By Kerry Skemp on December 16, 2008 10:53 AM
Joy Uyeno graduated from Emerson's Publishing and Writing program earlier this year, and is currently expanding her freelance writing career. She has written a guest post for us about her inclusion in a recent anthology of writing about Honolulu, Hawaii.
I write a small travel column for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the newspaper from my home state, and when my editor wrote to let me know that the people at Mutual Publishing were trying to figure out how to get in touch with me I assumed it was about the column. It actually turned out that they wanted to use a short story that I'd written while at the University of Hawaii Manoa for a new anthology about Honolulu—the newspaper just acted as a convenient means of tracking me down. The short story was a somewhat vague memory, but I was thrilled to be included, so I said yes.
Besides being sold as a trade publication, the anthology—Honolulu Stories—was also meant to be used in Hawaii's classrooms. This excited me because I had briefly taught high school English in Hawaii and there didn't seem to be a single resource from which the students could see the range of our home state reflected. The anthology would be a fantastic opportunity for a vast variety of local literary voices to be sampled.
The really exciting part, though, was that I was invited home to attend the book launch party and to do a reading at Barnes and Noble. It didn't seem like this would be possible, until I got in touch with Lisa Diercks, the director of the publishing program. She has been an incredible resource in my time at Emerson—she shares in my love of Hawaii, as it is also one of her homes. Lisa helped me secure grants from the GSA and Graduate Admissions, which allowed me to go home and participate in the book launch events.
The anthology is a thousand-page tome that spans centuries of writers who were both native to the islands as well as visitors. It was amazing to find my name pressed between the works of authors and poets I've grown up reading, including local writers like Juliet Kono Lee, Wendy Miyake, Daryl Lum, and Nora Okja Keller. These writers are friends of my mother's—"aunties" and "uncles" in local custom—and the "grown-ups" of my childhood. I felt a bit like a little girl in too-big high heels as I read aloud my short story after the legendary Wing Tek Lum read three of his poems, but it was completely thrilling.
I'm writing this blog post on the airplane as I head back to Hawaii for the holidays. The last trip home sparked something in me—a kind of new appreciation for the literary community of Hawaii—and this time I feel like I'm going back with more love for the nature, the culture, the food, and the people. The anthology made me remember that I used to love to play with fiction, and the trip back last spring made me realize that although there are hundreds of stories in the Honolulu Stories anthology alone, there are still more left to tell.
Leave a comment