, of the man with the nowshocked wife. “I could have gotten away without that story in
the flow of the book even though it was true.”
But as for people such as former House Speaker Henry
Peters, who is depicted at various points threatening to throw
somebody off the Capitol’s fourth-floor balcony, punching
Ollie Lunasco, trashing Mits Uechi’s office, etc., Cayetano
simply says, “I told the truth about those people.” The phone
calls never came from the players at the Lege. Or from former
trustee Gerard Jervis, whose story of getting caught in a hotel
lobby bathroom having sex with a married Bishop Estate employee (Cayetano tactfully refuses to name this person) is also
revisited (pointedly, to make a point). “I’m sure he wasn’t
happy,” Cayetano says of Jervis, “but what I wrote was factual.” It may be that as “public figures” Jervis and Peters and
others are held to different standards in a defamation suit, or
that since the law requires a defamed individual to show damages, someone whose reputation is already “damaged” has
no case.
Or it may be that, thanks to the memoir’s “My Story”
nature, they knew everyone would understand the depictions
as Cayetano’s alone. That is, unlike the woman who walked
out on Biography Hawai‘i’s loving tribute to her own mother,
they understood the dynamics of the car accident witnessed
by ten people who produce ten different versions of what
happened, that writing about true stories is subjective, and
that even when you start from the index, it should be read
as such.
Mark Panek is a product of the UH
Mānoa’s Center for Biographical Research. His biography of Chad Rowan
(Gaijin Yokozuna) explores the cultural
moves Hawai‘i’s sumotori had to make
for success in Japan’s national sport.
His life of Waikāne’s Percy Kipapa (Big
Happiness) traces the roots of Hawai‘i’s
crystal meth epidemic to the pressures
of colonization and development, and
won the 2012 Ka Palapala award
for Excellence in Nonfiction. His new
novel (Hawai‘i) explores the aftermath
of Hawai‘i’s post-statehood surrender to outside investment.
Panek, Associate Professor and Chair of the University of Hawai‘i
at Hilo’s English Department, has been honored with a 2012 Elliot
Cades Award for Literature.
Stuart H. Coleman, Moderator, is the
award-winning author of Eddie Would
Go and Fierce Heart. Coleman has
published more than fifteen articles in
numerous publications, including Menʼs
Journal, Salon.com, Sierra Magazine,
The Washington Post, Honolulu, Hawaii
Magazine, and the Honolulu Weekly.
Coleman has won the Eliot Cades
Award for Literature, the Hawaii Book
Publisher Associationʼs Excellence in
Non-Fiction Award and The Yemassee
Award for Best Poetry. He has an MFA
in Creative Writing from American University. He has taught at
Punahou School, ʻIolani School, the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa
and the East-West Center, and he currently works as the Hawaiʻi
Coordinator of the Surfrider Foundation.
5
Tell Me Your Story: Young Lives
Susan Yim
We can each tell our own different stories…
— HIKI NŌ student from Ni‘ihau
Telling their own stories is exactly what students from elementary, middle and high schools across the islands have
done for more than two years on PBS Hawaii. Each week,
students from public, charter and private schools tell stories
about their families, friends or neighbors on HIKI NŌ, a
prime-time weekly show that airs on PBS Hawaii.
More than 400 stories have been broadcast since HIKI
NŌ went on the air in February 2011. A huge majority of the
stories are told in English. However, the students at Ke Kula
Niʻihau O Kekaha, a charter school on Kauai attended by
youth from Niʻihau, tell their stories in Niʻihau dialect.
Viewers follow by reading English subtitles.
What have their stories been about? A paniolo, a
Native Hawaiian horse whisperer, who learned to train horses
from his father on Niʻihau. An entertainer who returns to prepare students for a music festival. A young widow who’s
steering her children to fulfill their father’s dream of speaking the Niʻihau dialect and by doing so keeping the language
of that island alive.
These are just the stories from Niʻihau students.
Across the islands, students are telling stories that have made
me aware that today’s youth care deeply about issues, especially the environment and even social justice. But perhaps
the most powerful stories they tell—the stories that stay with
the viewer long after the television is turned off—are those
that take us into the personal lives of these young storytellers.
A sixth-grader struggles with what she believes is a
less than perfect “body image.” Although an outstanding student and athlete, with a circle of friends, she believes she isn’t
beautiful because she doesn’t look like “a Disney princess.”
A high school freshman, who chose to move from
Japan to Hawaiʻi so he can attend school in a place “where he
can think independently,” wins over his classmates who initially think this newcomer with different ways is “strange.”
And then there is the story I call, “Crystal’s Story.” A
year after this story aired on public television, viewers still
bring it up when they talk about HIKI NŌ. A national gathering of public television broadcasters in Washington, D.C.
applauded the story when it was shown at a conference, where
HIKI NŌ won a prestigious broadcast award.
Crystal, a 13-year-old student who strives to be “in
control,” tells us in a clear voice, absent any self-pity, how
she’s coping with her mother’s terminal illness and last days
of life. She lets us into her world and at the end of the story,
it isn’t easy to leave Crystal’s world behind. You wonder,
months later, how she’s doing.
Think back to your youth. To those stories you, perhaps, wanted to tell. Why didn’t you tell those stories, write
them down and in the process find your “voice”? How many
times have adults—who on learning I’d been a newspaper reporter—told me, “I don’t know how to write.” Yet every day
they’re telling friends, co-workers and family members stories about their kids, their colleagues, their triumphs and their
struggles.
To be human is to live a life of stories connected by
time. We are all capable of being storytellers. We just need
the confidence to tell our stories. With HIKI NŌ, students
who have found media to be an exciting tool for learning and
expressing themselves use video to tell their stories.
Yet, to produce that video—to tell their story with a
camera—they must be able to write a script. They have to find
the words as well as the images.
How do we teach young people to tell these stories?
The answer isn’t complicated. At HIKI NŌ, when
teachers discuss the stories their students brainstorm and ask
us how to select one, we ask: “Which story are your students
most passionate about?” It’s usually a story that is about one
of them—a classmate, a teacher, a family member, a neighbor—someone they know.
For so many of the students we work with—as with a
multitude of storytellers over the centuries—they don’t have
to look far. That initial story—which introduces the storyteller
of any age to his or her “voice”—is close to home and is usually their own.
Susan Yim is the Managing Editor for
HIKI NŌ, a weekly program on PBS
Hawaii featuring stories conceived
and produced by students in public,
charter and private schools in Hawaiʻi.
She was a feature writer and editor at
the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and The
Honolulu Advertiser. Her writing has
appeared in The New York Times and
International Herald-Tribune; and
Islands, Honolulu and Spirit of Aloha
magazines. She is the author of John
Young: The Sketchbooks (1998) and
editor of We Go Eat: A Mixed Plate
From Hawaiʻiʼs Food Culture (2008) and We Go Jam: Celebrating
Our Music, Our Soundscape, Our Hawaiʻi (2012).
6
Hawai‘i’s Story,
and Mine
Sydney Iaukea
As we measure present circumstances with past realities,
noticing where the information rubs up against knowing the
self is the gift of the archive. Research offers a view of the
self in the present via the resurrected information obtained
from a collective, and/or personal, past. Yi-Fu Tuan says that
past reenactment is ended when it lives in the present, and
historians reconstruct culture once thought lost, so that we are
able to recall and learn from our own yesterdays. Research is
the tool to uncovering narratives that can affect the personal
on multiple levels and in various ways. Here the personal and
political are recognized as intertwined, as each informs and
alerts the other. This distance closes so that whatever information the researcher uncovers—emotional, serious, insightful, intriguing—tells us as much about our relationships in
the present as it does to describe the descriptive constructs of
yesterday. This emotional archive, both emotional and
archival, ensures that “the record is always being made”
(Verne Harris) based on our interpretations and relationships
to what is being researched—in essence, an uncovering of the
past alongside an unveiling of the present.
Much of my research is directly connected to my
genealogy. My great great grandfather, Curtis Piehu Iaukea,
left his diary notes, chapters, letters, and other official documents available for the discovery. I realized that because he is
my kupuna, there is no distance. This moʻolelo is my DNA
speaking to me and asking that I listen. In the process of engaging his words, some of the gaps of knowing self and
moʻokūʻauhau were filled in and clarified. The intimacy with
the material is unavoidable, and articulating this closeness in
the work grounds the information in phenomenological ways
to the lived experience of the author(s)—then and now.
Native researchers have an intimacy to place when researching that place. The unveiling of historical truths demands a closeness with the material that is not subject/object
generated because what is being studied is also being lived and
experienced from a near distance. For example, Hawaiians are
part of a larger cosmology that extends beyond self. All are interconnected and so information about any one part aids in the
understanding of the collective whole. With this in mind, I
wrote about sharing my story alongside that of my kupuna:
I also at various times include my own moʻolelo, because to a native researcher, history and land here are
personal. As Hawaiians, our identity and sense of knowing come directly from relating to ka ʻāina and ke kai. A hundred years ago and today, we are connected to land and deeply affected by its loss, because ka ʻāina is our older
sibling, part of our genealogical makeup, and the entity that connects us to all that is—including nā akua, aliʻi, and
one another. Since we cannot be separated from this entity, this ʻāina, in our very being, we experience an acute
sense of loss of ourselves when we are separated from this entity in our day-to-day lives. To recognize the loss of
land as the loss of self is an enormous and very personal endeavor, one that makes historical occurrences very real.
But even taking this personal state of research into account, research in general asks that we soften and listen because the product that is the research itself affects
self-understanding—almost regardless of the topic. The
archive itself contains a “temporal plasticity” and we as researchers act as the plastic subject—malleable by the information presented. Although the information is collected and
stored at the archive, it is still open to and reliant on our readings and interpretations, and the manner in which information is presented also shapes the discourse. Michael Shapiro
writes that “although aspects of the past shape the archive,
the very form of its making, the technologies of record keeping, in turn reshape the way the past is understood.”
Research, therefore, is a dynamic project of interpreting the past by the “plastic subject” or “one who undergoes
transformation while striving to reshape his world’s understanding.” In effect, the historical record is always up for interpretation and nuanced understandings. And this relationship is
always presented in the work—where the personal is either
recognized and explained or veiled and hidden. Herein, there
is no escape from the personal impacts of research.
Sydney Lehua Iaukea is from the
island of Maui and is a dedicated
instructor, community member,
and ocean person. Sydney has a
Ph.D. in Political Science and specializes in Hawai‘i Politics. She is
currently the Hawaiian Studies
Program Manager for the Department of Education. Her academic
work intersects with her personal
life because she researches and
writes about her great great grandfather, Curtis Piehu Iaukea, the
Hawaiian Kingdom representative
on whom her book The Queen
and I is based. Through her ancestorʼs manuscripts and other primary documents, Sydney discovers and shares a silenced history
in Hawai‘i from the early 1900s, and connects this account to todayʼs contemporary land and property issues in Hawai‘i through
personal narrative.
7
Breaking Records:
Athletes’ Lives
Michael Tsai
It may be fairly argued that sports and literature serve many
of the same purposes. Both exist, ostensibly, for the entertainment of their boisterous crowds and quiet readerships, yet
both also have also acted as powerful media for instruction,
instigation, even social reform. Both are reflective of and reactive to the beliefs, values and aspirations of their times yet
also, in their finest moments, are transcendent over time,
place and every other context beyond the field or the page.
And in exciting our passions, loyalties and imaginations, both
challenge us to reflect on who we are and why we believe
what we believe. The intersections of literature and sport then
are fertile ground for exploring the human condition.
Driven by internal contradiction, by rising and falling
“dramatic tension,” literature is a particularly apt vehicle for
examining the nature of sport, which is defined in near-equal
measures by its traditional utility in indoctrinating young men
in the values and skills of war and by its more innocent roots
in expressive, non-purposeful play, by the strict codification
of its rules and standards and by the shocking, unaccountable
intrusions of the miraculous into its unfolding narratives.
Sports literature is in essence a literature concerned
with the qualities of the heroic. In his book Dreaming of
Heroes: American Sports Fiction 1868-1980, Michael Oriard
argues that “sports exists, in a sense, to create heroes.” It follows then that sports literature exists in part to respond to the
ways in which sports’ exemplars of character, performance
and morality — from mythological champions like the Celtic
warrior Cu Chulanin or the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, to pulp
heroes like Gilbert Patten’s Frank Merriwell or Owen
Johnson’s Dink Stover, to real-life compensatory heroes like
Jack Johnson, Hank Greenberg, Jackie Robinson, or
Muhammad Ali—reflect who we are and who we want to be.
The literary approaches applied to sports vary broadly,
their forms and conventions sometimes mimicking the forms
and conventions of the sports themselves. While Patten and
Johnson championed Luther Halsey Gulick’s ideas on “muscular Christianity,” G. Stanley Hall’s evolutionary theory of
play and Theodore Roosevelt’s idea of the strenuous life to
generations of young American boys, in pulp magazines and
young adult books, writers like sports columnist and shortstory writer Ring Lardner (You Know Me Al) and later novelist Bernard Malamud (The Natural) challenged the
hero-making project with wry humor and damning insight.
Grantland Rice brought literary flair to the daily business of
sports reporting, laying early groundwork for the masterful
New Journalism examinations of sport undertaken by writers
like Tom Wolfe (“The Last American Hero”) and Norman
Mailer (The Fight). Meanwhile, experimental writers like
Robert Coover have used the conventions of sports narrative
as launching points for daring re-imaginations of form and
content.
Indeed many of the most prominent novelists, poets,
journalists and essayists of the last century—Phillip Roth,
Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo among them—have found literary inspiration on the pitch, between the lines or within the
squared circle. Nowhere within sports literature is the pool of
authorial talent so diverse as in its life writing sub-genres,
where a cursory review of notable contributors might include
Red Smith, Gay Talese, George Will, Buzz Bissinger, Dennis
Rodman, Jackie Robinson, Jose Canseco, George Plimpton,
Jack Kerouac and John Krakauer. Whether through telling autobiography like Billie Jean by Billie Jean King, illusion-shattering memoir like Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, humanizing
biography like Jane Leavy’s The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and
the End of America’s Childhood, or long-form journalistic profiles like Gary Smith’s classic Sports Illustrated article on
dying basketball coach Jim Valvano, “As Time Runs Out,” life
writing in sports addresses perhaps the greatest desire of sports
fans—to understand from within the mind of the athlete the
hidden life of the locker room, the invisible movements of the
game and the spectacular moments that they produce.
Michael Tsai is a reporter and columnist for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser
and an instructor of English at
Kapiʻolani Community College. Prior
to joining the Star-Advertiser in 2010,
he worked for the Honolulu Advertiser
for more than 15 years covering local
news, sports, and features. As a graduate student at the University of
Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, he has studied creative writing, sports literature, and
contemporary American short fiction,
and he is a past recipient of the
Grace K. Abernethy Creative Writing
Scholarship and the Myrtle Clark Award with Distinction. His current project is an institutional biography of the Honolulu Marathon.
8
Instant Lives:
Deadline Biography
Beth-Ann Kozlovich
There is one truth to remember in an interview: Nothing about
anyone’s life story is completely objective. That can be tough
to reconcile, especially when we’re after the facts and someone is spilling over with the whats, whos, wheres, whys and
hows. Often that exercise is not nearly so illuminating as
when the storytelling begins to overtake the litany of facts. In
the storytelling, people reveal themselves and that’s when
things get interesting.
It sounds simple: what makes us intriguing is our stories. We never seem to outgrow the need for them or to share
something of ourselves, to get out of ourselves, to pass on a
little context, find out how simpatico or incompatible some of
us really are, or just plain learn something. People are their
stories and the concept has long been part of our lexicon. You
might have even said it yourself, “So what’s his story?”
Perhaps it’s the mystery contained in the human voice with all
the nuances of meaning and shades of emotional color that
can betray the speaker’s brain—or even yours. Maybe too,
it’s what some scientists now take as fact that we are hardwired to tell and listen to stories. And it’s through story we
learn best, because we are, to borrow Jonathan Gottschall’s
book title, The Storytelling Animal.
A good yarn, including nonfictional narratives, can
mesmerize us. Voice to ear, stories have a unique power to
move us, influence us, and possibly change our perspectives.
That’s part of the argument why terrestrial radio not only
failed to die with the advent of television, it actually grew in
listenership. When the same dire fate was predicted because
of satellite radio and the smart technology many of us pack in
our pockets, purses and bags, radio audiences continued to
grow. According to the media research firm Arbitron Inc. in
the March 2013 RADAR® 116 National Radio Listening
Report, radio’s audience added more than 1.6 million weekly
listeners over the year and reaches 242.8 million listeners
each week. In case you’re already shaking your head and assigning the gain to online listening, consider this: the same
report pegs weekly listening via AM/FM/HD streaming at a
little more than 5.4 million people age 12 and older, of which
3.5 million are in the 18-49 market. Screens are nice, but good
old-fashioned radio has a lot of mileage yet.
However we hear it, the truth is often a moving target
and age does matter. (And I can hear you shouting hooray
from wherever you’re reading this.) Whatever side of the triangle you’re on, interviewer, subject or listener, what you understand at 30 often has a different meaning at 40 or 60. Of
course at 23, few of us really want to admit that we don’t absolutely understand how the world works. At some point,
though, if we’re lucky, we may grow to understand that aging
changes context and reframes the past—for good or ill. In the
storytelling business, that often means the story told today
may be quite different from the story of next year or a decade
ago, even (and sometimes, especially) from the same person.
If there is any capital “T” truth, it may be that the only way
to begin to understand life—and many of the people also trying to sort it out—is to keep living and keep asking questions.
When we invite someone to talk about her life or point
of view, it’s helpful to remember the reality du jour is frequently fuzzy: one person’s purple really is another person’s
periwinkle. An interview, or for that matter any conversation,
is a dance on a shifting carpet, and its success often boils
down to two things: listening well and poking at assumptions,
especially the ones inside our heads. Those are sizable challenges, especially for people more concerned with besting the
interviewer, being right, focusing on what they’ll say next, or
for those with a prepared agenda, making sure to get all those
bullet points worked into the answer, regardless of the question. (If the End of Conversation ever comes, it will be the
last line on a list of talking points.) In time, we all become
stories and what gets through all the filters, whether we like
it or not, is still subject to interpretation...which means that
very likely, there will be another conversation, more information, and lucky for us, more stories. As long as we keep at
it, and keep the myth of objectivity in its place, there is hope.
Beth-Ann Kozlovich is Hawaii
Public Radioʼs Talk Shows Executive
Producer and oversees HPRʼs five locally-produced talk shows. She created and co-hosts HPR2ʼs weekday
morning show, The Conversation,
launched in 2011. In 1999, she created and began moderating Town
Square, HPRʼs long-running live public affairs forum. A woman with lives
on radio and in the business of nonprofits, she was also the Hawaiʻi anchor of NPRʼs Morning Edition. Her
attraction to public radio began when
it was the only car-accessible, parent-approved station . . . so all
of this really is her motherʼs fault. When her three sons contribute
to public radio, Beth-Ann will be just as happy to take the blame.
9
Living Memory: Honoring the Past
George Tanabe
Why do we let so many slip away undocumented, as
if biography and memoir, based in the minutiae of ordinary
lives, do not rank high enough in the literature of war? By the
strange habit of suddenly finding value in people only when
they are leaving us, we wait until it is too late. Does appreciation have to arise from absence?
It is not just our taking people for granted that makes
us complacent, but the individual Nisei veteran himself, bred
in his own cultural and military training of placing group before self, recoils at the suggestion of being the central subject
of a story. A publisher might agree. Does the life of Pvt. Nisei
Soldier have literary weight enough for a full biography?
Perhaps not, and this is where memoirs come in. Most
of what we have are short, like those in Japanese Eyes,
American Heart. They provide invaluable glimpses into
global war from the sometimes frightening specifics of one
man’s experience. They point out how experience is made up
of deliberate decisions mixed with good and bad luck. But
memoirs are limited by memory.
Biographers can tell a bigger story, and as the number
of subjects decline, we should not rule out biographies of Pvt.
Nisei Soldier. Through the magic of good writing, a skilled biographer can throw the mundane details of his life against one
of the most cataclysmic events in history, and make some
sparks fly. After all, two billion people waged war with and
against each other, and he, one of the remaining few, was there.
Nearly 2 billion people worldwide served in military capacities during the Second World War (1941-1945). Accounts of
the war necessarily tell of vast movements of armies and
navies, and it is impossible to narrate every story of this
global, cataclysmic event that embroiled over 61 countries.
The scale of the war was staggering, and it is no wonder that
bookstores and television still offer new books and movies,
adding to the endless efforts to capture a war gone forever except in reclaimed words and images.
Of the 16 million Americans who served in the military during the war, over 5,000 were of Japanese ancestry,
most of them from Hawaiʻi. We have heard many times over
the story of the Nisei (second generation) soldiers who fought
in Europe as the 100th Battalion (“Remember Pearl Harbor”)
and the 442nd Infantry Regiment (“Go For Broke”), and in the
Pacific as interpreters. The Nisei soldiers racked up an incredible record, and the 100/442 remain the most decorated
units in the U.S. Army to this day.
They have become the stuff of legend, and their story
line is repeated often. After the Japanese attacked Pearl
Harbor, Nisei patriotism was questioned, as if Japanese in
America were no different from the enemy in Japan, but they
proved themselves as GIs in battle: Cassino, Anzio, Rome,
Bruyeres, Biffontaine, the rescue of the Lost Battalion. No
one would question their loyalty again, and the effects of their
blood and sacrifice benefitted the community, enabling others
to exploit American opportunities for successful careers and
lives.
The advantage of a fixed story lies in its capacity for
hardening memory so that it will not be forgotten. The Nisei
soldiers’ story will be told and retold long into the future, preserved in those books and movies. This hardening, however,
gives the illusion of the story having been told in its entirety,
that fixing it finishes the group narrative of the battalion and
regiment.
The military, by nature of its need to function as large
groups, effaces individuals, turning their identities into ranks.
A sergeant leading even as small a group as a squad is equally
replaceable by another sergeant, no matter who the individual
might be. And yet we all know, all too obviously, that a soldier is a person, but in the writing of military literature, very
few persons of the lower ranks get to have their stories told.
In part there are just too many of them, 2 billion worldwide,
16 million Americans, over 5,000 Nisei men.
The most striking statistic in our own time, however,
is how fast those masses of men are dwindling down to a
handful of individuals, all of whom are in their 80s and 90s.
The story of the 100th and the 442nd will continue to be told,
but we are facing our last chance to capture the stories of remaining individuals, and that can only be done through biography and memoir.
George Tanabe is Professor Emeritus in
the Department of Religion at the
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His academic specialty is the study of the religions of Japan, and his books include
Myōe the Dreamkeeper (Harvard UP),
Religions of Japan in Practice (Princeton
UP) and Practically Religious: Worldly
Benefits and the Common Religion of
Japan (with Ian Reader, U of Hawai‘i P).
With his wife Willa, he has written a
guidebook to Japanese Buddhist temples in Hawai‘i, which was published by
the UH Press in October, 2012.
Brian Niiya, Moderator, is the content
director for Densho: The Japanese
American Legacy Project and editor of
the Densho Encyclopedia, a new encyclopedia on the Japanese American
World War II incarceration experience.
A public historian who has previously
held senior managerial positions for the
Japanese American National Museum
and the Japanese Cultural Center of
Hawaiʼi, he has produced numerous interpretive works in print, exhibition,
video, and online media.
10
Don Blanding (1894-1957), artist,
writer, and poet. [Courtesy DeSoto
Brown Collection]
Gabby Pahinui (1921-1980), slack-key master.
[Courtesy Berger Archive]
Warner Oland (1879-1938), Swedish actor, played
the legendary fictional Honolulu detective Charlie
Chan in 16 movies in the 1930s. [Courtesy DeSoto
Brown Collection]
11
Life Quests:
Memoirs and Beyond
David Ulrich
What gives resonant meaning to art and writing? The question
leads to a paradox. The greatest art, the most memorable writing, is infused with deeply felt personal experience and highly
unique observations. Yet it points beyond the self to the human
condition. When teaching a class, Maya Angelou would write
on the blackboard for diverse students to deeply consider: “I
am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me.”
Here, I must question the trend that has spawned a
spate of published memoirs and a host of idiosyncratic, personal styles of art. Partially due to the ease of digital creation
tools, we can now find a bewildering profusion of memoirs
and a mind-numbing plethora of photographs that grace the
web and social media. In this confessional culture of books
and images, part of me feels: who cares? You had a difficult
childhood. Write a memoir. You traveled to interesting places.
Write a memoir. You need therapy. Write a memoir. Or, you
see something personally memorable. Take an Instagram. And
instantly make it look like a nostalgic memory from a time
you never actually knew. It’s just too much about self.
By contrast, photography and much good writing
excels in detailed observations of the outer world. To be sure,
we use our self as an instrument of discovery—our senses,
feelings, minds—but not as the center around which all things
revolve. At least hopefully not. There is no Zen riddle here.
The world exists outside ourselves. A big, beautiful, tragic,
sad radiant world.
To argue the other side, we also exist. Our inner
worlds—our potential and our range of experiences—are at
least as wide and deep as the outer world. We are microcosms
of the macrocosm. This too demands exploration and expression. The unexamined life goes nowhere. In memoir writing,
as in art, it is a question of inclusion and balance, leaving nothing out, neither inner nor outer, but integrating the two. It’s not
about me; it’s about what I have discovered and learned and
gained understanding of through the blood of my efforts.
At this particular stage in my life, I have just completed the first draft of a memoir essay, called Longing for
Light, about vision and awareness. I think I may have something to offer, but do not want to contribute to the “bonfire of
vanities” that plague highly personal contemporary expression. I have struggled for thirty years to understand a singular, life-altering experience. Can I now finally speak about
what I have come to understand about seeing from losing my
right dominant eye in an impact injury in 1983? One truism I
have come to respect—you cannot write about something
until well after the event. I’m not sure if I yet have the wis-
dom—or the ego—to use my own distinctly personal experience to help others find greater luminosity and clarity through
sight. But I know I need to try, and am learning a great deal
from the effort.
A strange intuition persisted during the time of my injury and fragile recovery—one that I could not shake from
my consciousness—that this painful experience would serve
to help others as well as myself.
For a memoir or highly personal body of work to leave
our intimate circle, I feel that we must apply a litmus test, a
measured standard. In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft
of Memoir, William Zinsser writes: “A good memoir requires
two elements—one of art, the other of craft.” Does it sing?
Does it have what Zinsser calls “integrity of intention?” Can
it elegantly reach others with a compelling story relevant to
the reader’s life? We respect triumph and human fortitude and
resiliency of spirit. We want to learn things through the experiences of others. Your voice becomes primary in what it
teaches, shows, or demonstrates.
And is it written well—crafted to high standards, with
your own voice and your own unique style? Interesting experiences do not always magically find their own shape on
the page. We need to assist the process. Thoreau wrote seven
drafts of Walden over eight years. In doing so, Zinsser remarks, “He wrote one of our sacred texts.”
The deeper we go within ourselves, the more we can
reach the common ground of our shared human heritage. The
recognition of both our shared conditions and our individual
variations, where we are unambiguously different, are equally
necessary to contribute to the dialogue of our times.
David Ulrich is the Program Coordinator for Pacific New Media,
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
He is an active photographer and
writer whose work has been published in numerous books and
journals including Aperture,
Mānoa, and Sierra Club publications. Ulrichʼs photographs have
been exhibited internationally in
over seventy-five one-person
and group exhibitions in museums, galleries, and universities.
He is the author of The Widening Stream: The Seven Stages of
Creativity and currently working on a memoir/essay: Longing for
Light: Into the Heart of Vision. He is a Consulting Editor for
Parabola magazine and a frequent contributor.
12
Lives Online:
Truth and Truthiness
John David Zuern
In January of this year many of us here in Hawai‘i were captivated and troubled by the news that Lāʻie-born Notre Dame
linebacker Manti Te‘o had apparently fallen prey to an elaborate online hoax: his girlfriend, “Lennay Kekua,” with
whom—prior to her purported death in September 2012—
Te‘o had been communicating solely through the Internet and
by telephone, was exposed as the fabrication of a male admirer, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. In the wake of this revelation,
Te‘o found himself having to explain inconsistencies in his
own account of the relationship, including his earlier claims
to have met Kekua in person, in order to fend off suspicions
that he had willingly participated in the ruse to boost his public image.
Two months before the Manti Te‘o story broke, a court
in Buenos Aires sentenced Paul Frampton, a 68-year-old professor of Physics at the University of North Carolina, to 56
months of detention for cocaine smuggling. Frampton alleges
that someone posing as the swimsuit model Denise Milani
had enticed him into an online romance, lured him to South
America, and tricked him into transporting two kilos of the
drug from Bolivia to Argentina. Text messages from
Frampton’s phone, however, convinced Argentine authorities
that Frampton was in fact aware of his role and legally responsible for his actions. Frampton and his attorneys continue
to represent his plight as the result of blind passion and misplaced trust.
What can we learn from these stories, now that so
many of us lead at least part of our lives online and have entered into relationships, some of them intensely intimate, with
friends whose faces we have never seen? Surely no one needs
to be reminded that the people we meet on the Internet are
not always who they say they are. Most of us are already on
guard against the temptations that apparently misled Te‘o and
Frampton, in part because we’re willing to recognize that
under the right circumstances, we too could be susceptible to
such seductions. To shield ourselves from humiliation, heartbreak, and identity theft, we proceed with caution whenever
we’re on the Internet, often second-guessing our impulses to
reach out to others and to share.
What our own online lives really have in common
with the high-profile ordeals of Te‘o and Frampton has less to
do with the drama of the deception than with what happened
after the truth came out: the damage control, the spin. Few of
us, fortunately, will ever suffer such widely publicized blows
to our reputations, but anyone who maintains a Facebook account, a Linkedin profile, a Twitter feed, or a blog is in the position of crafting and managing a public image that always
depends, though to varying degrees, on an audience’s perception of the integrity of the person behind the page. Even if
we’re not using these media to pursue professional goals, as
many now do, we care about what our online communities
think of us, and we know that a carelessly uploaded photograph or a rash political comment can send ripples of doubt
and confusion through our personal network.
These concerns about how our readers see us inevitably shape the stories we tell about ourselves online, and
they sometimes lead us to bend the truth. Although we don’t
typically hide behind entirely false personas, in more subtle
ways we indulge in a version of what comedian Stephen
Colbert has famously called “truthiness.” We edit and even
embellish our posts to project convincing and emotionally satisfying, if not always entirely factual, pictures of our lives.
We don’t lie, exactly, but when we strive to be as entertaining
as our funniest Facebook friend, or more seriously, when we
sift the details we reveal about our personal crises, we come
to the line between autobiography and fiction. That line is notoriously blurry—in fact, the term “truthiness” has also been
applied to James Frey’s 2003 book A Million Little Pieces, a
largely fictional depiction of drug addiction and recovery that
Frey initially passed off as a memoir.
Colbert used the word “truthiness” to condemn the
fabricated “intelligence” that helped launch the Iraq War;
Frey’s truthiness has been criticized as a manipulative bid to
sell books. But for Facebookers and Twitterers like us, is
truthiness such a bad thing?
John David Zuern is an Associate
Professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at
Mānoa, where he teaches classes in
literature and directs the Undergraduate Internship Program. He is a coeditor of the journal Biography: An
Interdisciplinary Quarterly. He also
conducts workshops on writing for
the Web for the Pacific New Media
program in the UH-Mānoa Outreach
College.
13
Creative Witness: Docupoetry
Susan M. Schultz
When we think about poetry, we usually still think about lyric
poetry, or short poems about feeling, in which time dissolves
into transcendent no-time. Writing a lyric poem, the poet
might (as Wordsworth did) contemplate a place in nature
where he was once a boy; out of such “spots of time,” he then
finds solace, wisdom, in “emotions recollected in tranquility.” Historical writing and journalism are very different
creatures. Their “spots of time” are tied to others, compose
narratives, are grounded in days, years, places. Both kinds of
writing engage memory, but the first engages it as personal
and potentially spiritual history, the second as social, often
conflictual, history. We call the lyric the work of subjectivity,
and assign to history the notion of objectivity, or distance.
Each of these modes of writing explains a world to us,
but we inhabit more than one world. We might find ourselves
feeling deeply over historical events, or finding wisdom
in a banal document attached to
a moment in our own lives (a dead parent’s cancelled check
carries more freight than as record of a simple financial transaction). How can we express these mixed states, except by
combining and blurring the genres in which we write about
them? When we begin to put lyric poems in the same (white)
space as documents or historical narratives, we are writing
and reading “docupoetry.” As Joseph Harrington writes in
“Docupoetry and archive desire,” “we are in the midst of
something of a flourishing of documentary literary forms.”
Harrington goes so far as to call this mode “creative nonpoetry,” though those of us still wedded to the poem might better agree with Marianne Moore, when she writes, “I can see
no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no
other category in which to put it” (quoted by Harrington). It
was Moore who used the language of Forest Service manuals
in her intricately woven meditative poems. Phil Metres describes docupoetry as “a dynamic medium that informs and is
informed by the history of the moment.”
One of the first 20th century practitioners of the mode
was Charles Reznikoff, a lawyer, whose works, Testimony,
and later, Holocaust, were based on legal cases. A reader is
hard pressed to find Reznikoff in one of his poems; he is more
editor than composer. But there is no escaping a rush of feeling (sorrow, anger, compassion) after reading one of these deceptively simple, even bland-on-the-surface poems. Take
“Negroes,” included in Testimony. In the second section of
this poem, the poet lays out the fact that a black man has died
in prison, his death assigned the cause “peritonitis.” But the
jailer testifies that the man was brought to the prison without
being charged, was left in his cell unattended, and had been
badly beaten. The final stanza brings home the poem’s lessons:
He was not treated by a doctor, the jailer, or anybody:
just put into the jail and left there to die.
The doctor who saw him first—on a Monday—
did nothing for him
and said that he would not die of his beating;
but he did die of it on Wednesday.
(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180089)
Clarissa Haili Nelson (1901-1979), aka Hilo
Hattie, entertainer. [Courtesy Bishop Museum]
14
Note the specificity, not only of the event itself, but of
Monday, and Wednesday. The poem is a history, but it is one
that makes an emotional and ethical claim on the reader. It is
out of this tradition that Wing Tek Lum has composed his
haunting poems about the Nanjing Massacre.
Another form of docupoetry employs the technique of
collage; it comes originally from Ezra Pound’s notion of “a
poem including history,” where documents (including visual
images) and lyrical fragments are juxtaposed to create a kind
of documentary feeling, or feeling documentation. Among the
myriad texts in this genre are Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s
Dictee, Mark Nowak’s Shut Up, Shut Down, and Kaia Sand’s
Remember to Wave. In Dictee, which gets taught as poetry, as
novel, as non-fiction, depending on context, Cha presents
(often without commentary) documentation of Korean immigrants to Hawaiʻi, the story of her mother’s life in Japaneseoccupied China, and episodes from her schooling in the
French language. While the book is masterfully put together,
the final work of assemblage (interpretation) is left to the
reader, almost as if s/he were given planks, screws, and assembly instructions. Her consideration of the damage done to
Korea by Japanese imperialism and American occupation
finds complements in Gary Pak’s fiction. Mark Nowak includes photography as a crucial engine of his documentary
work. Kaia Sand, who describes herself as a poet journalist,
writes essays to create context around the walk she takes
around North Portland. Her work unveils the hidden, secret
histories of the place, histories that include JapaneseAmerican internment and African-American labor consigned
to living in a swamp that eventually, predictably floods.
Amalia Bueno’s work is in this vein; she writes about women
prisoners, using a layering of statistics, overheard conversations, bureaucratic instructions and examinations.
‘Iolani Luahine (1915-1978), kumu hula, dancer.
[Courtesy DeSoto Brown Collection]
Notes:
Joseph Harrington, “Docupoetry and archive desire.”
.https://jacket2.org/article/docupoetry-and-archive-desire
Phil Metres, “From Reznikoff to Public Enemy.”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/180213
These sources include information about other docupoets and their
work. I’ve written extensively about docupoetry at Tinfish Editor’s
Blog (http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com)
Susan M. Schultzʻs books include, most recently, “Sheʼs Welcome
to Her Disease”: Dementia Blog, Volume 2 (forthcoming, Singing
Horse Press, 2013) and Memory Cards (2010-2011 Series)—prose
poems composed to fit on a time card or index card (Singing Horse,
2011). In 2008, Singing Horse Press published her book Dementia
Blog, about her motherʼs decline from Alzheimerʼs disease. She is
the editor of the anthology Jack London Is Dead: Contemporary
Euro-American Poetry in Hawaiʻi (and Some Stories), published in
2013 by Tinfish Press. Susanʼs critical work includes the book A
Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Univ. of
Alabama Press, 2005). She founded Tinfish Press, which publishes
experimental poetry from the Pacific, in 1995. Susan lives and
teaches in Hawaiʻi and is a lifelong fan of the St. Louis Cardinals.
15
One Place, Different Voices
Craig Howes
esting or irrelevant, leading these people to follow the example of the nineteenth century Hawaiians, and to create their
own publications, often in their first languages, as places to
preserve their lives. And of course, from the moment Captain
Cook wrote his first journal entry about Kauaʻi, one of the
consequences of discovery and occupation has been that visitors and settlers from Europe and America have seldom felt
shy about recording their own experiences here, and their informed opinions about Hawaiʻi as well.
Over the past fifty years in Hawaiʻi, the fortunes of
life writing have taken the form of a proliferation of biographical and autobiographical work made available by an upsurge in reading and publishing opportunities. An important
part of this has been the recovery and the publication of many
life stories lost to all but a few. The increasing availability of
materials from the Hawaiian language newspapers and other
sources has for example transformed our understanding of
the lives of Hawaiians. Similar projects have drawn on early
Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Filipino publications to preserve the memory of the first generations of
these immigrants. And as for contemporary writing, the appearance of such publications and presses as Hawaiʻi Review,
Bamboo Ridge, Ramrod, ‘Ōiwi, Tinfish and many others created homes for many different forms of memoir, biography,
and autobiographical poetry and fiction.
But proliferation does not erase Hawaiʻi’s history, or
necessarily address continuing problems of inequity and access. Issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and history in the islands have always conditioned how biographical and
autobiographical writing is produced, and perhaps more importantly, read. Given the lack of interest those in power have
often shown in the lives of others, it’s understandable that
many people feel not only that it’s our turn to talk, but your
turn to listen—and listen hard.
If history has taught us anything about life writing,
and perhaps literature more generally, it’s that it’s hard for
anyone to believe—or to be told—that their lived experience
is insignificant. For writers, it might be just as hard to accept
that because of who they are, many readers will find their
work by definition uninteresting and a waste of time.
So who should tell their stories of Hawaiʻi? The answer, and not theoretically, is anyone. What also needs to be
noted, however, is that the freedom to write does not carry
with it a guarantee that the writing must be received in the
spirit the author would like. Perhaps more than any other writers, autobiographers and biographers always know that for a
variety of reasons there might not be a welcoming reception
for their work—or at the very least, the reception might be,
and perhaps should be, mixed. And I would further argue that
for all life writers, taking into account the history and setting
for their writing will ultimately make their artistic choices
stronger and more informed, and the work itself better.
Who gets to write about something? In theory, anyone who
wants to. And people of course do—in their diaries, in their
travel journals, on their blogs, and in print. But who should
write about something? That’s a different issue. Most would
agree that offering commentary about something you know
absolutely nothing about is generally a bad idea—though this
clearly doesn’t stop a great many online pundits or radio talk
show participants. But what if the subject matter is your own
life, and the things associated with that—your friends and
family, the place you live, your opinions and beliefs about
your own history and daily experience? Are there circumstances under which this material would be best left alone?
In the case of Hawaiʻi, and many other occupied or
colonized places in the world, the issue of who can or should
speak is powerfully influenced by the history of who has spoken. It would seem self-evident that Hawaiians have the right
to speak and write about their lives here—and of course, for
hundreds of years, they have. But anyone with even a slight
knowledge of 19th and 20th century history knows that
Hawaiians have often been told, implicitly and explicitly, that
their personal and national stories and histories didn’t matter—or if they did, only in the ways that editors and publishers found interesting.
The waves of labor immigration brought workers to
the islands whose lives in their ancestral homes, and especially in the fields of Hawaiʻi, were also treated as uninter-
Keali‘i Reichel, kumu hula,
chanter, and recording artist.
[Courtesy Punahele Productions]
16
True Lies: Lost in Translation
Bob Green
Among the many challenges awaiting writers wishing to alter
their text(s) either simply (adding to and/or ellipsizing) or
complexly (changing genre, tone, point-of-view, form) in our
time, those challenges have become more problematic: translating print into visual media, adapting material for strictly
audial presentations, adding new research, and maintaining
awareness of constantly evolving developments in Intellectual Property concerns.
A further question then involves the writer’s responsibilities and obligations toward that material. Can the altered
form distort the message or theme? Do these changes, however inadvertent, involve harmful compromise? Or are writers entitled to any changes their authorship seems to endorse?
These questions can have more than one answer, and
can present further questions. In the case of found material—
pre-existing texts, facts, history—what, if any, assumptions
can the writer accept?
When screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke wished to employ a previous character—HAL, the villainous computer
from his film 2001: A Space Odyssey—in a subsequent
screenplay, he discovered he could not because the character
was no longer his—it was now owned by 2001 director
Stanley Kubrick. The implications are unprecedented. Has
the traditional relationship between author and character been
threatened into perpetuity?
And what can happen in types of narrative, poetic, and
staged content when the medium is changed? A recent highlypraised play was rejected as a screenplay when a stubborn
playwright insisted on using stage conventions in the script.
More changes, he was advised, were needed.
This writer once worked as assistant to screenwriter/playwright Robert Bolt (Lawrence of Arabia, A Man
For All Seasons) on a film script called “Buddha.” In the
three years that followed, Bolt delivered 17 full drafts, all influenced by ongoing research by Oxford University, made
more challenging by the intersection of fact with various versions of mythology. The weaving of these narrative strands
involved attempts to keep past and present compatible. The
problems of such weaving are many—and require constant
reexamination to avoid “modern” standards. Certain material
pertinent to the past would evoke film-censorship in modern
India. What can be said cannot be shown.
In point-of-fact the word “research” has perhaps lost
a bit of its integrity. Whose research? And, more importantly,
when was that research undertaken? The reality of dueling
researchers is more prominent than ever in contemporary theatre, bio-pics, and historical narratives. Authorial research
can be, and sometimes is, called into question. The omniscient writer is dead, except perhaps in “pure” fiction. Transference into a different genre can call all into re-examination.
The alleged simplicity of the past has given way to the
crowded modern world of information and opinion.
Robert Cazimero, kumu hula, recording artist.
[Courtesy Mountain Apple Co.]
Bob Green is a writer, journalist,
sometime screenwriter, film production consultant and retired assistant
professor in the UH system. He has
been involved in adapting film projects from print sources (the novel A
Passion in the Desert), an unfinished
project with Arthur C. Clarke based
on Clarkeʼs novel The Sentinel, and
a film treatment from a play about
Sun Yat-Sen. Green co-wrote the film Baraka (1992) and worked
on its sequel, Samsara (2012). He is currently at work on the third
non-verbal film treatment called “Parabola.” Green taught screenwriting for UH Outreachʼs Pacific New Media for 20 years. He has
taught film workshops throughout Hawai‘i. He has been film critic
for the Honolulu Weekly for the past 20 years.
17
Perfect Pitch:
Telling Musical Lives
Chris Vandercook
fails to remind us of his own subjective, opinionated nature.
No writer wants to start every sentence with “in my humble
opinion,” but the music writer is well-advised to be self-effacing. Your subject will always be bigger than you are, so
you need to be careful to stay out of its way.
Many of the best books about music are those written
by the musicians themselves. At their best, musicians’ memoirs take us behind the curtain and tell us what it all feels like.
The language is usually unforced and informal, and the insights—on any number of subjects—can be surprising. The
biographical details and the anecdotes are often suspect, but
the experience of reading any artist’s memoir is not that different from listening to an after-hours reminiscence; you’re
not taking notes or memorizing details, just enjoying the ride.
And the more forceful the personality, the more provocative
the memoir, as artists as diverse as Arthur Rubinstein, Charles
Mingus, and Keith Richards have shown. All have written the
kind of books a reader can enjoy, whether or not he knows
the music—and all are free from the heavy hand of the “as
told to” professional helper.
Good music writing should send us back to the music
armed with new ways to enjoy it: knowing more about the
lives of the people who made it, the times that produced it,
and the influences that informed it. The stories will be as diverse as the people themselves. The one constant to all musical lives is dedication to an ideal and the willingness to
sacrifice in order to reach it—but all too often, we describe
musical artists in terms of something they have instead of
something they do. If only it were that easy. The musicians
who live in memory have done a great deal with what they
have been given. That’s what sets them apart from the many
gifted ones who fall by the wayside. Their lives and their hard
work inspire the rest of us, giving us music that takes us to
places where words can never go.
Mana Kaleilani Caceres, sovereignty activist and singer-songwriter.
[Courtesy Wayoutwest Enterprises]
Music eludes capture; that’s part of its charm. Each of us is
free to take away our own entirely different, completely subjective impression, and those can only be subjective, coming
as they do from waves of sound that have passed into the air
and vanished with the moment. Even if music is preserved
for us as a recording, it’s going to be different with each hearing, and each listener.
Writers, then, face a problem. How can the written
word contribute to our appreciation and enhance our understanding without diminishing its subject? Do we lose something by trying to preserve music in amber? Maybe we should
just let it speak for itself.
Some of the more irascible musicians among us would
argue exactly that, but most would admit that good writing
about music can give us plenty to savor. It can satisfy our inevitable curiosity about the lives behind the sounds (and musicians’ lives are rarely dull). It also can provide historical
context. The reader has likely heard music at some remove
from the times and places that produced it, and a good writer
can enrich our experience by putting the jewel back in its original setting.
But there are pitfalls. It’s easy for even the most wellmeaning chronicler of music to give in to the temptation to
make pronouncements, in order to be seen by the reader as
offering a definitive perspective. That may even be what readers expect (as with any work of non-fiction), but the writer
who gives in to that temptation does readers a disservice if he
Chris Vandercook was born in
New York City and moved to
Hawaiʻi in 1982. He is a guitarist,
writer, and photographer who
moved here to work in television
news. He is the co-host of The
Conversation, a weekday morning
news and public affairs program
on Hawaii Public Radio. He continues to be active as a performing
musician and as a writer of liner
notes for local and national recording artists. His writing has appeared on recordings by artists as
diverse as jazz singer Azure McCall, slack-key master Raymond
Kane, and trumpet legend John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie. He lives on
Oʻahuʼs windward side and teaches guitar at Kailua Music School.
18
Truth in Montage
Documentary Lives
Dan Wallace
A couple of years ago my wife Mindy Pennybacker was out
surfing at her usual break, Sui’s, when a lull came in the
waves. One of Mindy’s surf crew, Rodney, was nearby and
they struck up a conversation. Rodney Ohtani is a cinematographer and cameraman and producer all in one, and he
knew Mindy was a journalist and author—she’s currently the
editor of the Honolulu Weekly and wrote the environmental
DIY manifesto Do One Green Thing. He mentioned that the
film he was working on for Eddie Kamae, the Hawaiian musician and documentarian, was looking for a writer. And
Mindy said, “You ought to talk to my husband.”
As many of you probably know, Eddie Kamae made
his first film in 1986, teaching himself the rigorous and cumbersome methods of filmmaking back in the day, before digital, as he went along. Eddie was not interested in traditional
filmmaking, to say the least. He had his own ideas, and developed them as he went along into what you might call the I
Ching approach. Everyone who has worked with Eddie talks
about it—how he doesn’t like to go into a film with a preconceived, gridded and storyboarded tale to tell, all tied up in
a neat bow. No, Eddie has a notion, scents a story, listens to
the voices of his ancestors (he really does consult them) and
when he’s ready he hires a crew and hits the road to discovery, with his wife, Myrna, running the circus.
But in my case I was joining the circus after it had
been on the road for two years, and while a great deal of film
had been shot—amazing footage of Waipiʻo Valley, beautiful
interviews and moments of musical grace, along with hours
and hours of archival film from Eddie’s 20-year journey—
what was the story, exactly? And that became my job. Not to
impose a story. Not to ruthlessly pare away the soft and spiritual and contemplative stuff in favor of the hard Hollywoodstyle beats of a screenplay. But to be guided to a story? Yes.
As I saw it, after going through the Eddie anti-job interview process, which involves drinking a little wine and listening to a lot of music, and eventually talking, my role was
to approach the material in both a humble and critical mode,
to help Rodney and Eddie and Myrna tell a true Eddie story,
one that alternated between the mystical and the scholarly, the
sentimental and the unvarnished, the elegiac and the contemporary.
In practice, it was like being handed a shoebox full of
old photos, journals and letters and being told, “Turn this into
something.” And yet I wasn’t deterred; to me this already is
the mission of every documentarian, whether working in film
or print.
First, Rodney sat me down with his raw edit and talked
me through two years of intuitive filmmaking decisions. After
a couple of hours a form was already coming to me—a story
about Eddie’s working method, how it led him to track songs
back to their origins. This in turn led to the film describing the
actual composition of songs by Eddie, Mary Kawena Pukui,
Sam Lia and ultimately Queen Liliʻuokalani.
It was to be a film about a process, the process of poetry and song, carried on over generations. And for that I
could draw on my own literary beginnings and checkered career. As a poet from an inner city public school who got tired
of chronicling his adolescent yearnings, I somehow ended up
studying the Cantos of Ezra Pound, whose vast works can be
justly described as a shoebox of civilization, then turned to
prose because of boredom with other poets, really, and for
awhile studied history and, after a thrillingly rigorous class
in grad school, briefly weighed taking a Ph.D. Now, if all this
makes me sound a wifty and little precious, um, I don’t think
so. I’ve written a book about high school football, and a novel
about bass fishing. I’ve got a memoir coming out about
France. But I’ve never turned my back on the bass fisherman
or the poet in me, or the high school fullback, and I think it
was this comfort with extremes that gave me the temerity to
approach Eddie, Myrna and Rodney and say, “This is our
film.” I knew I could summon the historical rigor to nail down
the facts amid the rumors, and conjure the poetic mood to help
express Eddie’s far more profound vision.
Those Who Came Before: The Musical Journey of
Eddie Kamae came out in 2011. It looks like it will be Eddie’s
last film.
Don Wallace is the Honolulu
Weeklyʼs Film Editor, and wrote
the 2011 documentary Those
Who Came Before: The Musical
Journey of Eddie Kamae. In addition to scripts he writes novels
(Hot Water, Soho Press), nonfiction (One Great Game, Atria),
memoirs (Harperʼs; Village Idiots,
forthcoming from Sourcebooks),
and reviews films, books, and
restaurants. Born in Long Beach,
CA to a family that idealized
Scotland, the Old South and
Hawaiʻi, he married into a local family known for its kimchee
(Halmʼs). His days consist of competing for attention with the clan
offspring in writing and journalism, music and film-making.
19
Why Write Lives
Mark Panek
Historian T. Michael Holmes concludes the preface of his millennial John Burns biography by quoting Hawaii author
James A. Michener. When asked way back in 1982 whether
the builder of statehood-era Hawai‘i was “worthy” of a biography, the best-known teller of Hawai‘i’s story up to the Burns
era (like it or not—and fictionalized, too), had this to say: “I
don’t know if he deserves a full-scale biography, but there’s
a need for something entitled ‘John A. Burns and His Times.’”
Like Michener himself, this response, spoken a decade
before the work of cultural reclamation scholars, Marxist and
feminist literary critics, and human rights activists combined
to bust academia’s biographical canon wide open, is rooted in
simpler times, back when biography’s primary concern was
documenting—often in laborious three-volume chronological
fashion—every waking moment of the “Great Men” of history.
Far more than simply an act of political correctness, though,
tearing down the old standard of biographical “worthiness” has
given historians here in Hawai‘i—whose history has so often
turned upon collective us-guys actions where a single “leader”
is hard to identify—a more useful tool for what biographers
have been attempting for centuries: to color the historical record
with the voices of those most likely to turn history’s abstract
listing of events into a compelling concrete reality with which
readers can better empathize, and thus better understand.
Now, a traditionally “worthy” biography such as H.
Brett Melendy’s Walter Francis Dillingham: Hawaiian
Entrepreneur and Statesman competes for shelf space with
David E. Stannard’s Honor Killing. Melendy first quotes a
former Punahou president as proclaiming a Dillingham bio
“imperative to Hawai‘i’s history,” and then follows through
with a chronicle stretching from Harvard to Hawaiian
Dredging and beyond. The list of great-man accomplishments
includes, astoundingly, Dillingham’s handling of the famous
Massie Case, where he assisted a group of enlisted Navy
sailors in literally getting away with murder. In short, between
1875 and 1963, Hawai‘i went from kingdom, to territory, to
agribusiness giant and U.S. military outpost, to American
state, all with Uncle Walter steering the ship. Speaking of
Dillingham and his wife, Melendy concludes his book with
this: “Their personalities, their winning charm, their character, and their range of activities in Hawaii and on the mainland
impressed all who knew them. With their passing, Hawaii
truly experienced the end of an era.”
Mining the same Dillingham papers archived at Bishop
Museum, Stannard comes to far different conclusions. Instead
of the Dillingham fountain on Kalākaua Avenue, Honor
Killing’s most lasting image is the humble grave of Joseph
Kahahawai, the everyman whose murder changed the course
of local history every bit as much as Dillingham did. Stannard
shines a biographical light upon a murder trial whose details
have been well-told by historians, focusing as much on
Kahahawai, and on Navy wife Thalia Massie—the wholly pathetic nobody whose manufactured rape claim against
Kahahawai and four of his friends led to his murder—as he
does on Dillingham. Stannard turns Kahahawai from merely
“a Hawaiian” (Daws, Holmes), a Hawaiian parenthetically
(Melendy), or even one of “a group of Honolulu hoodlums”
(Kuykendall), into a shy former St. Louis football star who,
other than that time he broke somebody’s jaw because the man
refused to stop beating a dog, was “easygoing” and, also to the
point, uninterested in women. Under Stannard’s biographical
spotlight Thalia Massie becomes a confused and lonely
woman, far from home, unable to fit in either at UH or in the
society of Navy wives, likely suffering from alcoholism, raised
as a racist, and, also to the point, rendered by a childhood bout
with Graves’ disease almost wholly unable to see. When the
lines are similarly colored in on Dillingham (pointedly, for instance, we learn he was a proud white supremacist), the historical picture is complete. That is, precisely because of
Stannard’s attention to the biographies of those traditionally
hardly “worthy,” the historical narrative that follows—the
unionization of the docks and the sugar plantations, the democratic revolution, statehood, and the epitaph of the Big Five
embodied by Dillingham—now contains causality.
Traditional narratives tracing the trajectory of success
will always assist us in completing the historical picture, even
here in Hawai‘i—Ben is a great example, and certainly former
Governor Cayetano is as “deserving” a subject in the Michenerian sense as Governor Burns. But by now it’s clear that
Haunani–Kay Trask (From a Native Daughter), Edward H.
Nakamura (Tom Coffman’s I Respectfully Dissent), Randall
Roth’s Bishop Estate trustees (Broken Trust), Frank Marshall
Davis (Kathryn Waddell Takara), any of the subjects in the
PBS Biography Hawai‘i DVD series—they’re not just “deserving.” In the telling of Hawai‘i’s history, theirs are the imperative biographies.
Kaumaka‘iwa Lopaka Kanaka‘ole, composer, singer,
recording artist. [Courtesy Mountain Apple Co.]
20
The Panelists
The Rev. Malcolm Nāea Chun, author of No Nā Mamo: Traditional and
Contemporary Hawaiian Beliefs and Practices, has taught Hawaiian language and folklore and has worked as a cultural specialist and educator at
OHA, the Hawaiʻi State Department of Health, the Queen Liliʻuokalani
Childrenʼs Center, and the Curriculum Research & Development Group at
the College of Education, UH Mānoa, in the Pihana Nā Mamo Native
Hawaiian Education program. His latest translations are the History of
Kanalu by Benjamin K. Namakaokeahi and Davida Maloʼs Ka Moʻolelo
Hawaiʻi. His latest publications are No Nā Mamo (University of Hawaiʼi
Press), Kuni Ola, Countering Sorcery (First Peopleʼs Productions), and soon
to come Nā Inoa: Selected Historical Hawaiian Personal and Proper Names.
Jim Becker is the last survivor of the press box crew that covered Jackie
Robinsonʼs first game when he broke the Major League baseball color line
in 1947. In his career he has covered numerous Olympics (Winter and
Summer), championship fights, baseball World Series, football bowl games,
pro and college basketball Final Fours, and most golf and tennis Majors
from Augusta to Wimbledon, and even the Americaʼs Cup yacht races. His
stories have been printed in several editions of Best Sports Stories, and in
his best-selling memoir, Saints, Sinners & Shortstops (2006), available at
Amazon.com.
John Berger has been writing about Hawaiʻiʼs music and the local entertainment industry since 1972. He has also covered entertainment on radio
and television. He has been writing for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (formerly the Honolulu Star-Bulletin) since 1988. His photo column, “On the
Scene,” and his reviews of local recordings in his “Island Mele” column appear in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Sundays. He is the co-editor of the
2nd edition of Hawaiian Music and Musicians (2012), a one-volume encyclopedia on the history of Hawaiian music published by Mutual Publishing
of Honolulu. For more information, www.hawaiianmusicandmusicans.com
Tom Coffmanʻs work is about the overlapping themes of history and political development, including Catch a Wave (book); O Hawaii, From First
Settlement to Kingdom (film); Nation Within (book); Nation Within (film); The
Island Edge of America (book); Arirang, The Korean American Journey
(film), also www.arirangeducation.com; First Battle, The Battle for Equality
in Wartime Hawaii (book), also www.thefirstbattle.com; Ninoy Aquino and
the Rise of People Power (film); I Respectfully Dissent: A Biography of
Edward H. Nakamura (book); and One Team (film). His current writing project is How Hawaii Changed America, an exploration of community development in wartime Hawaiʻi.
Perle Besserman was praised by Isaac Bashevis Singer for the “clarity and
feeling for mystic lore” of her writing, and by Publisherʼs Weekly for “wisdom [that] points to a universal practice of the heart.” Houghton Mifflin published her autobiographical novel Pilgrimage, and her short fiction has
appeared in The Southern Humanities Review, AGNI, Transatlantic Review,
Nebraska Review, Southerly, North American Review, and Bamboo Ridge,
among others. Her books have been recorded and released in both audio
and e-book versions and translated into over ten languages. Her most recent books of creative non-fiction are A New Zen for Women (Palgrave
Macmillan) and Zen Radicals, Rebels, and Reformers, coauthored with
Manfred Steger (Wisdom Books). Two novels, Kabuki Boy, and Widow Zion,
and Yeshiva Girl, a story collection, are forthcoming from Aqueous Books,
Pinyon Publishing, and Homebound Publishing, respectively. She holds a
doctorate in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and has lectured, toured, taught, and appeared on television, radio, and in two documentary films about her work in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan,
China, and the Middle East.
Rasa Fournier is an associate editor and senior writer at MidWeek newspaper. In addition to her “Art & Stage” and “Dr. in the House” columns, Rasa
does freelance work for various Hawaiʻi-based newspapers, magazines and
online publications. She also writes feature stories for MidWeek on local
and international personalities, including prominent government, business
and community leaders. Some of her notable entertainment interviews include the Hawaii Five-0 cast, actress Yvonne Elliman of the musical film
Jesus Christ Superstar, reggae artist Matisyahu, actor Rico Rodriguez of
the TV show Modern Family, the late musician John Koko of the Makaha
Sons, sculptor Satoru Abe and actor Jason Scott Lee.
Sandra Hall is a writer, researcher and editor, currently working on a major
biography of Duke Kahanamoku. Raised in Australia, her life story has been
the pursuit of what interested her as a child — including teaching, librarianship, psychology, the Pacific Ocean, Olympic Games, anthropology, community activism, the Sonoran Desert and the Himalayas. Sandy has written
for dozens of magazines, newspapers, and encyclopedias. Her awards include the Kwapil, for librarianship, and the Hawaii Book Publishers Association Palapala award for Memories of Duke. She is a member of the North
American Association for Sports History and the Biographersʼ International
Organization. She has two Mastersʼ Degrees from the University of Arizona.
Amalia Buenoʼs poems and stories have been published in various literary
journals, magazines and anthologies, including Growing Up Filipino and
Walang Hiya: Literature Taking Risks Toward Liberatory Practice. Her work
has been featured on Hawaii Public Radio and most recently appeared in
Hawai‘i Review, Bamboo Ridge, Tinfish, and is forthcoming in Dismantle.
She graduated this month with an MA in English from the University of
Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her research interests include issues of gender, culture
and representation.
Leilani Holmes was born in Hawaiʻi and adopted by haoles, who relocated
to Ohio. Her book Ancestry of Experience: A Journey into Hawaiian Ways
of Knowing (2012) was published by University of Hawaiʻi Press: “Part memoir of a Kanaka academic in the diaspora searching for her ʻohana, part . . .
historical and ethnographic celebration of Hawaiian culture . . . part documentation of . . . communication with . . . those who have passed . . .
Ancestry of Experience will . . . make readers gasp at the incredible series
of ʻcoincidencesʼ that leads to Leilaniʼs connection with her ʻohana.” Leilani
says: “Iʼm a retired Community College instructor with only one publication,
privileged to be here! I love to describe those ʻcoincidencesʼ!”
Lee Catalunaʼs plays have been produced at Kumu Kahua Theatre (The
Great Kauai Train Robbery, Aloha Friday) , Diamond Head Theatre (You
Somebody), Honolulu Theatre for Youth (adaptation of Musubi Man), UHHilo (Da Mayah), and Maui Talk Story, and Kamehameha Kapālama (Ulua:
The Musical). Bamboo Ridge published her two books, including 2012ʼs
Three Years on Doreenʼs Sofa, winner of the Kapalapala Poʻokela award
for excellence in literature. She was the 2004 recipient of the Cades Award
for Literature for her body of work. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from
UC-Riverside, and teaches Creative Writing at ʻIolani School.
Yunte Huang grew up in a small town in southeastern China, where at
eleven he began to learn English by secretly listening to Voice of America
programs. After receiving his B.A. in English from Peking University, Yunte
came to the United States in 1991, landing in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. As a
struggling Chinese restaurateur, he continued to study American literature,
reading William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, and Emily Dickinson. In 1994, Yunte
attended the Poetics Program in Buffalo, where, at an estate sale, he discovered the Charlie Chan novels. He was immediately hooked. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1999, as an assistant professor of English at Harvard,
he began researching the story of the Chinese detective—both real and fictional—and the life of Earl Derr Biggers, a Harvard graduate who had authored the Chan novels. Yunte Huang is currently a Professor of English at
the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Benjamin J. Cayetano served as Governor of Hawaiʻi from 1994 to 2002
and was the first Filipino American elected as a United States governor. His
autobiography, Ben: A Memoir, from Street Kid to Governor, was published
in 2009, and won the Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award for Book of the Year from
the Hawaiʻi Publishers Association.
Melissa Chang has more than 25 yearsʼ experience in marketing and public relations. She is currently a freelance writer and independent marketing
consultant, specializing in integrating the new social media platforms with
traditional media to maximize clientsʼ marketing efforts. Melissa writes for
Nonstophonolulu.com, Gayot.com, Honolulu (real estate), and Edible
Hawaiian Islands. Social media clients include Pearlridge, Waikiki Beach
Walk, Chart House, Hawaii Foodbank, the Pacific Communications Council,
Brasserie Du Vin, and some of the hotels in the Outrigger Resort chain.
21
Bob Jones has worked as a journalist all but three years since he became
editor at eighteen of his college newspaper. He is now seventy seven. He
has worked as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, the Overseas Weekly
in Frankfurt and as its Paris bureau chief, Noticias y Viajes in Madrid, the
Louisville Courier-Journal, and the Honolulu Advertiser. He currently is a
columnist on politics and social issues for MidWeek. As a foreign correspondent for NBC News he covered the wars in Biafra and Vietnam. He
worked for twenty-eight years with KGMB-TV as reporter, anchor, and news
director. He is the recipient of a Heywood Hale Broun award for his reporting in Germany, a George Foster Peabody award for his documentary work
in China, and three Emmys. His recent book is Reporter (2012). Jones is
married to journalist Denby Fawcett; their daughter Brett Jones is a State
Department foreign service officer currently posted in Nepal.
chosen to screen on both the East and West Coasts at Kennedy Center in
D.C., and numerous other venues. Hoʻokuʻikahi—To Unify as One (1998) is
about the important revival of cultural protocols at Kamehameha the First
Heiau of State, Pu‘u Kohola, Kawaihae, on Hawai‘i. Ku‘u ʻĀina Aloha—
Beloved Land, Beloved Country is Meyerʼs current feature length film in production about truth-telling as medicine that heals. Drawing on real events,
first-person accounts, and other historical, political and cultural issues brings
story to a whole new level of telling—giving voice to what was very much silenced in the past.
Gail Miyasaki is a Hawaiʻi-born third generation (sansei) Japanese
American and a freelance writer/editor. Her work has been published in
Hawaii Business, Honolulu and Mana magazines, among other local publications. In the early 1970s, she wrote extensively on the JapaneseAmerican experience in Hawaiʻi for the Hawaii Herald. Her work on books
include serving as a writer and copy editor for Hawaiiʼs College of Tropical
Agriculture and Human Resources: Celebrating the First 100 Years, Barry
M. Brennan and James R. Hollyer, eds. (U of Hawaiʻi P, 2008), as editor of
Hawaiiʼs Historic Corridors: Volume One (Historic Hawaii Foundation, 2007),
and most recently, as editor of Japanese Eyes, American Heart, Volume II:
Voices from the Home Front in World War II Hawaii (2012).
Patrick Vinton Kirch is the Class of 1954 Professor of Anthropology and
Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Born and raised
in Hawaiʻi, he is a graduate of Punahou School and of Yale University. He
has carried out extensive archaeological research throughout the Pacific
Islands including Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Samoa,
French Polynesia, and Hawaiʻi. He is the author of more than a dozen
books, the most recent of which is A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The
Island Civilization of Ancient Hawaiʻi (2012).
Tom Moffatt—radio DJ, TV show host, event promoter, record producer,
music publisher, and author all describe the man whoʼs been at the helm of
Hawaiʻiʼs showbiz scene for over fifty years. Named one of the most influential people in the history of Honolulu, “Uncle” Tom Moffatt has kept the
50th State hoppinʼ with attractions for every taste – from the elegance of
the Bolshoi Ballet to the knock-out action of WWE, and every major artist
who has ever toured the Pacific.
Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl is a Honolulu playwright and author. Her many
plays have been performed in Hawaiʻi and the continental United States and
have toured to Britain, Asia, and the Pacific. Ms. Kneubuhl is the author of
two mystery novels set in Hawai‘i in the 1930s: Murder Casts a Shadow,
and Murder Leaves Its Mark. She is currently the writer and co-producer for
the television series Biography Hawaiʻi. She received the Hawaiʻi Award for
Literature in 1994 and the Eliot Cades Award for Literature in 2006.
Nanette Naioma Napoleon is a freelance historical researcher from Kailua,
Hawaiʻi. For the past twelve years, she has assisted researchers from
around the world find historical information about various topics related to
the history of Hawaiʻi and its people. Nanette is also a freelance writer, lecturer, and Hawaiian cultural specialist who has developed dozens of public
lectures, workshops, and tours relating to Hawaiian history and culture, often
in conjunction with local museums, schools, libraries, and archives. Nanette
is also known in the community as the stateʼs leading expert on historic
graveyards, with more than twenty-five years experience in documenting
old graveyards, and her cemetery directories are in wide use in the community as historical and genealogical resources.
For 42 years, Kumu Kahua Theatre has nurtured, enriched and preserved
our lives through the unique power of theatre. Our mission is to bring stories of and by the people of Hawaiʻi to the stage by encouraging our playwrights, producing plays written by and about our people, and developing
our theatre artists and audiences with this work. The only theatre like it in the
world, Kumu Kahua is solely devoted to the stories of all people of Hawaiʻi,
our histories, current lives and futures. Through theatre, we experience and
share our lives. www.KumuKahua.org
Sam Low is author of Hawaiki Rising: Hōkūleʻa, Nainoa Thompson, and the
Hawaiian Renaissance. He sailed aboard Hōkūleʻa on three voyages. In
1983, after traveling throughout Polynesia, Sam produced his award winning
film, The Navigators – Pathfinders of the Pacific, shown nationally on PBS
and internationally throughout the world. Sam is the author of many articles
on Hōkūleʻa and her meaning to Polynesians. He served in the U.S. Navy
in the Pacific from 1964 to 1966 and earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from
Harvard in 1975. He is one-quarter Hawaiian; Nainoa Thompson is his
cousin, a relationship that provided unparalleled access to the main protagonist of his book.
Warren Nishimoto is the director of the Center for Oral History at the
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. For over thirty years, he has documented
Hawaiʻiʼs social and cultural history by conducting life history interviews with
Hawaiʻiʼs longtime residents. He has co-authored two books, Hanahana: An
Oral History Anthology of Hawaiiʼs Working People and Talking Hawaiʻiʼs
Story: Oral Histories of an Island People. He also teaches university classes
and community workshops on oral history techniques.
Puakea Nogelmeier is a Professor of Hawaiian Language at University of
Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where heʼs taught for nearly thirty years. A researcher
and translator, he works extensively with 19th and early 20th-century
Hawaiian writings, translating and interpreting narratives, literature, and poetry of the past.
Wing Tek Lum is a Honolulu businessman and poet. Bamboo Ridge Press
has published his two collections of poetry, Expounding the Doubtful Points
(1987) and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (2012). With Makoto Ooka,
Joseph Stanton, and Jean Yamasaki Toyama, he participated in a collaborative work of linked verse, which was published as What the Kite Thinks by
Summer Session, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 1994.
Gary Pak is the author of two novels, A Ricepaper Airplane and Children of
a Fireland; and two book-length collections of short stories, The Watcher of
Waipuna and Language of the Geckos. He has also published a childrenʼs
play, Beyond the Falls. A novel about the Korean War, Brothers Under a
Same Sky, is forthcoming from the University of Hawai‘i Press in July 2013.
In 2002, he received a Fulbright award to Seoul, South Korea. He is a
Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa where he teaches
creative writing and literature.
Brandy Nālani McDougall is Co-Founder of Kahuaomānoa Press and Ala
Press and has served as editor for ‘ōiwi: a native hawaiian journal and
Mānoa. Author of the poetry book, The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Pa‘akai, and
co-author of the poetry collection, Effigies, and poetry album, Undercurrent,
she is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies in the American Studies
Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Robert Pennybacker is a 4th generation Korean-American writer, filmmaker,
and television producer. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut but was
raised and lives in Honolulu. Robert graduated from Punahou School and
earned a B.A. in cinema production from the USC School of Cinema. He has
worked in the local television industry as a writer-producer-director, marketing director, and creative director for more than thirty years. Currently
the executive producer of Learning Initiatives for PBS Hawaii, in 2011 he
helped to launch HIKI NŌ: The Nationʼs First Statewide Student News
Network for PBS Hawaii. Robert has written approximately fifteen documentaries. Four of his films have screened at the Hawaii International Film
Festival. His poems, short fiction, and essays have appeared in Bamboo
Ridge and HMSAʼs Island Scene Magazine. He also writes film reviews for
the Honolulu Weekly. Robert lives in Nuʻuanu with his wife Lorraine and
their four cats and one dog.
Chris McKinney is the author of five novels, The Tattoo, The Queen of
Tears, Bolohead Row, Mililani Mauka, and Boi No Good, and has written a
feature film screenplay, Paradise Broken, and a short film, The Back Door,
both of which premiered at the 2011 Hawaii International Film Festival. He
is an Associate Professor at Honolulu Community College, and recently
served as Visiting Distinguished Writer at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
He and his wife Mika co-direct the Chris McKinney Language Arts Center,
which offers reading and writing courses for elementary school children,
teens, and adults. It is located in Mililani, Hawaiʻi.
Meleanna Meyer is an artist, educator, and documentary filmmaker in her
spare time with two remarkable films to her credit. Puamana (1991), about
her beloved Aunty Irmgard Farden Aluli, a well-known musician and composer, premiered at the Hawaii International Film Festival in ‘91, and was
22
Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of
Guåhan/Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of the poetry
album Undercurrent (Hawaiʻi Dub Machine, 2011), and author of two collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008)
and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010), a finalist for the LA Times 2010 Book Prize for Poetry, and the winner of the
2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry. He is an Assistant
Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa,
where he teaches Pacific literature and creative writing.
and American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. His other writings on Hawaiʻi include Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaiʻi on the
Eve of Western Contact and articles on historical demography and the cultural politics of the Islands.
Sandra A. Simms was born in Chicago, and earned her Juris Doctor degree from DePaul University. She moved to Hawai‘i in 1979, serving as
Deputy Corporation Counsel for the City and County of Honolulu until 1991,
when she was appointed to the District Court of the First Circuit, becoming
the first African American female judge in the state of Hawai‘i. In 1994,
Governor John Waihee appointed her Circuit Court Judge for the First
Judicial Circuit; she retired from the bench in 2004, but has remained active
in a number of public and professional organizations. Her memoir Tales from
the Bench: Essays on Life and Justice was published by Pacific Raven
Press in 2012.
‘Umi Perkins teaches Hawaiian history at the Kamehameha Schools Kapālama, and lectures in Political Science at Windward Community
College. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from UH Mānoa, a masterʼs
degree in Government from Harvard, and is a former Fulbright scholar to
New Zealand. He writes on issues of Hawai‘i history and politics on his blog
theumiverse.com and for the online newspaper The Hawai‘i Independent. In
2012 he presented at TEDx Mānoa on a Hawaiian history textbook he is
currently developing.
Kathryn Waddell Takara, PhD, is a 2010 winner of the American Book
Award (Before Columbus Foundation). A performance poet, lecturer, workshop facilitator, adviser, healer, and consultant, she has published Frank
Marshall Davis, The Fire and the Phoenix: A Critical Biography (2012), and
Timmy Turtle Teaches (a childrenʼs book). She has three books of poetry:
New and Collected Poems published by Ishmael Reed Press, Pacific
Raven: Hawaii Poems, and Tourmalines: Beyond the Ebony Portal by
Pacific Raven Press. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of
her poems about women. Takara has also appeared on a variety of television shows, in national and international interviews and documentaries. Dr.
Takara is the daughter of pioneer black veterinarian, author, and world-famous Buffalo Soldier, Dr. William H. Waddell, VMD (1908-2007)
Growing up in the arid mountains outside San Diego, John H. Ritter often
pondered the meaning of life. Through six metaphorical and socio-political
novels set in the world of baseball, the Kauaʻi resident has explored subjects
as diverse as the Vietnam War, spiritual aspects of land development, baseballʼs racial ban, and materialism. Ritterʼs first novel, Choosing Up Sides,
which examined the roots of prejudice, won the 1999 IRA Young Adult Book
Award and an ALA Best Book citation. In 2004, Ritter received the Paterson
Prize for Childrenʼs Literature for The Boy Who Saved Baseball. His latest,
Fenway Fever, juxtaposes the “Curse of the Bambino” with 2012 ascension
prophesies to show what can be achieved when a divided community unites
behind a boy and his unconditional love for a ballpark.
Lee A. Tonouchi a.k.a. “Da Pidgin Guerrilla” stay da writer of da awardwinning book of Pidgin short stories Da Word, author of da Pidgin essay
collection Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture, compiler of Da
Kine Dictionary, and editor of Buss Laugh: Stand Up Poetry from Hawaiʻi.
His most recentest book is his poetry collection Significant Moments in da
Life of Oriental Faddah and Son: One Hawaiʻi Okinawan Journal. He also
had some plays done before at HTY and Kumu Kahua Theatre. His latest
play wuz da East West Players production of Three Year Swim Club, which
wuz one LA Times Critics Choice Selection.
Randall Roth is a law professor at the University of Hawaiʻi. Heʼs also been
a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and lectured at Harvard,
NYU, Howard, Duke, UCLA, and UC-Berkeley. Locally, he has served as
President of the State Bar Association, and has received UH-Mānoaʼs highest awards for teaching excellence and community service. In 2000 the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin included him on its list of “100 Who Made a Difference
in Hawaiʻi During the Twentieth Century,” and in 2005 the City of Honoluluʼs
Centennial Celebration Committee named him as one of “100 Who Made
Lasting Contributions During the City of Honoluluʼs First 100 Years.”
Born and raised on Oʻahu, Catherine E. Toth has been chronicling her adventures in her blog, The Cat Dish (www.thecatdish.com), for nearly a decade.
She worked as a newspaper reporter in Hawai‘i for 10 years and continues
to freelance—in between teaching journalism, hitting the surf and eating
everything in sight—for national and local print and online publications. She
earned her masterʼs degree in journalism from the Medill School of
Journalism at Northwestern University in 1999, focusing on magazine writing and publishing. She obtained her bachelorʼs degree in English from the
University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa, graduating with distinction in 1996.
Blind since birth, mezzo-soprano Laurie Gale Rubin recently received high
praise from New York Times chief classical music critic Anthony Tommasini,
who wrote that she possesses “compelling artistry,” “communicative power,”
and that her voice displays “earthy, rich and poignant qualities.” On October
23, 2012, Seven Stories Press published Rubinʼs memoir, Do You Dream in
Color? Insights from a Girl without Sight. Recounting her experiences from
childhood through the rise of her career as an opera singer, Rubin shows
her determination to continually surpass and redefine othersʼ expectations.
As a soloist she has performed Berliozʼ Les Nuits dʼété with the Burbank
Philharmonic Orchestra, Mozartʼs Great Mass in C Minor with the Yale
Symphony Orchestra, Haydnʼs Harmonie Mass with the Oakland East Bay
Symphony, a benefit concert of duets with opera star Frederica von Stade,
Barberʼs Knoxville Summer of 1915 under the baton of John Williams, a
benefit performance with Marvin Hamlisch, as well as in concert at The
White House and the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. Rubin is
a graduate of Oberlin College and earned a Master of Music degree at Yale.
She is co-founder and associate artistic director of Ohana Arts, a performing arts school and festival in Hawaiʻi. She also designs her own line of
handmade jewelry, The LR Look.
Jean Yamasaki Toyama was born at Kapiʻolani Hospital, spent her early
years at Queen Kaʻahumanu Elementary School and later graduated from
Roosevelt High School. She is a retired professor of French and former
Associate Dean of the College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature at
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her latest books include No Choice but to
Follow and Kelliʼs Hanauma Friends. Her poetry recently appeared in FiftyEight Stones and Wavelengths from Savant Press, and her short stories in
the latest issues of Bamboo Ridge. Her book The Piano Tunerʼs Wife and
Stillborn Stories, will be appearing in Summer 2013 from Aignos Publishing.
Ted T. Tsukiyama was born and raised in Honolulu. A member of the
University of Hawai‘i ROTC before World War II, he was one of the Varsity
Victory Volunteers, and then of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and
the 6th AAF Radio Squadron in the China-Burma-India Theater from 1944 to
1946. A graduate of Indiana University and Yale Law School, he had a long
and distinguished career as an arbitrator in Labor/Management issues in
Hawai‘i. The Historian for the Varsity Victory Volunteers, 442nd, and 522nd
Field Artillery MIS, he has been designated a Living Treasure by Honpa
Hongwanji Mission, and recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award
from the University of Hawai‘i Alumni Association.
Gregory Shepherd has studied Zen Buddhism since the early 1970s. He
practiced with Yamada Koun Roshi at San Un Zendo in Kamakura and also
with Robert Aitken Roshi in Honolulu, where he was groomed to be Aitkenʼs
first successor. In Japan, he struggled with prejudice and cultural rigidity
and found his deeper meditations leading to actual panic attacks over fear
of losing himself. What began as a quest for enlightenment became Gregʼs
confrontation with his own inner demons: his need for approval, his distrust
of authority, and his ego-driven fixation on achieving the profound spiritual
breakthrough of kensho (“the Big K”). Ultimately, he broke with Zen and his
teachers to pursue a career in music. He received a fellowship from the
Japanese Ministry of Education to research contemporary Japanese music.
He is currently Associate Professor of music at Kauaʻi Community College.
Vicki Viotti, born in New York but a Hawaiʻi resident for most of her life,
was lucky to move her editorial writerʼs desk to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser,
after The Honolulu Advertiser closed. She is a graduate of McKinley High
School and earned her journalism degree at the University of Hawaii at
Mānoa, where she later found her way back for a masterʼs in political science, and things political remain top of her list of interests. She also has
done some teaching as an adjunct instructor at Kapiʻolani Community
College and Hawaii Pacific University, with the fond hope that those students might still find a place in journalism.
David Stannard is a Professor of American Studies at the University of
Hawaiʻi. He also has taught at Yale University and, as a visiting professor,
at Stanford and the University of Colorado. A Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and
American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, Stannard received his PhD
from Yale and is the author or editor of six books, including Honor Killing
23
Bank of Hawaii presents
The 8th Annual Hawai‘i Book and Music Festival
Telling Lives:
The Art and Practice of Biography and Memoir
Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities Pavilion
SATURDAY MAY 18
SUNDAY MAY 19
10 A.M.
Kiss & Tell: The Naked Truth
Stuart H. Coleman, Moderator
Ben Cayetano, Bob Jones,
Mark Panek, Sandra Simms
11 A.M.
Lives Online: Truth and Truthiness
John Zuern, Moderator
Melissa Chang, ‘Umi Perkins,
Catherine Toth
11 A.M.
Tell Me Your Story: Young Lives
Susan Yim, Moderator
Lee Cataluna, Chris McKinney,
Lee Tonouchi
NOON
Creative Witness: Docupoetry
Susan M. Schultz, Moderator
Amalia Bueno, Wing-Tek Lum, Gary Pak
NOON
Hawai‘i’s Story, and Mine
Sydney Iaukea, Moderator
Leilani Holmes, Patrick Vinton Kirch,
Sam Low
1 P.M.
One Place, Different Voices
Craig Howes, Moderator
Brandy Nālani McDougall,
Puakea Nogelmeier, Susan M. Schultz,
Jean Toyama
1 P.M.
Breaking Records: Athletes’ Lives
Michael Tsai, Moderator
Jim Becker, Sandra Hall, John Ritter
2 P.M.
2 P.M.
Instant Lives: Deadline Biography
Beth-Ann Kozlovich, Moderator
Rasa Fournier, Warren Nishimoto,
Vicky Viotti
True Lies: Lost in Translation
Bob Green, Moderator
Yunte Huang, Victoria Kneubuhl,
Craig Santos Perez
3 P.M.
3 P.M.
Living Memory: Honoring the Past
Brian Niiya, Moderator
Gail Miyasaki, Ted Tsukiyama,
Kumu Kahua Theatre
Perfect Pitch: Musical Lives
Chris Vandercook, Moderator
John Berger, Tom Moffatt,
Laurie Gale Rubin
4 P.M.
4 P.M.
Life Quests: Memoirs and Beyond
David Ulrich, Moderator
Perle Besserman, Malcolm Nāea Chun,
Greg Shepherd
Truth in Montage: Documentary Lives
Don Wallace, Moderator
Meleanna Meyer, Nanette Napoleon,
Robert Pennybacker
5 P.M.
Why Write Lives
Mark Panek, Moderator
Tom Coffman, Randall Roth,
David Stannard, Kathryn Takara
Produced by Hawai‘i Book & Music Festival (HBMF)
Cover photo: Helen Desha Beamer
1882-1952, composer, singer, musician.
With support from the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities
[Courtesy Gaye Beamer]
“We the People” initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities
Principal Scholar : Dr. Craig Howes
Executive Director: Roger Jellinek
Design: Angela Wu-Ki
Printing by Hagadone Printing
Photo credits: Courtesy of Berger Archive, the Bishop Museum, DeSoto Brown, Mountain Apple Co.,
Gaye Beamer, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society, Wayoutwest Enterprises