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The cover for "Remember to Wave" (2010) by Kaia Sand was designed by Bao Nguyen.
"[Sand's] book is composed of essays, a poetry walk, and poems that rise out of documents like histories from a nearly-forgotten past. Sand shows us how a past can be re-visioned through research and the poetic imagination.
Above:
Designed by Allison Hanabusa,
the cover for "Jack London is Dead" (2013) "is an interpretation of a map utilizing triangles, as they are prevalent symbols in Hawaiian culture. The dispersion of color symbolizes the overlapping of individuals into various categories as well as the movement of people from their homeland to their home."
Opposite Page:
The cover for Lehua Taitano's "A Bell Made of Stones" (2013), by Allison Hanabusa is ""a reflection of one's roots, of nature, and of home ... The placement of the circle over the main fissure is offset to echo Taitano's feeling of not fitting into society's categories, not this, not that, somewhere in-between, but not quite."
people like me, do to find an audience here?”
I started thinking about that conundrum over many, many years and then, one year I had a student named Mason Donald in one of my grad classes—whom I quote in the introduction to the book—who wrote this poem about being a kid who grew up on the Big Island but had a professor here tell him, basically, “You can’t write about Hawaiʻi because you’re not from Hawaiʻi.”
Out of that experience he produced this bitter, sad poem where he basically asked, “Then what do I write about?” And that poem really clicked with me and I thought, “OK, there’s room here to actually do something.” That was in 2006.
So then I thought, well, every other group in Hawaiʻi has an anthology—especially through Bamboo Ridge—so why don’t I just do an anthology of white writers and see what happens? I mean I knew that this was kind of dicey, but I decided to do it anyway. But when I wrote to people that I knew had associations with Hawaiʻi and asked them for work, I was pleasantly surprised. People were game to do it—most people, anyway—and they wrote these very thoughtful statements. And once I got their work I thought, “Wow, I’m glad I had this crazy idea.”
The reaction has been, as usual, a little mysterious [laughs]. I think there’s some people in the larger community who got very excited about it, like Chris Vandercook on Hawaii Public Radio. Craig Howes has been very supportive and invited me to the Hawaiʻi Book and Music Festival.
The rest of the English department, however, has really met it with silence. But it did cause this big buzz for awhile. Ron Silliman wrote a big, wonderful review of it and it was selling like crazy, but then it just stopped. So I think I just need to do a little more work to get it out there.
WC: I actually first saw it at the Weekly—we had a copy there and someone did a review of it for the last books issue.
SS: Yeah, it was Janine Oshiro that wrote the review. And actually, when I first told her I was going to do it, she looked at me and asked, “Are there enough white writers out there to fill a whole book?” [laughs]. And I ended up quoting her in the introduction because there were actually lots more than I even included.
WC: More writers than you thought there would be?
SS: More than I thought and many more than I included. Because I didn’t make a big announcement that I was going to do it and I was just looking for people, it was pretty much just who I asked, not other people who I later realized could have easily been in it too.
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there’s some people in the larger community who got very excited about it, like Chris Vandercook on Hawaii Public Radio. Craig Howes has been very supportive and invited me to the Hawaiʻi Book and Music Festival.
The rest of the English department, however, has really met it with silence. But it did cause this big buzz for awhile. Ron Silliman wrote a big, wonderful review of it and it was selling like crazy, but then it just stopped. So I think I just need to do a little more work to get it out there.
WC: I actually first saw it at the Weekly—we had a copy there and someone did a review of it for the last books issue.
SS: Yeah, it was Janine Oshiro that wrote the review. And actually, when I first told her I was going to do it, she looked at me and asked, “Are there enough white writers out there to fill a whole book?” [laughs]. And I ended up quoting her in the introduction because there were actually lots more than I even included.