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.
WC: After I checked out the catalogue on your website, I was immediately drawn to the cover of Lehua Taitano’s A Bell Made of Stones. Can you talk a little about how Allison Hanabusa’s design work interacts with the poetry you publish and how visuals and design interact with poetry in general?
SS: Allison has been a different kind of designer for us. Most of the years we were working with Gaye Chan in the art department, and she’s very in to working with recycled materials: very funky and edgy. Allison is, in some ways, much more into the aesthetic, the beautiful, which sort of came as shock at first, like: “Oh my God, it’s this beautiful book, it’s Tinfish!” [laughs]. She’s just a different kind of aesthetic for us which, now, I’ve decided is fine. Tinfish is not about consistency. It’s about surprises. And often the surprise comes to me first.
WC: Do you think that it’s important to have visuals that interact with the poetry in general?
SS: Yes, and that was one of my first big discoveries about Tinfish. Once we started getting really interesting visual work, more people were drawn to it. I’m not a terribly visual person, so I’ve learned a lot about how people with visual acuity interpret something written. And, to me, that becomes kind of the first interpretation of the text: the cover. And even if you don’t quite “get it” [laughs], it draws you in a particular direction. So that’s really been kind of a wonderful gift from the whole project.
WC: I haven’t had a chance to read any of Taitano’s work, but the theme of being hapa, especially on the mainland, and not feeling like you belong to either community is one that a lot of people in Hawaiʻi have experienced themselves or can relate to. One of our own writers for INhonolulu, for her master’s project, created a collection of poetry that has a lot to do with growing up and living as a half-Japanese and half-white woman in Hawaiʻi. Why do you think that’s such an important issue to talk about, and how does poetry in particular lend itself to questions of identity?
SS: Poetry thrives on problems—that’s where poetry comes from a lot of the time. And identity problems are really important to people. And this is an interesting thing about Tinfish—except for the Jack London book, I don’t think of Tinfish as being about ethnic identity. In fact, I would rather let go of that, but I can’t because everybody’s writing about it. So what I’m trying to do is put people in conversations. So, let’s think about being a Kelsey Amos or a Lehua Taitano, and what are some of the affinities and differences?
8
Right:
The cover for "The Arc of the Day/The Imperfectionist" (2013) by Steve Shrader was designed by Allison Hanabusa.
"Not only a writer and graphic artist, Shrader was also an avid photographer. I had access to a large number of his photos. Selecting prints he'd made multiples of, along with those that caught my eye, I started laying out the cover. The design was meant to display as much of his work as possible, a manifest of sorts, while complementing the book's interior layout."
Perspective:
"I’m not a terribly visual person, so I’ve learned a lot about how people with visual acuity interpret something written. And, to me, that becomes kind of the first interpretation of the text: the cover."