“From the Notebooks of Kaʻaumoana Enos”
“Māmā had the wind in her bones; my mother had something else.”
When I started thinking about what stories I would include in Blood Work, I knew that “From the Notebooks…” needed to be in it for a couple of reasons. Originally inspired by Mason Altiery’s The Last Village in Kona (the line about the main character’s uncle is an allusion to the book) and written for a creative assignment in a course I took from Dr. kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui, it served as a sort of thesis for the collection and a way to draw the many themes of the collection together. Also, as one of my most published pieces, I wanted the inclusion of the revised version to serve as an opportunity to address some of the issues with the original.
But where to put it?
Photo credit: Donald Carreira Ching
In the first draft of the manuscript, it was the first full story instead of the last (the original last full story was “Search the Waters”). Then, Kristiana Kahakauwila read the collection and that changed things. She was the one who suggested a change to the order, starting with disaster and ending with hope rather than the other way around. It was a major shift, but it was one that opened up other opportunities for stories like “Kāneʻohe Town” and allowed me to revise and leverage “At Dawn” (a story I originally wrote for the Bamboo Shoots writing contest), using the former as the collection’s thesis and the latter as a kind of conclusion to the collection and, for those who are looking for it, a resolution to “Search the Waters.”
“She paddled out under pale sky and across static waves, the moon wading in the break.”
From “At Dawn.”
Photo credit: Taylen Lundequam
Is the woman in “At Dawn” Kaʻimi’s daughter?
Maybe. As discussed in an earlier post, when I wrote these stories, I wanted the possibility of those kinds of connections, but I kept them intentionally implied or indirect. There are no easy resolutions and no epiphanies in Blood Work. There are only choices, and none of them are easy.
(One) more soon,
Donald
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