What do Art Communities Say about You? by Jaimie Nagle

"This identity dichotomy is exhausting"

From left to right, Sujatha Raman, Kai Lawrence, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Alicia Upano, Jaimie Nagle, and Kristiana Kahakauwila.

In lieu of a live event, please enjoy select recordings from previous MIA Honolulu readings and discover more #HawaiiWriters on our website. Click here to visit our Media page or follow us on SoundCloud to listen to MIA audio recordings. Mahalo to HI Soup for supporting this initiative with a micro-grant awarded in March 2019. 

Our third Thursday readings this month will
feature works that speak to power dynamics
by the following writers:

Anjoli Roy
Sterling Higa
Eric Stinton

7-9 p.m. Thursday
February 20, 2020
The Manifest

free event. bring ID.

You’re invited to a reading and release party in honor of Scott Kikkawa’s debut novel, Kona Winds.

7-9 p.m. Thursday
January 16, 2020
The Manifest

free event. bring ID.
books by Bamboo Ridge Press will be available for purchase.

From the publisher’s website:

KONA WINDS, the début novel by Japanese-American author Scott Kikkawa, is a hard-boiled noir murder mystery set in Honolulu in 1953, when Hawai‘i was evolving from a racially stratified, near-feudal plantation colony to the multi-ethnic 50th State.

Honolulu Police Department Detective Sergeant Frankie “The Sheik” Yoshikawa, a Nisei veteran of World War II, is assigned the case of a young local Japanese woman whose body is found in Honolulu Harbor under a pier. His investigation uncovers dark motives tied to a recent dock and sugar strike and a forbidden relationship between the scion of a prominent kama‘aina haole family and a young woman from a growing immigrant community.

Hindered by the limitations of race and class and haunted by the specter of his combat experiences in Europe and his resulting dependence on alcohol, Yoshikawa nonetheless resolves to bring the case to a successful conclusion.

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Hawai‘i has been the setting for countless mysteries but most have been cozy crime stories or books that have featured Caucasian protagonists as outsiders in an exotic setting. KONA WINDS was written with the firm belief that Hawai‘i is more than just a pretty tropical backdrop for the mischief of tourists: it can be, and was, a terrifying, sometimes sodden place whose social realities were ugly not so long ago and continue in some respects to go unresolved. In addition, the novel provides a well-researched glimpse into the police work of post-war Honolulu, which has rarely been written about in this way before.

Please take a seat at our favorite Kaimuki bookstore for an afternoon of short readings by four novelists.

featuring Honolulu-based writers
D. Nandi Odhiambo
M. Thomas Gammarino
Thuy Da Lam

plus visiting writer
Maureen Medved

4:30-6pm Sunday
December 15, 2019
da Shop: books + curiosities
3565 Harding Ave.
Honolulu, HI

Free event. Books available for purchase.

Our third Thursday readings this month will explore
language and narratives that activate our senses,
featuring work by:

Laurel Nakanishi
Matthew Dekneef
Janice Greenwood

7-9 p.m. Thursday
November 21, 2019
The Manifest

free event.

Jane spoke with MIA co-organizer Spencer Kealamakia over the phone about poetry and place, from one coast to another.

Reading Jane Hirshfield’s poetry is like being cast out into the wild dark alone, fearful, if not for a “stubborn faith” in the few reassurances life gives: the ground beneath, the ground before, “ . . . in rotting / that ripens into soil” (from “November, Remembering Voltaire,” in Of Gravity & Angels, Wesleyan University Press, 1988). As a fresh college grad from the Northeast, Hirshfield craved something away from the East Coast. “I set out in a red Dodge van—not the archetypal Volkswagen bus—a red Dodge van that I lived in while I drove around and looked for where I was going to land.” Wandering took her down unlocked US Forest Service roads and led her to creeks clean enough to drink from without filtration. In 1974, six months after setting out, Hirshfield landed in California. Though she’d grown up in New York City, she felt a stronger connection to the natural world than city life. — SK.

ON Island Life

“The question basically asks does urban culture disguise certain geological realities, and it wouldn’t have to. With greater awareness—I mean the terrific Oliver Sacks was swimming around Manhattan. He knew it was an island. But when I was a child I knew there was an East River and a Hudson River, and a Statue of Liberty down at one end and bridges one drove over, but I don’t think I had all of the conception, which I now understand, so much more deeply.”

On Letting Go

“It is part of poetry’s role to allow the heard and felt and investigated—exactly the things that words can magnetize but not hold—and to not only acknowledge that but to like it. [There’s a] part of the psyche that wants control of everything but that’s just pure delusion. Much better to learn to be really happy with what is beyond control.”

ON Wave Riding

“I’ve never done it but I imagine that is part of the joy of surfing—you are collaborating with what you cannot hold. Surfing is a really good analogy in that you have control of your own response to something which you are deliberately engaging that is immensely larger and more powerful than you are, and that’s the reality of our lives.

“In writing a poem, in surfing, in mountain climbing—when you engage with something larger than yourself (and I’m going to go way out on a limb and say the same can be true of spiritual life)—this is one of the human experiences that feels the most central, and the most deeply true to our task of these seconds and minutes and hours we’ve been given. How can we spend them in ways that are rich and not trivial?”

On Hawai‘i Poets

”It’s been made clear to me that Hawai‘i has an absolutely thriving community of poets. I might not know the details, but I’ve already glimpsed the shape of it. It’s wonderful.”

Mahalo to Jane Hirshfield and the Engaging the Senses Foundation (ETSF) for coordinating this discussion and connecting writing communities across the Pacific.

November 2, 2019

Entrepreneurs Sandbox

Writer: Tani Loo
Novella (excerpt): “Ivywood Manor"
Author's Note: "[This novella] resulted from an exploration into late Victorian literature and a lack of representation of women of color that I really wanted to address."

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]]>Audio: Honolulu Print + Book Fair (2019)ReadingCommunity PartnersEmily BentonFri, 25 Oct 2019 04:13:05 +0000https://www.miahonolulu.com/news/november-2-honolulu-print-book-fair-readings5c9c31cf33f3c800010577a7:5c9c353c652dea3651a18b14:5db2754d9ff0e37436508210

Find us at the 2019 Honolulu Print + Book Fair!
We’re hosting featured readings by:
Tani Loo
Rain Wright
Marley Aiu

5 p.m. Saturday
November 2, 2019
Entrepreneurs Sandbox
643 Ilalo St.
Honolulu, HI 96813

Free event

Can you believe it? MIA Honolulu is celebrating 10 years!

7-9 p.m. Thursday
October 17, 2019
The Manifest

Join us for MIA memories, literary raffle prizes, and readings by:
Jaimie Gusman
Amalia Bueno
Anjoli Roy
Emily A. Benton

Free event. Bring ID.

September 19, 2019

The Manifest

Writer: Scott Kikkawa

Short Fiction: "Momotaro Club Blues"

Author’s Note: "This short story takes place in 1950, so if the language sounds a bit antiquated to you, then good."

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]]>Audio: Bamboo Ridge Writers (2019)ReadingBook ReleaseMIA HonoluluWed, 04 Sep 2019 14:50:59 +0000https://www.miahonolulu.com/news/september-19-bamboo-ridge-writers5c9c31cf33f3c800010577a7:5c9c353c652dea3651a18b14:5d6fcd47928cf8000154d88d

MIA Honolulu presents an evening with contributors to forthcoming Bamboo Ridge issue #115
7-9 p.m. Thursday
September 19, 2019
The Manifest

featuring readings by
Derek N. Otsuji
Scott Kikkawa
M.G. Martin
Nora Pollard

Derek N. Otsuji lives and writes on the southern shore of O‘ahu. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Salamander, Sycamore Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and The Threepenny Review.

Scott Kikkawa grew up in a Hawai‘i Kai where every avocado-green freezer had Meadow Gold popsicles in them. He currently lives with his family in a Hawai‘i Kai where every stainless-steel freezer has giant bags of something dead and chopped up from Costco in them. A federal law enforcement officer by day, he writes detective noir fiction set in postwar Honolulu featuring cops who chew toothpicks and drink on the job. His debut novel, Kona Winds, is forthcoming from Bamboo Ridge Press.

M.G. Martin is the author of One For None (Ink, 2010). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Powderkeg, Juked, ZYZZYVA, Sink Review, PANK, Hawai‘i Pacific Review, and from Greying Ghost Press. A 2018 W.S. Merwin Creative Teaching Fellow, he teaches middle school English and lives on Maui with the poet Tess Patalano and the dog, Ihu.

Nora Pollard is a alive queer trans woman living in the Pacific Ocean on the American colonized islands of Hawai‘i. She loves her dog, and her friends, and everything else too. Her poems have appeared in Water Soup and tendernesslit.com.

Free event. Bring ID.

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]]>NewsEmily BentonMon, 26 Aug 2019 06:15:52 +0000https://www.miahonolulu.com/news/mia-in-honolulu-magazine5c9c31cf33f3c800010577a7:5c9c353c652dea3651a18b14:5d6377d8c388aa0001c1fe67

"M.I.A. Honolulu is the closest thing our city has to a full literary salon, one that's open and inclusive, attracting fictioneers in every genre, urban scholars, digital and graphic artists."
— Don Wallace, "The Hawai'i Writer's Life," HONOLULU Magazine

Pick up the August issue of HONOLULU Magazine to see pictures from our April event at da Shop and to read more about Hawaii's talented writing community.

...or experience it for yourself at one of our free events! Sign up for our e-newsletter to receive event notifications to your inbox.