Enduring War: Stories of What We’ve Learned

The following praise for MANOA’s winter 2008 issue was gratefully received in May 2009.

Thanks for putting together the fine issue of Enduring War. All the poems are excellent, with Amichai’s and Nye’s especially striking. The fiction “Heartless Willy” and the excerpt from The Gray Earth are unforgettable, though it’d be more comfortable to hide them. I think I appreciated most David Shulman’s essay on Palestine. To see non-violent Israelis and Palestinians persisting in their brave, vulnerable, and tiny protest actions says something good about humans, and to me Shulman’s essay is very inspiring.—Kathy Phillips, professor of English, University of Hawai‘i

Another Kind of Paradise

Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific

Cheng & Tsui (2009)

“Trevor Carolan’s Another Kind of Paradise is a wonderfully rich collection of some of the best contemporary fiction from East and Southeast Asia. These stories give students a direct window onto the wildly diverse cultural assumptions and influences at play in Asian societies today. And they illustrate in unforgettable ways the tensions and dramas of daily life in societies undergoing economic and cultural change at a dizzying pace. Another Kind of Paradise is the perfect supplement to any course on modern Asia, or on contemporary Asian, world or comparative literature.”—Paul Ropp, Klein Professor of History and Asian Studies, Clark University

Trevor Carolan was born in Yorkshire and began writing professionally at age seventeen, filing dispatches from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury music scene. He is widely published as a journalist, literary critic, anthologist, poet, and translator and has also worked as a media advocate for international human rights, Canadian Aboriginal land claims, and Pacific Coast watershed issues. He holds a doctorate in interdisciplinary studies from Bond University in Queensland, Australia, and teaches English at University of the Fraser Valley, near Vancouver.

His other books are Against The Shore: The Best of Pacific Rim Review of Books, which he co-edited with Richard Olafson; The Pillow Book of Dr. Jazz, an autobiographical novel; Celtic Highway, a collection of poetry; Giving Up Poetry, a memoir of his acquaintance with Allen Ginsberg; and Return to Stillness: Twenty Years With a Tai Chi Master, an account of his lengthy studies with Master Ng Ching-Por in Vancouver’s Chinatown.

Understanding War (and Peace)

Shepherd Bliss and Chester Aaron, contributors to Enduring War: Stories of What We’ve Learned, have arranged three events focusing on the subject of war. They are listed here by date.

• Feb. 17, Tues., Storytelling, Farming, & Healing
  Summary: Chester will take a break from garlic farming and Shepherd from tending berries and teaching at Sonoma State to share a good meal and read from Enduring War.
  Details: 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at VIVA – The Culinary Institute of Florence/Italian Cultural Center, 7160 Keating, Sebastopol; $15 includes light supper and beverage. For more information, call 824-9913 or see www.studyabroaditaly.com/viva.

• March 26, Thurs., Joint Reading
  Details: 7 p.m. at Copperfield Books, 138 N. Main, Sebastopol. Free.

• April 1, Wed., Understanding War (and Peace): A Psychological, Literary, Musical, Storytelling Approach
  Summary: Designed to be a seamless blending of live music, prose and poetry (the oral interpretation of literature). Seeks to evoke memories, feelings, beliefs, and thoughtfulness, to entertain, and to educate. The appeals will be to logos, ethos, and pathos.
  Details: noon to 12:50 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium, 110 Ives Hall, Sonoma State University, Northern California.

For more information on Enduring War, see MANOA’s website.

South Asian Edition of CROSSING OVER

The American Library launched the South Asian edition of Crossing Over on 29 January at the American Center of the U.S. embassy in New Delhi.

The event included a recitation by poet Rita Malhotra of poems by Gulzar and a panel discussion by

• Larry Schwartz, minister-counselor for public affairs, U.S. embassy in New Delhi;
• Mushirul Hasan, vice-chancellor, Jamia Millia Islamia;
• Alok Bhalla, editor, translator, and visiting professor, Jamia Millia Islamia; and
• Sukrita Paul Kumar, poet, critic, and co-editor of Crossing Over.

A reprint of MANOA’s summer 2007 issue, the South Asian edition contains additional commemorative materials and photos and was published under the embassy’s Indo American Co-operative Publishing Program.

Cambodia 2009

Annemarie Prins—a director, writer, and actress who has been a familiar face on stage and screen in The Netherlands for decades—has created a blog to record events related to producing Breaking the Silence, a play about the Khmer Rouge regime. She is now in Cambodia, working on the production. The following text is from her post for 19 January:

The title is the aim of the theatre play.

Now, 30 years after the genocide of the Khmer Rouge ( 1975-1978 ) there is hardly any communication between the generations about these terrible happenings. And that hampers a possible reconciliation or at least discussion between perpetrators and victims. Inside its own history, in a country where perpetrators and victims are practically each other’s neighbours is of utmost importance for a possible development and working out of the traumas.

For years the Documentation Centre Cambodia (DCCam), led by Youk Cchang, has been working on information and the gathering of interviews with perpetrators and victims in the whole country. Already a year ago Youk Cchang assured Annemarie that the making of a theatre performance about these problems is very necessary. He gives his active support to the project by collaborators of this Centre who will have an evaluation and discussion with the public a day after they have seen the performance. By giving us his consent, we dare make a play about this painful subject in a culture that is so different from ours.

The ingredients of the play will be: seven scenes written by Annemaire in Amsterdam, singing, music and dance. The seven scenes will be played by the four actresses who performed in the first production of 3 years, 8 months, 20 days. Each scene shows a different aspect of the social life during Pol Pot regime. For example: two ex-child soldiers, now 48, meet each other after all those years and they each have a completely different attitude regarding their lives of those days. All the other scenes will be dealt with in the following blogs. They are purely Brechtian scenes in which questions will been thrown up but not answered because we hope that the public will have a discussion about these questions later on. The scenes that form the core of the play are heavy, but we will make the performance open and pleasant to watch by music, singing and dancing.

The following images are from 3 years, 8 months, 20 days, which was produced in 2006. Production credits follow the images.

text: Annemarie Prins (based on the actors stories)
company: Amrita Performing Arts, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
director: Annemarie Prins
stage design: Fer Smidt
production: Fred Frumberg
actresses: Kauv Sotheary, Morm Sokly, Chhon Sina
singer: Nam Narem
musician: Ieng Sakona
assistant director: Ragnhild Rikkelman
translation / assistant to director: Sok Kunty
production assistant: Hourt Bunny
lighting designer: An Pagna
costumes: Tan Matom
assistant designer: Teang Borin
photography: James Wassermen, Arjay Stevens
sponsor: Fonds Amateurkunst en Podiumkunsten, The Netherlands
first performance: Sovanna Puhm Theatre, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, February 18th 2006

People who want to read the work of some of the writers who lost their lives during the Khmer Rouge regime are directed to MANOA’s summer 2004 issue, IN THE SHADOW OF ANGKOR.

The Ninth Inning

Chester Aaron, a fiction writer whose story “Winterswijk” opens MANOA’s winter 2008 issue, recently appeared on National Public Radio’s series The Ninth Inning. The following paragraphs by senior producer Davar Iran Ardalan are from NPR’s blog on the series:

In early September, author and garlic farmer Chester Aaron emailed me and asked me to consider a program that focuses on the lives of seniors. “One neighbor,” Chester wrote, “a fisherman, 80 years old, kept his family going by continuing to fish. He died last week. His children and grandchildren had a wake. The tributes, by fishermen and wives, would have broken your heart but also given you hope.”

I was intrigued and over the course of the fall, we began reviewing essays and considering interesting seniors to feature. Today, as part of our series The Ninth Inning, you will hear the story of Chester Aaron himself.

See Aaron’s website for more about his life story.

Aloha, Ian

MANOA bids farewell to Ian MacMillan, who served as its fiction editor for many years. A recipient of the Hawaii Award for Literature, the Elliott Cades Award for Literature, and numerous other prizes and distinctions, he passed away on 18 December after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Ian became MANOA’s fiction editor in 1992 and was a professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i, where he had taught creative writing since 1966. His first book, Light and Power (University of Missouri Press, 1980), won the Associated Writing Programs Award. He published several books set in Hawai‘i:

• two novels from Mutual Publishing, The Red Wind and The Braid;
• one novel from Bamboo Ridge Press, The Seven Orchids; and
• three story collections from Anoai Press, Exiles from Time, Squid-Eye, and Ullambana.

He also published a trilogy of novels set in World War II: Proud Monster (North Point Press, 1987), Orbit of Darkness (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), and Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the Treblinka Uprising (Steerforth Press, 1999, Penguin Books, 2000), which won the 2000 PEN USA–West Fiction Award. He made over a hundred appearances in such literary and commercial magazines as Paris Review, Iowa Review, and Gettysburg Review and appeared in such anthologies as The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best of Triquarterly.

Waitangi Day

The following was received from Stacey Garland, of Maori Television.

New Zealand’s national indigenous broadcaster, Maori Television, is putting out the call for all New Zealanders to come home for Waitangi Day 2009 but forget the planes, trains and automobiles you would usually rely on. This year, the only travel required will be in a virtual sense.

The broadcaster has created its own layer on Google Earth to collect messages from anywhere in the world devoted to the question: ‘Where on Google Earth will you be on Waitangi Day?’

Pictures, videos and text can all be uploaded into the page – from Aotearoa-New Zealand and beyond – to appear on the specially-created layer as a pin on the spinning globe. Anyone can upload material, ranging from a simple text message to photos, via Google’s photo sharing service, Picasa, or for the more tech-savvy among us, videos via YouTube.

‘Where on Google Earth will you be on Waitangi Day?’ is the question but also the concept that will underpin the channel’s broadcast dedicated to New Zealand’s national day, Waitangi Day, on Friday February 6 2009. The most inspiring, fun and heart-warming messages will be played throughout Maori Television’s programme, KOTAHI TE RA: WAITANGI DAY 2009.

To see the short demonstration, or if you want to post a message, go to www.maoritelevision.com and follow the Google Earth link.

UH Press Journals

The Journals Department of the University of Hawai‘i Press, our publisher, actively maintains a blog on MANOA and other UHP journals.

UHP’s publishing history is summarized at the blog. Here are excerpts from the section about the Press’s journals program:

The University of Hawai‘i Press started with one journal in 1947 and today publishes or distributes sixteen, one literary and fifteen scholarly. They all reflect strongly the University’s regional and international focus.

Current issues of thirteen of our journals are published electronically through Project MUSE. Current issues of Pacific Science are published electronically through BioOne. Back issues of four of our journals are available online in JSTOR. Our youngest journal, Language Documentation & Conservation, is published in electronic format only and is available by open access courtesy of its sponsor, the UH NFLRC.

Book Launch

River Road Press

invites you to the launch of

The Road South
an audio CD of poems
by Mark Tredinnick

Saturday 27th September 2008
The Book Barn
Old Hume Highway, Berrima
3pm for 3.30pm
to be launched by
Geraldine Turner

RSVP to cjenkins@riverroadpress.net
Jenny at the Book Barn t. 4877 1370