Back to Tinfish Press! M.I.A. Reading, February 9, 2011

In recent weeks, this blog has been hijacked by its "owner" into a space for writing exclusively about dementia. I will now return it to its original purpose, as a record of Tinfish Press's recent activities.

This past Wednesday, the MIA reading at the Mercury Bar in Chinatown, curated by Jaimie Gusman, featured readers from the new Hawai`i Review (#73 ably edited by Donovan Colleps) and Tinfish issues. Before the reading, the Tinfish board met outside Govindaji's vegetarian restaurant, where the editor could eat nearly nothing due to her allergies, for a conversation on this past year's activities. More on that and some future plans later on in the post.

In many ways, this reading was typical of Hawai`i readings: the subjects-matter included land, colonialism, language suppression (and rediscovery), land, food, local landmarks, ethnic identity positions, land, food, cultural tensions. All those things, in other words, that seem mostly to lack at the huge readings at MLA and AWP. Many of the writers combined their dishes into what exotic Europeans call a potpourri:

Craig Santos Perez wrote about Guam by way of canned meat, devoting one poem to Vienna sausages and another to corned beef. But the "indigenous food practice poems," as he called them wryly, got at issues of colonialism (who brought the sausages anyway?), family (who cooked the corned beef anyway?), and language (who named the shit anyway?). Tiare Picard got at words themselves, and beneath the words their sounds, as she did brilliantly in Tinfish 18.5.




Jade Sunouchi's prose piece, set in Mexico, got at a tension familiar to Hawai`i residents between tourists and local vendors. She threw a pinch of gender and a dash of class into her lyrical prose. Amalia Bueno wrote about teen-pregnancy by using names of local establishments in Waipahu.


Jaimie Gusman read an elegy for her Aunt Rose from a marvelous series of poems called the Anyjar Series. She followed that with a romp through one woman's love life. Monica Lee read a very funny story on male/female non-communication (the man and the woman are thinking the same thoughts, but prove unwilling to share them with each other, until their relationship becomes one of boring sameness). Joe Tsujimoto went next with his own poem about food and the sexes delivered in the gravelly New York voice that never ceases to surprise this listener.

This was the last reading at the familiar Mercury Bar venue, which has done well by its readers, but has grown louder and less hospitable to them and their listeners. On to Fresh Cafe as of next month!



[This photo does not present an editorial comment on the reading, as it preceded the event; it's Radhika with Gaye Chan doing their Stinky & Smelly routine.]

______________________________

And now for some future plans, an email I sent to Tinfish friends this morning:

OK, enough rest already [this refers to the sabbatical that the editor and her press are currently enjoying].

Tinfish Press is preparing to launch a new chapbook series. It will be very retro, simple, cheap, small print runs (100), sent for small donations (aka for free) to people on mailing lists yet to be established. We will try to do a bunch of them fairly quickly, perhaps one a month for a time. Eric Butler has kindly agreed to be the designer; he lives in Hawai`i, has worked in publishing and in making zines for quite some time. I trust he'll come up with compelling designs appropriate to the inexpensive format. You can find out a bit more about him here: http://www.manta.com/c/mvt3jc4/eric-butler-book-design

One of the benefits of this series is that the chaps can be very short in length. So poets and writers who do not have heaps of work already on their desks can have their poems circulated in this way. Writers with something to say who don't require great length can make a point quickly. I think back on something Ron Silliman said once, that when he publishes in a large journal, he never hears from readers. When he publishes with small mags of just a few pages, he gets a lot of responses.

As ever, our focus will be on experimental poetry from the Pacific region. Short manifestos or proses are also welcome. I'm asking you to consider sending work but--especially if Tinfish has published you recently--I ask that you recommend poets to us. Be our eyes and ears for good material. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions. We're open to work by students of whatever age (children, high schoolers, college students, and the rest of us life-long learners). The work can be political, personal, or any combination.

We're looking for 5-20 pages of work, preferably 8-15.

We have no idea how long this project will last. But that's half the fun of it. Let's get more work out there!

I'm sending this call to those of you considered long term "friends of Tinfish." But feel free to spread the circle.

aloha, Susan

PS Alain Cressan--many thanks for the inspiration! Je te remercie pour les beaux livres d'Ink!

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Also look in the near future for the non-winners of our No Contest, not judged by our non-judge, Craig Santos Perez. The first volume in the No Contest series of two books will be by Jai Arun Ravine. The poetry in this book will cross more boundaries than I knew existed!

William Carlos Williams Takes On Tea Partiers and Other Puritans

When I teach Foundations of Creative Writing to graduate students, I always include William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, a messy, exuberant book of essays that undoes the American myth, only to remake it in the image of America's apparent failures. The book offers a transition between the foundational texts (Plato, Sidney, Shelley, Riding, Bernstein, Ho`omanawanui) and those about place that come just after. Williams offers us writing out of a passionate, brilliant, anguished need; he also means to reframe our notions of place and historical necessity. Its genre a strained mix of manifesto, poem, essay, and documentary history, his book threatens to come apart at its various seams. Let be be finale of seams, to misquote his rival poet.

Truth be told, I ask students to read the 234 page book mostly so that they can read the last page, which is my favorite moment in all American literature. It is the chapter called "Abraham Lincoln," in which old Abe becomes a woman, the mother of his divided and grieving country:

It is Lincoln pardoning the fellow who slept on sentry duty. It is the grace of the Bixby letter. The least private would find a woman to caress him, a woman in an old shawl--with a great bearded face and a towering black hat above it, to give unearthly reality. (234)

and then the book ends thus: "Failing of relief or expression, the place tormented itself into a convulsion of bewilderment and pain--with a woman, born somehow, aching over it, holding all fearfully together. It was the end of THAT period."

This writing is worthy of Lincoln himself; it also ends the book about an America that "begins for us with murder and enslavement" (39) on an empathic note. Trans-gender is trans-formation, hard earned by chapter after chapter about American over-reaching and failure.


You can't read the same book twice, of course. This time through I'm noticing ways in which the 1925 manifesto echoes our time, especially its hyper-moralism in the face of actual ethical depredation. Here I'm trying to separate out the "moral" issue of sex from the "ethical" issues of greed, militarism, corruption, and so on. I am helped by the experience of having watched an hour of news and a couple hours of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert with our Distinguished Visiting Writer, Adam Aitken, who comes to us from Australia. Adam's sense of the lunacy of American politics enforces my own, italicizes it. Stewart and Colbert have very little work to do these days; splice some video from Fox News and you have a show, especially when the voice over comes from John Oliver. The latest heroine of the Tea Party movement (so-called, because they're actually Republicans) is Christine O'Donnell of Delaware, whose platform is based on moralizing about sex and gender roles. O'Donnell is best known for her anti-masturbation work. (I have to laugh; when I write about her, or her fellow travelers, every word I write takes on an aura of moral turpitude!) And no, I have not watched the video.

Against O'Donnell and her ilk, I hear Williams calling out the Puritans, making his argument over and again that American violence and American sexual repression are allied. Turn to the end of "Voyage of the Mayflower," and Williams turns O'Donnell against herself (again I blush): "What prevented the normal growth? Was it England, that northern strain, the soil they [Puritans] landed on? It was, of course, the whole weight of the wild continent that made their condition of mind advantageous, forcing it to reproduce its own likeness, and no more" (68). Not only did the Puritans refuse to generate new names for the places, the plants, the animals they encountered in the New World, according to Williams, they also refused to touch the place they entered. Their purity was a mark of their fear, and their purity condemned them to isolation and violence. "It is the Puritan--" he writes in "Pere Sebastian Rasles": "Having it in themselves nothing of curiosity, no wonder, for the New World--that is nothing official--they knew only to keep their eyes blinded, their tongues in orderly manner between their teeth, their ears stopped by the monotony of their hymns and their flesh covered in straight habits" (112).

Against this morality of not seeing, marked as Puritan, Williams proposes a Catholic alternative in the figure of Pere Sebastian Rasles, a French cleric: "It is this to be moral: to be positive. to be peculiar, to be sure, generous, brave--TO MARRY, to touch--to give because one HAS, not because one has nothing . . . He exists, he is--it is an AFFIRMATION, it is alive" (121). Among his affirmations is the "peculiar" particular language; Rasles not only learns to speak the Indian's language, he reveres its pronunciation: "(Note, the figure 8 is used by Rasles in his alphabet of the Abnaki language to signify the unique guttural sound characteristic of the Indian dialects" (124). This is what Williams means by "peculiar," I suspect, this precision of attention to detail, to contact.

To name is to caress, Williams almost says. Not possess: he would be happier if the Puritans had taken on the names Indians gave their places, one suspects. But they should at least have offered up new sounds to go with the new places they lived in. My English 100A class will be reading about names this week, how names are given, how they are taken away and replaced by other names. One of the (shorter) readings is a poem by Tiare Picard from Tinfish 18 1/2:


Ford Island sits within Pearl Harbor, but of course neither name came first in the chain of names placed upon places in Hawa`i. How Moku`ume`ume came to be Ford Island is the subject of Picard's poem, which operates entirely by name, not by link or verb or plot. It's the literal presentation of effacement that she performs here. It's a document Williams would have liked.

In contrast to Williams's attacks on the Puritan come these love letters to the French (I get in trouble again, don't I?). Another of his heroes is Champlain, whom Williams admires simply because he sees the world around him, a quality ascribed to "the feminine": "Champlain, like no one else about him, watching, keeping the thing whole within him with amost a woman's tenderness--but such an energy for detail--a love of the exact detail--watching that little boat drawing nearer on that icy bay" (70). And so Champlain becomes Williams who then foresees (or hears) a poet like Jack Spicer: "This is the interest I see. It is this man. This --me; this American; a sort of radio distributor sending out sparks to us all" (70). Williams elsewhere describes himself as one whose "antennae [were] fully extended: (105). Perhaps he means his figure here to be an insect, but it also the antenna on a radio, taking impulses in, speaking them out to whoever will listen.

When I go to christine2010.com, the website for Christine O'Donnell, I find precious few written words. Her platform resembles a series of tweets. One bullet point is about "values": "Believes our country was founded on core values of faith, family and freedom and will fight to defend those values." Among these values are antipathies to sex of any sort, and to non-standard families. A recent interview had her saying this about science: “American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they’re already into this experiment.” If O'Donnell and other right wingers were attentive to detail, if they were close-readers, they would know that the Constitution does not found the nation on "faith," but on freedom to worship as one wishes. She would also know that mice have not been given "fully functioning human brains," though these days one wonders about the humans with mice for brains.

Both my classes this semester, the English 100 and the graduate course, are about forms of attention. Attention costs--one pays it, after all--but the costs are worthwhile if we are to find apt names for our places, our conditions, and our political process. I say this with some hope, as last night Hawai`i's Democrats nominated Neil Abercrombie for Governor. His platform is largely pro-education; he has ties to the University of Hawai`i, from which he graduated and at which he taught for some years. He was the educated choice, and that bodes well, at least for now. In November, he will be opposed by Duke Aiona, whose platform is God-drenched. We shall see.

[click on images to enlarge them]

Method is Public, Poetry Not So Much So (Perhaps)

Joe Harrington has been torturing himself (in a good way) over blogs for quite some time, making and re-making taxonomies of the "form." Joe's a reflective guy whose mind runs toward reflexivity. In his latest post, he notes, "The web log, like other logs, is written with time in mind - and marks time's passage. So do journals and letters. In that sense, these are all reflexive forms that invite reflection on their reflexivity. And the temporality is not just backwards (in the format), it's forward (new posts)." So far, so good, in my book. Or perhaps outside my book. For, he writes: "In a sense, a book is private - one has to physically have it; it is enclosed between covers. It costs money and a lot of time to make it. The blog opens out to a much wider audience, and invites that audience in. Immediately. Indeed, it might double-back against the Institutions of Art, or open towards activism against non-art institutions - which is what Mark Nowak's blog does, I think."

I have a quarrel with Joe about the distinctions he preserves between Art and the Public Life, although I understand why he keeps them in play; they're the walls of the squash court in which we pound our definitions and deal with the crazy bounces that ensue. But the question of what is public and what is private is more crucial now than it was in the pre-internet past. My Ph.D. student writes about celebrity in order to write about herself; she refuses to "go public," finds that she can use the odd public sphere of celebrity to get at issues that obsess her. The resistance I feel to using such masks (see Alfred Corn's recent post) is a resistance that surprises me, as I used to maintain a zone of privacy even in what I published. Dementia Blog finished off that notion for me, the most private work I've ever written--private not simply for me, but also for my mother, who is the subject of the work. It's her privacy I wonder about often, even as I think that making her Alzheimer's public will do someone else a private good. (The squash balls sure are bouncing now, aren't they?)

For some reason, I keep thinking about the alphabet as a way to get at the private/public ricochet. It's not that Ron Silliman's The Alphabet sits rotundly on my poetry shelves, among other S's. And it's not that I'm currently reading new books by Mary Jo Bang (The Bride of E) and John Ashbery (Planisphere), both of which organize their poems according to the alphabet, and that I return often to Tiare Picard's twin alphabet poems from Tinfish 18.5 for their richness, but also because I've always found the alphabet to be an odd way to organize the world (hence the chaos of my own paperwork?) The alphabet is a public form; a trip to any library will assure you of that. But to organize one's work alphabetically is to render it private. Or that's my hunch. This has something to do with the differences between method and practice, or that's my further hunch. The boundary between private and public in what we call "alphabetical order" blurs in both directions: the private becomes public, but the public also becomes private, which is the more radical direction, because less expected. The order the alphabet creates is arbitrary, paratactical. It's the kind of order that links "Nixon, Richard" with "non-absorptive writing," as in the index to my book of essays. There's surely something there, but its logic, while powerful, is accidental rather than considered. Yes, writing one's memoir takes one's private life and makes it available to a public one cannot see or even imagine. But there is a significant way in which the public is terribly private, too, not simply in the way we absorb public events, but in the way public events affect our language, our way of thinking. Our uses of language can illustrate the way privatization comes to make public/common spaces mysterious, and not always in ways beneficial to the community.

One of the few times I talked to John Ashbery, a few of us were sitting in a bar in a Washington, D.C. hotel in the mid-1980s. Behind me were bookshelves, the kind provided in bars as decor, not for the sake of knowledge. There was a line of books on the shelf behind me, so I pulled one out, and discovered that I held one letter of a children's encyclopedia. Ashbery's eyes grew even bigger than usual, as he told us that he'd memorized parts of that encyclopedia as a child. That Ashbery's new book is organized according to the alphabetical order of its titles should come as no surprise then, especially, as one of his earlier volumes was also organized in this way. My first encounter with Planisphere (this is not a review of the book!) reminded me of first encounters with other Ashbery books. Over and over I start out utterly baffled by his books, only to find ways of access later. (I'm not there yet.) So the book remains private to me, in code, and yet organized with the efficiency of a librarian or a shopkeeper. Mary Jo Bang's book is even more self-consciously an alphabet book, with titles like "B is for Beckett" and "E is Everywhere" and "I in a War," the last of these titles one of many that wanders away from its first principle. "For Freud" might be a subtitle of this book, as there are so many references to the ur-psychiatrist. Freud is called out by his letter as surely as is Mao Zedong in the "Z Stands for Zero Hour" poem that ends Part I of the book. History emerges out of a single letter, the private code (which is the alphabet for each of its users) rendered public. History as accidental passage.

Tiare Picard's two poems, "L'alphabet" and "Sans les Isles," make an opposing movement. Rather than summon history out of letters, Picard shows how history has privatized the very language we use, and in so doing, has rendered great parts of it into code. What was once history is now hidden, inaccessible, organized by letter only. Hence, "L'alphabet" begins with a colonial story told via the method of the alphabet poem:

All
bulldozers bully,
clank
down coral-crushed roads,
eunuchizing lingo, and
farting proper, dark smoke. (102)

The response, on the facing page, in "Sans les Isles," goes as follows:

b d z b y,
c
d c -c d d ,
c z , d
,d (103)
[layout below]




While terribly difficult to decipher, this is a very public move, from one poem to the next. In fact, that difficulty is part of the poem's (sharp) point, for the second poem is what happens to the first poem when the letters of the Polynesian alphabet are taken away from the English. That the English language embraces (or smothers) Polynesia comes clearest when Polynesia is taken out of it. When the bulldozers are done with Polynesian islands, when development has paved over the land, what the land is left with is scatter, the "coral-crushed roads" of the language itself. The book's design, which mimics word game puzzle books, accentuates the effect, as word games are those places where what has been kept secret is revealed as language.

In each of these instances, what is most public in the poem or the book of poems is the method. Alphabetical order is public; it's how we organize knowledge. Monks and google have used it, as it's a- or trans-historical. What is private is the poem's content, even if the significance of privacy is very different, depending on whether you look at Ashbery or at Picard, at a poem that includes Freud because his name starts with F or at a poem that gets bulldozed by development, for reasons greater than the letter D. If C was a Comedian, this D is not, even if the poem is itself extremely playful. If method is always a public activity, then what method enables is less so. But the real blurring of method and poem comes in these instances, like the one in Bang's poems that invoke Freud and Mao because their names begin with F and M, or as in Picard's poems, where what is most public (development, what one cannot not see) effaces history (renders it private, cryptic).

I will now post this blog entry. It will appear in order of the day it was composed and "published" (another private/public blurring). The way in which this day made this post possible is something only I know, or think I do. But when I hit the "button" at the bottom of the "page," its arbitrary order may become less arbitrary to its reader outside the blog box. Time offers an arbitrary order like the alphabet's. It too is a private space, crow-barred open by the completion of this method. There.

Poetry is political and Oedipus was adopted

Friday's schedule for Poetry & Politics featured Tinfish 18.5: The Book, so I invited Ryan Oishi and Tiare Picard to join us. Then Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Ted Pelton separately sent messages that they would be in Honolulu, so I invited them too, and opened the class up to anyone who wished to attend. The ensuing conversation was predictably a bit unfocused, but contained nuggets worth holding up to the virtual light.

Ryan read a revised version of his poem about Aloha Air Flight 243. The poem is about a flight from the Big Island to Honolulu in the late 1980s that was diverted to Kahului after most of the fuselage ripped off. Ryan imagined that the plane was damaged by a huge shark, kind of a reverse aumakua (or not?). He revised the poem after Go! had entered the local airline market, driven Aloha out of business, and then tried to appropriate Aloha's name. So the poem I had read as a commentary on tourism (shark takes big bite out of plane full of tourists) became instead a poem about one airline taking a bite out of another. This poem, like his love poem set in a Walmart (where Hawaiian bones were found, quarantined and air-conditioned), addresses issues of development and the economy.

Tiare read poems about language, militarization, and erasure. Her alphabet poem is marvelous; on one side of the page, she's written a wacky alphabet poem (each line begins with the next letter in the alphabet). On the other side, she's taken that poem and removed all the letters from Polynesian languages. The result is a syncopated burst of sound that resembles nothing so much as Christian Bok, yet whose instigations are profoundly "local" and political.

Ted Pelton read from a parable he wrote in the mid-80s about the Agency's search for employees who were honest but had always wanted to lie. Pelton's "story" ended with the very premise of the ad being called into question ("you trusted that we were actually looking for employees?!"). Tiare's question was spot on: "is that fiction?" It reminded me that the Reagan years were a more benign-seeming warm-up for the Bush II years. Nicaragua, Grenada, Lebanon, Iran-Contra, were Iraq and Afghanistan writ small.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs read poems about Korea, and also a new poem, not included in her book Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press), about Cyprus's division, and demilitarized zones in general. Her image of the divided bed at the end of the poem was apt. What I found most compelling about Jennifer's discussion of adoption (she was adopted from Korea and grew up in Oklahoma) was her notion that she begins from "negative capability" and works toward certainty, hence goes in the opposite direction of many imaginations. She also spoke of not trusting still images (which evoked Hart Crane's "still yet moving" bridge to me). Jennifer also spoke to the ancient link between poetry and politics, citing the Greeks (which reminded me how infrequent are mentions of the Greeks in my department, at least within my hearing!).






On Thursday, the day before, I attended Mary Edmond-Paul's talk on Robin Hyde's autobiographical writings. The crux of Edmond-Paul's talk was the treatment of Hyde's mental instability (she was arrested for attempting to commit suicide, such being the laws of her day (the 1930s in New Zealand/Aotearoa). Edmond-Paul spoke at some length about "kindness," the way in which Hyde, because she voluntarily submitted to treatment, was treated with a kindness lacking in the commitment of Janet Frame to the severe care of a hospital. I wish she'd said more about "kindness" as a (dare I say it?) category. The idea that someone would invoke kindness in an academic setting struck me as itself an intervention in the usual goings on, but I would have liked to have heard more. The epilogue offered on the contemporary photographer Yvonne Todd was fascinating, but the bridge between Hyde and Todd did not seem complete. What amazing photographs, though. My colleague, Craig Howes, brought up the problem with seeing writing as therapy--as "scriptotherapy." I remember that one of our visiting writers described how she would pour her problems onto the page at night, and wake up again the next morning with the same problems. To my mind, scriptotherapy works only if the illness is under control; you cannot write your way out of suffering, but you can explain that suffering to yourself later, as meaning, as story, as image (still or moving). The blur of image that Jennifer would address a day later, and the sense of trying to move from negative capability to a sense of sureness with the world, is familiar to me not as an adoptee (I am not one, though my children are), but as someone who suffered several extended bouts of "agitated depression," in which there was no stillness, only some godawful version of "shaken adult syndrome."

The rest of the weekend has been all baseball!

Celebrate Reading: TINFISH 18.5 meets junior high school!

[Top: Tiare Picard, Ryan Oishi, Kai Gaspar, Jill Yamasawa
Bottom: Enthusiasts from Kalakaua Intermediate School in Kalihi; click on photo to see more students]

Today, April 17, was the large Celebrate Reading festival at UHM, organized by Lorna Hershinow, local literary activist--readings at the Art Auditorium and HIG, as well as break out sessions in Kuykendall, where the English department resides. Ryan Oishi read his "Walmart: A Love Poem" at one of the two opening sessions, and then he and I and Tiare Picard and Jill Yamanasawa and Kai Gaspar met a raucous group of students for a 50 minute session of readings and Q&A. We quickly found out that a large group of the students had taken the bus from Kalihi (they are Kalakaua Intermediate School students) to earn extra credit from their teacher (praise be to him or her). Another couple of students had taken TheBus from the North Shore. This speaks volumes about wonderful teachers inspiring their kids in the public schools. After Kai and Ryan and Jill and Tiare had read from their poems in 18.5, the questions began. One girl from the Kalihi group was especially eager to ask questions, and her questions were themselves a form of poetry, clearly marvelous, but also like koans, hard to comprehend. After she had asked a mysterious question about the imagination and poetry, she followed up by asking: "does the imagination interfere with your past?" After much back and forth, I asked for a final comment and one boy raised his hand and said, "poetry is AWESOME."

After lunch, Ryan, Jill, Tiare, and I had a workshop session. Jill offered an exercise based on the phrase "I am," which included naming yourself based on the objects in your house, historical events, food, and a couple of other items. Tiare chose to give them a word game. Find a word, any word, and play with it, see what happens. Ryan had little time, but proposed an exercise that caused one sentence to grow and ramify with words and phrases added to the end and the beginning. "Love is a mango" erupted into a marvelous compound thing!

Here is my riff off of Tiare's exercise. My word was "torture."

I torture syllables--
I screw down their toe nails until they bleed
I pour water into their mouths until they drown
I sic dogs on them
I smear syllables with fecal matter
I take off my clothes for the shy ones, put them on for the brazen
I keep them awake, play them loud music, interrupt them with guards
I make syllables stand until they cannot, put them in tiny boxes
and introduce insects to them
I pry open their tiny hearts and replace them with handcuffs
My syllables will say anything.

And so I return to the subject of poetry & politics & the way language has been degraded by such as Bybee and Yoo, Cheney, Addington, and Bush.

But let me end by saying how lovely it was to see all these young people listening to poetry, and then writing it themselves!

Writer Talks #1

Inaugural edition of Writer Talks: Poetry, Politics, Publishing & More

April 24, 1:30-4:00, Kuykendall 410


Please join my Poetry & Politics honors class for what I hope will be the first in a series of Writer Talks (like the Biography brown bag series, except not so frequent). We will be joined by two writers who are coming for the AAAS meeting in Honolulu, as well as two writers from Honolulu. This roundtable will covers areas as disparate as writing & politics, adoption, development and militarization in Hawai`i; it should be quite a free for all.

Joining us will be:

RYAN OISHI earned an M.A. from UHM. Several of his poems were published in _Tinfish 18.5: The Book_. He is working on an anthology about TheBus entitled “Routes,” with Aiko Yamashiro, Emelihter Kihleng and Mark Guillermo, which will be published by Kahuaomanoa Press in Fall, 2009, as well as “Statehood Project,” a collaborative project between Kumu Kahua and Fat Ulu Productions. Ryan teaches English at Kamehameha High School.

TIARE PICARD earned an M.A. from UHM. Her work can be found in _Tinfish 18.5_. She is a founding member of Fat Ulu Productions and is currently working for the Census Bureau, driving Honolulu's neighborhoods and training employees. See http://tinfishpress.com/18-5.html for more on _Tinfish 18.5_.

TED PELTON is the author of the novel _Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals)_ and two other books, as well as being the publisher of Starcherone [start your own] Press, an independent press specializing in innovative fiction. He has received National Endowment for the Arts and Isherwood Fellowships in Fiction. He lives in Buffalo, NY. See http://starcherone.blogspot.com/ for more on Ted.

JENNIFER KWON DOBBS was born in Won Ju Si, South Korean. Her first book of poetry, _Paper Pavilion_ (2007) won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her essays, reviews and poems are widely published, and have been translated into several languages. She is the founding director of the SummerTIME Writing Program, a college access program for inner-city LA students. She is currently assistant professor of creative writing at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. See http://jkwondobbs.com/ for more on Jennifer.

Please feel free to email me about the event at sschultz@hawaii.edu.