Oral History Project

Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project
Cathy Song

Interview of Cathy Song (CS), conducted by Susan Lee St John (SLSJ) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project via Zoom, on July 28, 2023. Cathy Song speaks of her family life, her education, examples of and influences on her writing, Asian American and local norms and mores in regards to culture and literature, and her roles within Bamboo Ridge Press. Cathy Song also recalls Wing Tek Lum, Joy Kobayashi-Cintrón, and others.

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Cathy Song (CS) on July 28, 2023. The interview took place via Zoom, and was conducted by Susan Lee St John (SLSJ) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. This is a single interview session.

Cathy Song and Susan Lee St John have reviewed the transcript and made their corrections and emendations. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

SLSJ: I was thinking about where to start. And I feel like starting with the crinoline skirt.

There’s that lovely scene in All the Love in the World where Kitty is wearing the crinoline skirt on her head.

CS: [Laughs] Okay.

SLSJ: And the crinoline skirt is also in your poem, “A Pale Arrangement of Hands.”

CS: Crinolines were a very important part of my life.

SLSJ: In what way were they important?

CS: I mean, that dates me, but I sure loved my crinolines. We used to wear these very tight waisted dresses with crinolines underneath. I was a child in the fifties and early sixties. And we always dressed up, for play at home, and when we went out. We were always told to look clean and neat, when we went out.

SLSJ: We had talked a little bit about that, like why it was so important for Asians to always look—?

CS: Oh, very important. I wrote a poem about it, “The Pineapple Fields.” That was a real big thing with my dad. He kept saying, “Don’t act like you came from the pineapple fields.” [Laughs.] So when we went on trips, we had to dress immaculately. My sister and I invariably wore matching dresses. My tiny brother looked like a midget because he always wore a suit with a little pork pie hat. It was really funny.

I remember my dad would never wear slippers outside of the house. He wouldn’t be caught dead in slippers. That was only for around the yard. He always wore shoes and socks and a belt when he went out.

SLSJ: You mentioned this in “The Pineapple Fields,” and do you feel that this was an important part of the Asian identity, and this identity figured in your writing?

CS: I think so. I might have written very overtly about it in “The Pineapple Fields.” But there was always a feeling that you just didn’t want to make waves, you didn’t want to inconvenience others. We’re compliant. These feelings are very rooted in Asian culture and then magnified as we are a minority in America.

SLSJ: Is this something that’s important for you to explore in your writing?

CS: Well, I guess it must be there on some level all the time. We were also told not to speak Pidgin in my family. That was an absolute no no. I was the only one in my family who could speak Pidgin. And maybe that was because I went to public school while my brother, the only son, got to go to ‘Iolani.

SLSJ: Right.

CS: At Kaimuki Intermediate I learned Pidgin very well. My best friend and her family were local Japanese and they were great Pidgin speakers. They were a second family to me. Hanging out with them I learned to speak Pidgin fluently. My kids to this day always tease me when I go into Pidgin. They find it very funny. [Laughs.] They think it sounds so old-fashioned.

SLSJ: Oh, that’s very funny. So they’re not Pidgin speakers.

CS: Oh no, no, no, not at all. When they try, it’s just laughable. [Laughs.]

SLSJ: I was looking over your poems, and your first book won the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and like how it felt to get that award?

CS: Well, at that time, I had graduated college. I had also finished graduate school. And I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writing a lot of poetry. I was also working with Kathleen Spivack; a poet who taught The Advanced Writers Workshop out of Radcliffe. I summoned the courage to ask her if she could help me get a book of poems together.

Looking back, it seems funny now, but I guess I really didn’t have a lot of confidence. And so I thought, well, what if I go by the name Cat Song? Maybe publishers will think I’m Native American and they might take more of an interest in my work.

Kathleen put that silly notion to rest and helped me put together what became the manuscript. I was bringing her lists of small presses I could send the manuscript to and she basically said, no, no, no, you start at the top. Work your way down. After you get all the rejections at the top, then you go to the smaller presses. So she helped me put together the poems and the Yale Younger Poets Award was at the top of her list.

I sent it off without another thought. In those days, we sent the hard copy manuscript, nothing like Submittable today. And hey, I forgot all about it. I moved back from Boston with my husband and our baby, and returned to Hawai‘i.

And then one day in the summer of ’82 I got a call. And it was from Yale. I really thought it was one of my graduate school friends playing a joke on me. You’re kidding me, right? It really was a wonderful surprise.

You know, we’re talking a long time ago. And now there is quite a wealth of Asian American writing, but this was more than forty years ago. I was only twenty-seven years old. This was a big surprise.

SLSJ: The book had this wonderful forward by Richard Hugo. What did you feel when you read his words?

CS: I guess I thought that any one of his stature that would take the time to write about my poetry. [Laughs.] Really, really out of this world.

SLSJ: We were talking before how you don’t want to rock the boat, that sort of early training. And now you’re in the national limelight. Was there any kind of conflict for you?

CS: I was surprised in the beginning by the criticism that came from the Asian American literary community early on. It seemed as though there was still that controversy about Maxine Hong Kingston and the publicity regarding her work being published as nonfiction. A lot of people were criticizing that and felt that it was fiction and that by calling it nonfiction, if I can remember correctly, it seemed to say her stories were speaking for the whole Chinese American experience.

I can’t remember exactly what the controversy was, but I was so surprised in the early days when I’d go to these Asian American literary conferences. All these panels bashing Maxine Hong Kingston, and I thought this was just ridiculous. Her book was the most wonderful thing I had read as a young woman in college.

So I didn’t understand the fuss and in the same way I always sort of felt you weren’t Asian enough or you were too mainstream and you weren’t writing enough about the Asian American experience. So I felt a little confused by it all. The harshest and sometimes pettiest critics are often people from your own community or background.

SLSJ: Did you feel like you had to make a choice: they were suggesting you either have to be Asian or you had to write in this mainstream way?

CS: Right, if you did a lot of Asian stuff, then you think the criticism would be, oh, you’re exoticizing the Asian American experience. Do we really need one more poem about eating wonton with your grandmother, you know, or if you ignored those things, then wow, you’re being a copout pandering to the mainstream.

I think I felt lucky enough to have grown up in Hawai‘i where I’m Asian American, but yet that’s not my whole identity. I did get into trouble once when I said I’m a poet who happens to be Asian American and I really got a lot of trouble for that. “The happens to be” is true; having been born and raised in Hawai‘i, being Asian doesn’t feature prominently in my consciousness.

It’s different on the Mainland. Suddenly I remember, “Oh, I have this Asian face” and many people who see me just see my Asian face. When I lived in Boston, I was taken for a Vietnamese refugee or an MIT foreign exchange student; when I lived in Denver, I was taken for a Saigon war bride. In Hawai‘i, I’m just another auntie, mixed in with all the other colorful array of aunties out grocery shopping.

The relief and the beauty and the ease with which I feel I can dwell here—I feel so lucky, among all the other things Hawai‘i has given me.

SLSJ: You got the word after you moved back here. And then what did you do in terms of your publishing? Did you feel like you should still publish mainly in these bigger presses or—?

CS: I think around this time, I had known Eric early on, even before or right around the time he and Darrell were starting Bamboo Ridge. It was really nice when I moved back to Hawai‘i. Wing Tek Lum reached out to me to see if I wanted to join their study group. It was like a secret society I didn’t know anything about. And for a while I was like, no, no, no. I kind of used my being a mother as an excuse because basically I’m an introvert. I did use that excuse many times to decline invitations to read on the mainland. The thought of traveling thousands of miles to read to an audience of maybe ten people just didn’t seem worth it, especially after I became a mother.

In retrospect I probably could have done a lot more to push my career along. But the way I managed it suited me fine. When I look back on my life, I’m glad I did it the way I did. My family always came first.

SLSJ: Well, you had a very successful career. Do you want to tell me a little bit more about your involvement with Bamboo Ridge?

CS: Well, eventually Wing Tek, in his very quiet persistent way. He didn’t take no for an answer and every few months he’d call and I got pulled into study group. Then my first real venture with Bamboo Ridge Press was co-editing Sister Stew with Juliet Kono, our women’s anthology. We had fun with that project. And again, I don’t know how these things happen, but between Wing Tek and Darrell Lum—they’re very persuasive in such a nice way—first, they’re like your brothers, so you’ll do anything for your older brothers—and pretty soon I became the managing editor. And I had a basement. “It’s perfect, Cathy. You can put all the Bamboo Ridge inventory in your basement and then you can do all the mail orders.”

Those days were just so funny because Eric would have the Bamboo Ridge phone and machine at his house. So all the orders would come to him, and in those days, that meant someone saying, “I want one copy of Small Kid Time. This is my address. I’m gonna mail you my check.”

Or if they didn’t, we would send an invoice. And Eric would call me and tell me these orders. So down into my basement I’d go, fill the orders, carry them to the post office, and mail them. Eventually—I really wasn’t good at this—I found Bamboo Ridge a really good managing editor.

Joy Kobayashi-Cintrón is still the managing editor. She came aboard in 1995. But before she did, I got my mother to do the mail clerk duties. [Laughs.] My mom is capable and she has a lot of free time, so why not, I thought. “Hey Mom, we’ll pay you nine dollars an hour if you fill out this stuff.” and she said, “Oh, wow, that’s better than the monthly parking rent I get.”

Twice a week she’d come to sit in my office and fulfill the orders. She would carry all the packages to the post office at Kahala Mall, and this particular postman—he was wonderful— he’d scold me whenever he’d see me and say I was working my mother too hard.

So my mother became the mail clerk and my dad would help her when they had to restock the inventory, picking up the books from Wing Tek Lum’s office in downtown Chinatown. They would bring the books back to my house so my mother could proceed with her work. When we were really in a pinch and needed a book fast, Wing Tek Lum’s daughter, Ching Jen, and my son, Josh, were in the same Mandarin class at Punahou. Wing Tek would give her the books. She’d give them to Josh, and he’d bring them home to me. All these things made me love Bamboo Ridge because it was such a family-run operation. We never had a central office. It was everyone taking a little bit and trying to help out in whatever way they could.

Then in 1995, my sister’s dear friend, Joy Kobayashi-Cintrón, had just returned from Puerto Rico with her husband, Xander. She and my sister had been friends at Kalani, and she told my sister that she and Xander had returned to take care of her 85 year-old mother in Kaimukī. They thought they’d be here for a couple of years and a part-time job where she could work from home while keeping an eye on her mom seemed perfect. Her mother, bless her heart, lived to 103!

SLSJ: Perfect. So excellent. I love the way it’s so high touch.

CS: Oh yeah, it still works that way. Sometimes I’ll say to Joy, I need a certain book and I just drive to her house. She either hands it to me or has it waiting on the porch.

SLSJ: For the future for Bamboo Ridge, do you see any kind of changes?

CS: Well, we’re all getting older, that’s for sure. And we really would like to get more younger people involved. It’s wonderful that we have Misty-Lynn Sanico. She’s so proficient and talented designing our books, our website, our social media feed. She’s terrific and absolutely indispensable. We also have Donald Carreira Ching and Normie Salvador, both young minds and full of energy. If we could just get a few more like them—

You do have to be a little unusual to work for Bamboo Ridge; it’s so idiosyncratic.

SLSJ: So how would you describe your ideal Bamboo Ridge employee?

CS: You’ve just gotta get it. You gotta get the way that we’ve been doing things. And it’s probably—until a whole crew takes over, it’s—as long as there’s still some old futs like myself willing and able—we’re gonna just do it old school. For example, Donald has a new manuscript coming up, and I’m supposed to edit it. I asked if I could have a hard copy, and he’s like, what?

SLSJ: [Laughs.] That’s not even in his vocabulary.

CS: [Laughs.] No.

SLSJ: You’ve edited a lot of editions, and what is it that you look for when you get submissions?

CS: Basically just good writing, a distinctive voice. Especially with poetry, language is foremost. It has to be a real crafting of language in a way that is undeniably language that’s being worked.

For prose, you want those elements and a good story to tell but also a narrative voice that is irresistible. It’s hard to describe, you read something, it pops out and you just know, oh yeah, this goes in the yes pile.

SLSJ: Do you look for a specific quality—since Bamboo Ridge’s title is a local literary magazine?

CS: Hawaii Writers’ Journal, right? Yeah, I think that should always guide us, but you can have wonderful poets too that live here, have lived here all their lives, but they might not write in Pidgin, or they might not write about the “local experience.” Or they write about their experience of Hawai‘i in a more mainstream way. I think of Sue Cowing. She’s such a good writer and I feel so happy that we’ve been able to publish her all these years. Again, it’s another point of view of someone who wasn’t born here but who has a great love for this place as well as deep concern. I don’t think writing about Hawai‘i has to come only from one lens of being what we think is local. I consider Sue Cowing’s writing local literature.

SLSJ: Yeah, yeah. And you talked about that too, where we don’t, you don’t, feel the sort of labels that are so restrictive, as to what is Asian writing.

CS: Right.

SLSJ: Do you want to talk a little bit about some of your early influences?

CS: Well, I always go back to this: that I really wanted to be a singer. And these songs still stay with me because my brain was a young brain when I fed it these songs. Fifty years later, I still know all the words. I grew up singing along with Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell. I still love to sing their songs. It was a way of wanting to sing—and not being particularly blessed with a beautiful singing voice—that I turned to poetry. I started to write poetry because of these beautiful folk singers. Writing poetry satisfied that singing impulse.

SLSJ: How do you think about formal things like rhyme or rhythm or meter in your poems when you are writing?

CS: While I am writing a poem, a good part of the time I am reading what I’m writing out loud. I’ll always read out loud whatever I write, starting at the beginning. I don’t write in strict meter or strict rhyme, but it’s there. Music is there. The poems that I like of my own to read out loud the best have music working the best in them.

SLSJ: Do you want to name some of your favorite poems?

CS: One that I really like to read out loud is “The Grammar of Silk.” It’s a poem about sewing and how there was rhythm to that sewing machine, sitting at it was like sitting at the piano, a kind of measured time.

SLSJ: When you were growing up in Wahiawā, what kind of early influences do you remember?

CS: We had a little child’s record player. And my father bought us all kinds of those tiny little yellow records. Now those songs are in my head and I’ll sing them to my grandchildren. There also seemed to be a lot of cowboy songs in the air—remember I grew up in the mid-fifties and sixties; my mother’s idol was Alan Ladd. My father was a music lover and he loved to play his records of South Pacific, Stephen Foster, La Boheme, Tchaikovsky—the cannons of the 1812 Overture rocking our little house in Wahiawā. There’s one children’s song in particular I find so delightful and yet people now would say, oh, that’s so anti-feminist. [Sings:]

Oh pretty Polly don’t you cry
you’ll be happy by and by when
he comes he’ll dress in blue
that’s the sign he’ll marry you

[Laughs.] You know, it’s so beautiful and simple. And the day Flower Drum Song came to Waikiki Theater, I’ve never been the same. [Laughs.] My father bought the record—the Broadway version—with Pat Suzuki, not Nancy Kwan. In the short story I wrote about my sister and I lip syncing around the living room, we were always told that Pat Suzuki wasn’t as pretty as Nancy Kwan, that’s why Nancy Kwan got to be in the movies, but Pat Suzuki had the better voice.

Once I heard “Grant Avenue” [song from Flower Drum Song], I was in bliss. Those early influences were strong, and remain so. My eight-year-old granddaughter, as we speak, is doing an ice skating recital in Los Angeles, ice skating to “Grant Avenue.” From the time she was little, I used to sing her that song because they lived near San Francisco. We would always go to Chinatown, and on Grant Avenue, I’d hum that song. These songs are just wonderful. People can criticize Flower Drum Song as perpetuating stereotypes, but the songs are terrific. It was the most wonderful thing in 1960 when we saw it.

It was the first time we saw all these Asian people on the big screen. Asian people who looked glamorous like Nancy Kwan and James Shigeta; not the Asians we were used to seeing as peasants running around in poverty-stricken China like Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. The haole actors with yellow-face and the Chinese peasants just looked so dreadful.

Seeing glamorous people like Nancy Kwan and James Shigeta in the movie did wonders for us.

SLSJ: Yeah. It did. Well, you know, it’s kinda like the new movie, Crazy Rich Asians.

CS: Again, when I saw it, you know the story [signals with her hand that it is so-so], but again, to see glamorous, attractive Asians having a wonderful life. A rich life, sumptuous. And when I was going on about it to my friends, they said, “Well, you obviously haven’t watched K[orean -Ed.] drama.”

SLSJ: Yeah. You know, when I saw Crazy Rich Asians—you talked about being an introvert—there were no introverts in that movie.

CS: Years ago there was a Russian ice skater named Nellie Kim. She was an ethnic Korean, but she was Russian. And every time she came on TV, we were all rooting for her, even though she was skating for Russia, because she was Asian. And then, of course, there was Kristi Yamaguchi, my idol. She’s just so fantastic. I think there was always a part of me that was rooting for these Asians—the few and far between—and I would make my children see this, and tell them it was really important. She’s so terrific. Look at what she’s accomplished. It was very important for me to have my children see these people as role models.

SLSJ: I want to ask about the atmosphere when you were writing. You were in college in the seventies, or late seventies, early eighties. What was it like for you on the mainland?

CS: Well, I went to UH for two years, and then I transferred to Wellesley. I met some wonderful professors at UH, like John Unterecker, who encouraged my writing. At Wellesley, I remember, I met this fabulous teacher in the Art History department. She agreed to be my senior thesis advisor. I didn’t feel like I could relate to anyone in the English department at Wellesley at the time because it was very, very conservative. This art history professor, Eugenia Parry Janis—her lectures were so compelling. I remember one paper we had to do: we had to pick a favorite painting and write about it. I picked Gauguin’s Woman with Mango. It was at the time one of my favorite paintings. I guess I was also missing Hawai‘i. One day we filed into the auditorium, already dark with the painting thrown upon the slide screen, and Professor Janis proceeded to read my paper to the class.

I went to her office afterwards and introduced myself. “Oh, you’re the girl with the mango!” And for the time at Wellesley, she became a mentor.

I’ve been very lucky to have found people along the way who were so generous with their encouragement. At that time most of my Asian friends were all doing pre-law, pre-med, economics—I didn’t even know what that was. [Laughs.] And then in 1976, I was still in college, I got ahold of Woman Warrior, and it was just so wonderful to read that.

SLSJ: Yeah, it was for me too. I think it was the book that made me think, “Oh, people like me— appearing in literature.”

CS: Yes, exactly.

SLSJ: So, were you an Art History major?

CS: Oh, no. But I took as many art history courses as I could because it was much more fun to sit in the dark auditorium and watch beautiful paintings go by in the slide show rather than, you know, read a very difficult text. I realize I’m not a scholar. I found all those higher levels of critical theory and deconstruction very tedious. I thought I’d be an English major because I liked to read, but I’m definitely not a scholar, not an academic.

SLSJ: Yeah, and your work is very visual. You have referred to paintings. Georgia O’Keefe paintings—it seems like visual art is so important in your work.

CS: Visual art, and again these early influences stayed with me. We didn’t have a lot of books when I was growing up, but we had some art books. It’s all you need, really, as a child growing up, just a few beautiful art books to look at. Coffee table-sized books poring over them. Of course those rainy days in Wahiawā helped. [Laughs.] We did a lot of indoor things.

SLSJ: I’m looking at your wall of paintings behind you. Is that your father’s atlas? The globe?

CS: Yes! It’s permanently tilted now, but that again, I think I was very fortunate that my father was an airline pilot. He was one of the first generation of Asian American commercial airline pilots, and he just loved to travel. Early on, in 1959, when we were very little, he left. He told my mother he was going to the Brussels World’s Fair and after, he planned to buy a convertible Karmann Ghia straight from the factory. I don’t know how my mother allowed him to do that, leaving her alone with three small kids. And when he returned, he’d present us with a slideshow. As a child, being very impressionable, the slides he took made me conscious of a bigger world out there, a place where my father had gone. And then he became a very high level pilot for Aloha Airlines. So when Aloha Airlines changed their fleet over to jets, they would sell their old planes to smaller airlines in different countries, and as a senior pilot he would be the one to ferry them to places like Colombia, or pick up the new jets from the factory in England. He was a great storyteller, and he’d keep us kids enthralled with tales of trying to land, nearly out of fuel, at a tiny airport in the Azores or flying over the Bermuda Triangle.

And then when we got older, he took us on trips. So we traveled a lot as a family—my sister, my brother, and I all developed this love of travel.

SLSJ: Do you have any place in particular that you remember?

CS: We took an extensive trip in the late sixties, we went to England, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. I don’t know how he did it. In those days, there was no Internet to even make arrangements. But somehow he managed to find, for example, these paradores all through Spain, refurbished old buildings and castles turned into government-run hotels. We would receive in the mail these paper thin aerograms confirming our reservations. He plotted our trip, without GPS, driving a rented Siat—from Madrid to Malaga by way of Granada.

SLSJ: I remember you mentioning him flying to different places and the traveling. It was really a very moving book and a very beautiful book. Of course the ending is very sad. It is a very personal story too. And then the perspective shifts, like the very end piece is from the driver’s point of view. How did you make that decision about shifting the perspective?

CS: I don’t know: this driver—I think—I just wanted a viewpoint of how it must seem to him, who probably never traveled very far but was tasked to drive these two tourists on this long Buddhist path, and how it must have made him think about his own life.

SLSJ: Yes, because he was Muslim.

CS: Muslim, yes. And I think maybe there was a scene where the two tourists want to go on the Ganges, and he’s like, “Aaak, I’ll never go near that water.” It’s unimaginable to him that these people come from all over the world and want to see things that are right in his backyard.

Among other things, there is the kindness that they show him, he’s not used to.

SLSJ: Yes, being very poor.

CS: Being very poor and treated so badly. Especially if you’re a driver or something lowly like that; you’re just expected to sleep in the car.

I found in India I was always asking, “Where are they supposed to sleep?”

[Mimes a dismissive hand wave.] “Ah, don’t worry about them.”

SLSJ: They’re kind of lower caste.

CS: Yes, very lower caste.

SLSJ: I wanted to ask you about your experience in the seventies and the eighties in college, forty years ago. Did you feel like there was sort of a caste system and that maybe Asians were a little bit lower caste?

CS: I think I was lucky at Wellesley because there was a strong tradition of Asian women students, ever since Ching Kai-Shek’s wife, Madam Mei-ling Soong, one of the famous Soong sisters, went there. That started this whole channel of wealthy Asians from abroad sending their daughters to Wellesley. There were many Asian women on campus, foreign as well as American. Many of my Asian American friends had families who had come to the U.S. in the sixties, which made me realize how rare it was for someone like me who had grandparents who had come to Hawai‘i in the case of my maternal grandparents in the late 1800s and my paternal grandfather who had arrived in 1904.

The one group that seemed new to my experience was the wealthy white young women—the debutantes—but they were a group unto themselves.

When I went to graduate school at Boston University, I may have felt the atmosphere a little less welcoming, but that could be the nature of graduate writing workshops, which can be very competitive. You have to be your own best advocate; you kind of have to push your work. I wasn’t very good at that. I could say it was my personality; or it could be cultural. Probably a combination of both.

There was one other writer of color, a Filipino American writer, and he and I of course bonded. We both weren’t good at pushing our work. We both kind of sat on the sidelines.

SLSJ: What was the response to your work?

CS: I felt very intimidated by anything academic. When there would be discussions about someone’s work it always involved academic references, which made me uncomfortable. There was this one young woman I remember who would spontaneously recite from memory passages of famous poems. Now, years later, I can at once marvel at her prodigious facility for memorization and yet, now, I think, what an ego trip. Back then, I was stunned into further silence. My own feelings of being academically inadequate were of my own making. Even now I sometimes get these panic dreams where I’m told I can’t graduate because I haven’t finished that final paper. [Laughs.]

SLSJ: Nightmares.

CS: Yes, nightmares. I wouldn’t say it was anything overt, and I’m sure my fellow writer friend also shared some of that feeling of being intimidated by these very super confident students. But we kind of grew up with that—it’s not politically correct to say so, but I’m gonna say it anyway—growing up here we’d always say, “Oh yeah, the haole guy, the one that talks so much in class.” Or, “Oh, that haole girl. She thinks she owns the place.” You know, it was kind of that, and again, that cultural birthright that allowed that young woman to think nothing of taking up ten, fifteen minutes of class time while she recited Chaucer or Wordsworth.

SLSJ: Yeah, that kind of entitlement of space, right?

CS: Yes, it was like whoa! wow! And even the way they’d walk into the room. I probably walked in and sat down at the first seat right next to the door.

SLSJ: I know exactly how you feel or felt at the time. Do you feel differently now?

CS: Oh yeah, oh my god. It’s being a grandmother, it’s being sixty-seven years old. I don’t give a rip anymore. I’ve become more outspoken if I see something I don’t approve of.

SLSJ: Yes, I know what it’s like to embarrass my own children.

CS: There’s got to be some benefit to growing old, right?

SLSJ: What sort of early challenges were there for the press?

CS: There was always the pressing question of how do we expand our subscriber base. I mean, after all these years, why are we still stuck at this number? Even today we’ve published over a thousand writers and yet, are they all subscribers? Or when we have our big anniversary fundraisers, do they buy tickets? So it’s always been this push and pull about wanting to do this labor of love, publishing, and yet sometimes we feel like just shaking our heads. It’s so much effort and the returns, in terms of support, at least from the writers we’ve published, are disappointing. It’s sad, when we’ve published over a thousand writers.

SLSJ: That is amazing, right?

It is amazing. And we’re one of the longest running small presses in the country.

SLSJ: Wow. Why do you think that is?

CS: I’m not sure, but I think, for some odd reason, Hawai‘i doesn’t have a vibrant literary community even though there are people who are writing. I’ve done a number of things with Singapore, and I just cannot believe how vibrant and cohesive their writing community is. They sponsor all kinds of poetry contests and literary events. They’re publishing all these wonderful little chapbooks. The writers and the readers there are engaged, and I think they get a lot of government support.

SLSJ: Oh, government support.

CS: Yes, yes. It’s a very literate society. Highly literate.

SLSJ: Yeah, I saw that too in Ireland. Government support.

CS: Yes, yes, I know; it’s crazy, right? And they’re just so very open minded. Right now I’m in the process of being a judge for one of their poetry contests; I’m one of the judges for the English poetry. These poets are so global, so in tune with poetry being written beyond their borders.

Well, look at our failing educational system, right?

SLSJ: Oh. Hmm.

CS: Sometimes it does feel as though we really are the most isolated landmass on the planet.

When I was involved in the Poets in the Schools program, at the start of each semester Eric Chock, who was the coordinator of the program, would give me a list of assigned schools to visit. You know, Susan, you taught in the program too. Our task was to visit a classroom— ranging from the early elementary grades all the way through high school—and teach poetry for a week. That seems like a very short time to get the students to write poetry, but it was amazing how much we could get done, pulling out our bag of tricks, getting the students to be excited about poetry. The kids were so present—from the youngest ones to the older ones—for many just hearing the spoken word arranged in the best order possible through a human voice seemed for some truly music to their ears. Yet, more often than not, when I’d call the schools to arrange these visits, I was often met with resistance. It seemed more of a hassle for the administrators to accommodate me. It got to the point where I felt I was begging them to let me in, to offer something good and worthwhile and wholesome to the kids.

We also have a university that is very closed off from the public. When I was there in the seventies, I remember seeing wonderful poets like Gary Snyder and W.S. Merwin, readings that were open to the public. If there are poets and writers coming to give readings at UH, the public doesn’t get invited.

SLSJ: Or sometimes we get notified very late.

CS: I know I’m dating myself by the number of times I begin by saying “I remember when,” but there was a time when our city had a vibrant newspaper like The Honolulu Advertiser with terrific writers like Bev Creamer who did articles featuring book reviews and interviews with local as well as visiting writers.

I think all of these things contribute, and again, the arts and literature always get pushed to the side. The world and our lives are very fractured now. They say loneliness is a big problem.

SLSJ: Right, arts connect.

CS: Arts connect. Yes. And you know, Bamboo Ridge has continued all these years despite struggling financially, trying to get a larger readership and subscriber base, writing the yearly rounds of grants. We really could use more support.

SLSJ: I did wanna ask you about your relationship, your friendship with Naomi Shihab Nye, because you mentioned her in your acknowledgements, and you said that she was there from the beginning and the end.

CS: Oh, she’s been a wonderful friend for years and years. I met her through Poets in the Schools, through Eric Chock, who had invited her to join us for one of our meetings because she was very involved in such programs on the mainland. It was in the early nineties when we first met.

The summer of 2016 when my father died, she was here and she was a great comfort to me. Later, when I began to write the short stories that became All the Love in the World, many of them about my father, she urged me to put together the book.

SLSJ: Yes, we’re very lucky because this is a beautiful collection.

CS: Naomi’s voice is so full of energy and life affirmation. She’s a national treasure.

SLSJ: Cathy, are you working on anything now?

CS: I am working on a new manuscript. I’m hoping I’ll be able to find a publisher. It’s very hard nowadays. It’s been a while since I last published a book of poetry. Now it’s almost like starting from scratch because the editor I used to work with at the University of Pittsburgh Press retired, and now I have to apply through Submittable.

SLSJ: Oh, no.

CS: Back in the day, I would write a letter to my editor and tell him a manuscript was coming in the mail. Now it’s impenetrable. So, [crossing her fingers], wish me luck.

SLSJ: I wish you the best of luck! Does Bamboo Ridge use Submittable or not?

CS: No.

SLSJ: No?

CS: We’re old school. As we speak, we’re getting a new regular issue out and it’s being guest edited by Victoria Kneubuhl. Misty gathers all the submissions the press has received by the deadline and sends them in batches to Victoria.

SLSJ: Well, it’ll come back. I feel touching a book and turning the pages is so much a different experience.

CS: It is, it sure is.

SLSJ: Wow. I really thank you for this time. It’s been really fun talking to you. Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you wanna add? Is there anything we didn’t talk about?

CS: We covered quite a lot from crinolines to Grant Avenue to—I guess, I really want to stress the fact that Bamboo Ridge has been a labor of love. We wouldn’t have lasted this long without the steadfastness of the founders, Darrell Lum and Eric Chock, and of course, Wing Tek Lum and Joy Kobayashi-Cintrón. And Juliet Kono who just recently stepped down, who led the press as editor when Darrell and Eric retired. It’s really been a labor of love all these years, a sacrifice for Eric and Darrell because running Bamboo Ridge took time away from their own writing. From the start it was a massive undertaking—cut and paste, exchanging back and forth grocery sacks of submissions.

So, truly, truly, it was a remarkable endeavor that they began in 1978 and because there’s enough of this feeling of love for them, for what they envisioned, we’ve survived.

SLSJ: It’s been a wonderful, wonderful publication that’s supported so many of us.

CS: And a lot of the artists too because we have fabulous cover artwork. A showcase for local artists. But again, I want to stress that the writers need to step up. They want something like Bamboo Ridge to be there for their work, then they’ve got to contribute beyond their work.

SLSJ: There has to be community support.

CS: Yeah, there really has to be. It’s always been a struggle, sometimes someone gets defeated but someone else will carry on, and then we switch places.

SLSJ: Well, thank you, Cathy.

CS: And thank you. I know this is a lot of work, not only do you do the interview but you’ve gotta write it all down.

SLSJ: It was so much fun talking to you and I think Zoom does something.

CS: But literally, are you going to have to listen and then write it down? Then go to the next bit? And write it down?

SLSJ: I’m gonna ask Misty because she put the closed captioning on and there’s the rough draft of a transcript.

CS: Oh, I see. It reminds me of when we used to like a song on a record, we’d keep dropping the needle because we wanted to write down the lyrics so we could sing along.

SLSJ: Well, I can’t imagine anything better to have in my head repeatedly. Our conversation was so much fun.

CS: Oh, well, thank you. I really appreciate it, Susan.

SLSJ: Yeah, well thank you, Cathy and you know, and I really hope to see your new manuscript.

CS: Oh, thank you. Thank you. And thank you for always supporting Bamboo Ridge by holding reading events at Windward. Yeah, that’s very helpful.

SLSJ: Oh, yes, yes. I will contact you again and we’ll set up a reading for your next few issues.

CS: Okay, my dear. Take care. I’m glad you had a wonderful time in Bhutan.

SLSJ: I did and yes, I’m glad you’ve got time to spend with your granddaughter.