Oral History Project

Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project
Eric Chock

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Eric Chock (EC) on March 13, 2023. The interview took place via Zoom, and was conducted by Donald Carreira Ching (DCC) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. This interview is the third of five sessions.

Eric Chock and Donald Carreira Ching have reviewed the transcript. Their corrections and amendments appear below in brackets with initials. 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.

DCC: Personally, and in terms of Asian American Literature, Local Literature, and Bamboo Ridge, what were the main takeaways of the Talk Story conference?

EC: What I remember is, when I was still a grad student in early ’77, I remember sitting on the concrete bench outside the Kuykendall elevators and Stephen Sumida coming up to me and identifying me as a local poet. And so, from that time, he made a connection to our local roots. And he probably told me about his work on the Asian American Writers Conference in California and Washington the previous two or three years, so he inspired me to join him and these other people, Arnold Hiura and Marie Hara, in working on this Talk Story conference, which at the time some of us referred to as the third Asian American Writers Conference except that it would have this local focus. Local writers, we never used the term Asian American, we didn’t think of ourselves that way. It was a different sense of ethnic community and, in general, local community more based on community in the locale. Of course, there were panels just for Hawaiian writers, Hawaiian kumu, and chants in the opening and closing. In our Talk Story anthology we had local Asians, local haole, writers we just didn’t know what their ethnic background was except they were local. So, it was not exactly a third Asian American Writers Conference and it stopped being called that.

That’s how I remember it in the beginning. Then, I just started going to meetings with them and Steve pointed me toward doing an anthology. I asked Darrell to work as the fiction editor, and then he asked another friend, Dave Robb. I wrote at least twenty grant applications. I helped organize conference Talk Story readings, which was kind of like what I was already doing as a grad student, except focused on Talk Story. We had them at the Makiki community center, maybe the library. So, I started helping to organize things and met a few people that I didn’t even know.

One of the first people I met was Wing Tek Lum. He was a poet and raised here. He had left for college on the East Coast and then moved to Hong Kong. He had been away for a long time, so I didn’t know who he was, but he had returned. Stephen might have known about him because he had won the Poetry Center (Discovery/The Nation) award, so he was known to the Asian American community on the mainland, and he had actually met the Aiiieeeee! boys and different writers. Which is kind of to say he had already been politicized, so he was different from those of us who had spent more time at home. And when I first met him, we met in a restaurant in Chinatown, not far from his office, Lum Yip Kee, and he said something to me, the first thing when we sat down, kind of like what Stephen said, he said, “You’re Pākē” or “You’re a Pākē writer.” I remember being taken aback by that because for someone to call you a Pākē, a lot of the times it was derogatory. It meant you were stingy. I didn’t know this guy, and it was the first thing he said to me. We hadn’t even ordered yet. It kind of threw me back a little, and I paid attention. But then I realized, talking to him, what he meant, what he knew about Asian American writers and the movement on the mainland, and how it was kind of related to what we were doing here, even though we didn’t identify that way. I mentioned this in an article I wrote about the early days and the impact of Asian American or Ethnic Studies movements on the mainland (“Remembering the Impact of Aiiieeeee! in the 1970s in Hawai‘i”), about how that helped solidify, at least in my mind, what we were doing here, what I was already very involved in doing here. Of course, it turns out that Wing Tek was this committed community activist who was a strong supporter of Local Literature.

But to answer the question, we learned that there were very good ethnic writers, young and old, and that the mainland Asian Americans were very active in fighting for more representation in publishing and academia. We learned that our own lives, local voices and local imagery, were valid and should be used to create a legitimate local literature. We learned that there were some serious critical analyses that we needed to pay attention to, sometimes directly related to what we were doing. We learned that we shared many of the concerns, literary and political, that mainland Asian Americans had.

DCC: So, before that, that connection to Asian American literature, that wasn’t quite there in terms of how you identified?

EC: Yeah, we didn’t identify ourselves that way. I didn’t anyway. I think I might have mentioned [earlier in this interview] when Darrell and I went to an anti-war meeting, and it was called Concerned Locals for Peace, so the term Local was already in use. There was the ’78 Con Con around that time, which focused on palaka power, focused on local plantation worker history, and before that people talking about that term, and there were even some people that ran for UH senate or president who ran on a palaka platform. It wasn’t Asian American. It was a different focus and for many of us there are still a lot of strong connections there. The old paradigm we grew up with was local versus haole. The non-whites were grouped. Especially the upper-echelon whites came from a background where it made sense to them to have an all or mostly white social, business, civic, or religious organization. That was something that all non-white locals could understand. Of course, it had a lot to do with class too, and growing up local always included relating to local haoles somehow. So, there were a lot of things going on already that were part of identifying with local culture in an ethnic non-white versus white sense, and that included literature. The term Asian American would obviously exclude too many locals; we already had Hawaiians and local haoles in the Talk Story anthology before the conference. While ethnicity is very important, and we can find overlap in political concerns with mainland Asian Americans, there’s obviously a lot of intermarriage in Hawai‘i and we find a way to live together as a local community—but the issues we face are sometimes totally different from the Asian American community.

DCC: So, it was really a crystallization of what was already happening?

EC: Yeah, the grasp of the importance of our Local community was already there. And the Local literary concerns at UH, in HLAC [Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council], in Poets in the Schools even were already pronounced. The Asian American issues focused on a certain part of the local community or crystallized that part of identity. Not for everyone, of course, but for some people that helped, and I could relate to it. I could see the commonality.

DCC: Do you mind me asking, you said not everyone could relate to it, what did you mean by that?

EC: First of all, on a larger scale, from the very beginning there were issues with the definition of Asian American in terms of getting organizational support for the conference. I was involved in HLAC and campus center as well as the English department, and I talked to certain people who were not clear about what Asian American meant in contrast to Asian literature, especially this conference where the focus on Asian American literature was supposed to be the focus in contrast to Asian literature from 200 years ago in Asia. So much had changed within the Asian-American community, especially after the war. So, there was that problem.

Also, certain people felt excluded because of the focus on Asian American; some non-local writers and academics felt it was an extension of the local versus haole paradigm. Not everyone, but in the beginning, many of the comments were like that. I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not going to get support from some people. Some wanted to have haole writers panels at Talk Story, as if they did not already have majority representation in visiting writers and the whole canonical tradition taught in all levels of education through graduate school. I guess the mainland academic poet or writer in Hawai‘i is an important category, but we didn’t really have time to add that to all the other panels. It wasn’t our priority. There were other points of view that were underrepresented, and that was our focus.

Back to the earlier point, if local people did not identify with being Asian American, that created some contrasting differences, mostly focusing on what was called political or non-political writing. Think back also to the WWII tensions between local Japanese and mainland Japanese soldiers—kotonks, Buddhaheads, or coconut heads. The nice standard English versus the plantation Pidgin. Things like that. Here at home, a combined set of Asian-focused backgrounds were the majority, not the way mainland Asian Americans were a minority, still are, with the attendant tension that causes in everyday life. They had to be more politically conscious in certain ways.

But to answer your question, the main focus of conflict for us here was not with mainland Asian Americans, it was still with the literary, cultural, and societal establishment here: UH English department, the Department of Education, the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council, the newspapers and media, that kind of thing.

DCC: So, it really seemed to be the establishment is who you’re including in those who were not included? Did you mean the UH/literary establishment or the larger societal establishment? Did I go off in the wrong direction?

EC: Post contact, there historically was a plantation economic and cultural establishment, right? After WWII, especially with the vets getting educated off the G.I. Bill, the Democratic Revolution in the ’50s started a big change. There was a joke about the English department being called a continuation of the plantation system, or an elite country club. In the old paradigm, local society was divided by class along those plantation lines—workers versus luna or foremen, owners, merchants, everyone else who was not a contract laborer. With luna, there was some sense of division there, like the Japanese, Filipino, or Chinese laborers were not usually foremen; there were more Portuguese and other usually white luna. Sometimes Hawaiian too. So it wasn’t a purely ethnic or class tension because there was a very clear local versus haole paradigm which was workers versus management and owners—but plantation owners were generally white with U.S. mainland roots. There was a plantation history that continued in some form until at least WWII. That was still going on at UH. Almost all mainland professors and administration. The university as a whole being considered an extension of—or the “new plantation,” and then the professors and administrators, the president, and definitely the English department and that focus on the Western canon. All that cultural imposition. This could be extended to the DOE, the media, and other aspects of local society. Is this too general?

EC: Talk Story helped crystallize a lot of things for me because it was what I was already doing with a slightly different focus. But once the conference started, it was just like a whirlwind, it was just things happening every day for a week, meeting people, going out for dinner, then talking all night about other people’s struggles. And one of the first things that came out of it that comes to my mind is that after a couple of days, there was just this conflict over mainland Asian Americans saying that local people were not political enough in their writing. It wasn’t a major issue to me. I remember talking about it and Darrell being on a panel saying something about how it was just not that obvious. When you’re talking about [his character] Rosa being this intermediate school bully who was supposed to be in high school, then what happened to him later in life, living off recycling empty bottles—there’s politics there, with what happened to people who are in the social welfare system. Why isn’t that political? So that was a big controversy, about political literature, but what they were doing on the mainland, writers were having sit-ins and trying to get the universities to create Ethnic Studies departments, and Ethnic Studies courses and Ethnic Literature courses. Asian Americans on the mainland were doing a lot of things much more politically active in focus. They weren’t just writing love poems.

Another thing that stood out was the controversy between Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin, and Frank Chin was not even there. He had already raised questions about the authenticity of her Chinese culture in her writing, and if that representation was hurting the image of Asians in America. And there was that whole idea that her book, which was subtitled “Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts,” was not really a memoir. It was fiction or a fictionalized memoir, and to confuse or to change on purpose something that was fiction and made up, and to call it memoir and real, or authentic—that was counterproductive for people who were trying to establish an emerging literature that represented our cultures. So that was a big thing, part of a larger national debate. Is it real or some kind of stereotype?

I also think of it in terms of Oprah Winfrey and Toni Morrison [The Color Purple]; when the movie came out there was that criticism by black writers and black critics that it made black men look bad. There weren’t that many black male characters, and they were always villains or weak, or somehow it was a negative portrayal of black men. People would make this critique of different ethnic American female writers, and so this was in that vein. That was a big deal because we thought of Maxine as one of ours. She’d been living here for years, and she was teaching at Mid-Pac. She was familiar to us, and former students were involved in Talk Story. Sumida went to Mid-Pac. Maxine had helped us with organizing and publicity. She was just getting known as just having won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle award.

So, it was tough. There was all this criticism and there was the question of whether it was fiction or memoir, and what that meant to us, and at the same time she had been asked by The New York Times to write some reports for them from this conference, which she did, and they were published in New York, I think daily or almost daily during the conference week. So that helped a lot. It brought a lot of visibility to Local Literature.

That controversy is still going on to this day in some circles. People have this list of all the ethnic writers, mostly Christian females, who were published up to that time. There was this big critique about whether you’re true to your culture, or if you’re assimilated and catering to a white audience so you can sell more books. It was related to the way Asians were stereotyped in movies, where Charlie Chan was not played by a Chinese actor, but a white actor. And how he was instructed never to raise his hand to a white man. That kind of thing. And speaking in a rather weird accent with all that weird makeup to look Chinese. That kind of related to us in terms of Darrell wanting to write in Pidgin but do you need to have standard English narration? Do you just write all in Pidgin, and why would you cater to people who needed the standard narration, or was that catering at all? Those were political issues to us. How do you make it accessible to a mainstream audience—if you want to at all? All these questions came up about something that was then more obviously political, not simply “literary.”

EC: There were the Hawaiian panels, we had chanters, and what I remember most about the kumu talking was when one of them was talking about the creative writing process, and how a good kumu is supposed to be able to get up in the morning and walk outside and feel the sun and the wind on your face, and create a chant right there based on that experience, in that moment, very spontaneous and creative. It was very poetic to me and hard to do. I felt so inadequate as a poet. But of course, these guys were working within a tradition with certain images, and with rules about things that they were going to say. That was impressive to me, like something about having up to four or five or however many levels of meaning in a good chant. I was like, “Man!” I can’t do that even for two layers of meaning. That was something that I liked hearing. I talk about the whole being more than the sum of its parts and metaphoric levels of meaning being important to poetry or fiction. Not just the literal level of things.

At one point, toward the end, Stephen had organized, because of some of the tensions, a hoʻoponopono session led by one of the Hawaiian participants. I had never sat through one of those before. I thought it was a great way to keep everyone feeling like we were in it together, that over-all, we could still talk to each other and work together. I thought it helped.

EC: I met other people that I didn’t know well like Ozzie Bushnell. I had read Kaʻaʻawa. It was earlier called The Valley of Love and Delight in its subtitle, as a hook to the reader, so at first, I had my doubts about it. But Ozzie was famous among certain people. Teacher groups, when they’d have their annual union conference, he would talk about how we needed to support local writers more. He was one of the early models for that, which I didn’t know, and he was this older guy and also, he was this microbiology professor at UH. So, he was a very qualified, intelligent person, writing novels about the olden days in Hawai‘i, already giving talks to local teachers. A little bit of Pidgin here and there and a mainland publisher. Wow!

So, he was an important role model, and he was talking about needing to have more focus on local writers, or rather that local writers needed to write more so some outsider like Michener wouldn’t be taken as the writer from our place. His famous complaint was “We’re old up here,” and he’s talking about himself and John Holt, and a few other people on a panel, and “You’re looking at us as part of your tradition, and we all got gray hair up here,” and “Where’s the people following in our steps?” He was saying there should be some younger middle-aged people already publishing, not to mention the younger writers, and we don’t see them coming up. And that if we, local people, did not write our stories, they would be written by outsiders, and that would be a sad thing. He was like that.

We got to know [Ozzie] a little and John Holt. Got to know Holt and his press, trying to focus on the Hawaiian part of his ancestry and what he had done with “On Being Hawaiian.” That was important. I don’t know that he was actually that well known yet for that kind of thing, but it was coming with the Hawaiian Renaissance developing, then at Talk Story, him being seen as more of a literary person. People went back and looked at his works. Also, he had his own press, Topgallant. I liked how he said that we’re all chop suey and should find ways to work together rather than against each other. Did I already mention that we felt these role models were so important that we followed up with another weeklong conference at the Hawai‘i State Capitol, Writers of Hawai‘i, featuring just Bushnell, Holt, Kingston, Murayama, and Aldyth Morris who wrote Damien?

I want to add that I also remember meeting or learning about some great Asian American writers: Ben Santos, NVM Gonzalez, Wakako Yamauchi, Hisaye Yamamoto, Toshio Mori, Momoko Iko, Jessica Hagedorn, Garrett Hongo, Laureen Mar, and of course the Aiiieeeee! boys who attended: Lawson Inada, Shawn Wong, Jeffrey Paul Chan. Just talking with them we could see how much we shared in common. They were generous, fun, and welcoming us to join a larger national movement, helping us get established and nationally recognized over the years. We made lifelong friends there.

EC: So those are some of the main things I remember. Then of course, we used Talk Story to kick off Bamboo Ridge. That was Darrell’s idea. He felt that it would be a great place to get access to our audience and get some publicity out there, that we were planning to start a local literary magazine. The Talk Story audience would be the people that would sign up and be subscribers, not to mention writers and poets that we would want to publish. His idea was we would have a product to use as sort of a representation of the kind of things we wanted to publish. So, his idea was to take my master’s thesis and publish that, so we did that chapbook of mine, Ten Thousand Wishes, and we passed out flyers, and I think we were asking for $5 for four quarterlies, for a year. We did get a bunch of feedback. Enough to feel like we could keep going.

Darrell and I had known each other for a long while. I had seen his writing. We knew about Hawai‘i Review’s antecedents, Hawaii Literary Review and Kapa before it. We knew what it was like to start a magazine. We’d seen different people try. I guess we thought we could do something as good, if not better, and it was really the first time that a magazine here would have more of a local focus, especially when you combine that with the Asian-American focus of the large Asian ethnic component to our local population. [Note: Our mission statement focuses on a Hawai‘i literature and arts, not Asian American. We see it as many mainland Asian Americans being attracted to our community of writers, not as us trying to become part of theirs. We have overlapping cultures and political concerns. -EC] We actually connected with a certain core group of local writers and a local audience and with the ethnic movements on the mainland. The mainland focus moved us away from a strictly local focus to something where locals had to simply be the best in what they were doing, trying to get more recognition with a mainland audience when topics and concerns were shared and overlapped. That was part of why it made sense to link up with the mainland Asian American community. It was an expansion of local literature toward something ethnic or what was called minority American, not simply toward mainstream American poetry and fiction of the time.

Also, we knew that people were mimeographing Darrell’s stories, especially teachers. The stories were popular, and he’d started getting them out there from before Talk Story, so we knew there was an audience for them, and Bamboo Ridge.

EC: Before Talk Story, we’d seen a lot of small poetry magazines. That was what we did, and being part of the national Poets in the Schools, we/Hawai‘i PITS would get these sometimes crudely made magazines from the fifty states showing us what they were doing with their poets’ and their students’ work. And there was this artistic explosion going on out there, where there was a lot of self-publishing and other questions about who had the rights to your poem, and if you published with a big magazine, should they own the rights. Why would they own the rights? And that’s how it was, and there was a movement away from that. To me, it relates to the Free Speech Movement, all different versions of free speech.

DCC: Taking control of your work and your art, and that was what was happening?

EC: Exactly. I also remember I used to go to the library all the time to try to get the latest poetry books for free, you know, being a poor poet. So, I used to go to the main branch because they had the shelves where you could see a lot of them, if not at UH. I remember going into that room. You go in the front, and then off to the left, and then the dark low-ceilinged area. I remember standing there, going over the shelves and looking for a new name or a new book that I hadn’t seen yet. Toward the end of my graduate career, having read most of them [the poetry shelves are not that much -EC] or having looked at books I didn’t want to read further, and then thinking about how there’s no book there that really speaks to me directly, is not really about Hawai‘i, or somebody like me growing up here. And I remember having that moment, and I’m not really sure why or what context it was, or how close it was to Talk Story, or if it was related to HLAC controversy. All I remember is standing there and looking at the books and thinking, I need to have some books that aren’t there [that speak to my experience], and I wanted to read writing that was more like ours, and that’s part of why we did what we did. That was the thing people did, and we did it.

EC: In the beginning, not long after we started there was an article in the Star-Bulletin. Someone interviewed us and what we were trying to do, and all these same things we were being asked, like how we started and our purpose, and the way the article started was something about how Darrell and I used to hang out together, and one night, we were “commiserating over our noodles,” and that struck both of us as not exactly what we had said, but it’s funny. Maybe Darrell can tell you more about that, how true that is, but I don’t remember it exactly that way.

I do remember something that became like a story when people would ask us how we started. We had different approaches to making a magazine. Darrell had done his own book for his New College undergraduate project. He wrote the book, then he made the book, bound it together, and did the artwork. So, you know, he had this art background coming into it, and he would say, “It has to feel good in your hands. You want people to pick it up and feel good when they pick it up, feel good in their hands.” And he would put his two hands together like he’s in church or something. I, on the other hand, with my background with poetry rags like I was telling you, like just dozens of them on the racks and people walking around the streets with these staple-bound Xerox things, cheap, just trying to sell a poetry book. My approach was it can be inexpensive, but it has to be regular and often, because we have to establish that we’re serious about getting this out. We’re going to come out on time so people can count on us, and it’ll be fairly often so people expect that it will be there [into the future]. That’s how to establish a literature, a tradition. They’ll need to write more often and keep working on their material, and keep sending it to us, and not have to wait a year or two for some publication to come out. What a laugh that is now. That was the story of how Darrell wanted it to look good and pay for that expensive paper and get good artwork and eventually not have it just staple bound, which actually I do agree with now.

It does look lots better, more professional, to be perfect bound. We had some differences in the beginning, but that’s just minor compared to how we focused together on developing a local literature.

DCC: Did you folks have any differences in what you wanted to publish?

EC: I don’t think we had that many major differences. I don’t think we had very many arguments. We always had three piles after we would read material for an issue. The ones that we liked, the ones that we didn’t like, and the ones that were maybes, and we had a lot of overlap. Then when we discussed the maybes, that usually went fairly quickly. For some reason that wasn’t a big problem. It was just happenstance, I guess. Just luck. He went to UH Fiction workshops. I don’t know that he ever took more than undergraduate poetry and creative writing and fiction classes, where they had that combined class that may have been combined with playwriting. And I never took the fiction courses though I may have sat in on one or two for different reasons. It’s kind of odd, but you spend a lot of nights just talking, playing cards, drinking beer, shooting pool, just talking. Going to local music concerts, talking about the lyrics, talking about what was going on with the Hawaiian Renaissance, the politics of urban development. You get to know each other pretty well.

DCC: So, what typically made a “yes” and what made a “no” in those early days?

EC: That’s always been hard to define. We were looking for good writing that helped to advance the idea of good local literature. So, we did put some kind of a priority on it being about local characters, voices, themes, topics, that kind of thing. But at the same time, we didn’t rule out anything else. It was always good writing. Just some guy from Missouri who we liked the poems, and that didn’t happen a lot, but it did happen. We published a lot of people that we never heard of, and some had never been here or lived here. Somebody told us once that we listed ourselves in those big, fat, creative writing publishing directories, and people would go through those, and because it says you pay, even just $10, people are going to send you poems because a lot of magazines would only pay with a copy or a subscription.

Darrell and I had English classes together through high school, where we got some basics of analyzing fiction, poetry. We had a really good English teacher, Miss Yamada. Later, we spent a lot of time talking about lyrics related to poetry. We’d listen to records over and over. We had a lot of agreement on those things. So, there was some kind of unstated or unformed idea of what we thought was good work. It had to do with basic ideas of good writing, development of character, theme, imagery, metaphors, certain amount of unity in it, impact, and all of it being done in a way that’s new, original work. And if all of that also had a local focus even better. I would say it’s a fairly conventional idea of good, original creative writing plus this local thematic component. To me, Darrell’s stories were really good examples to follow.

DCC: And what were those first couple of years like, positives, negatives, challenges? Did you feel like, whoa, what’s happening, or was it euphoria those first couple of years?

EC: Well, it was not euphoria all the time. In terms of whether it was feasible or not, together we figured we knew around forty or fifty writers from classes and our professors and HLAC and that was a good enough base to get them to submit work and maybe to subscribe. We thought that there were enough people writing good literature that would be interesting to read, and then people would start buying that and it would take off from there. And the funny thing was, hardly any of the subscribers were ever the writers. I should have known because being a poor poet I never subscribed to things. So, we had to really focus our PR on educators, professors, teachers, to the librarians’ group and the teachers’ union conferences, and the DOE.

I had a little bit of a head start on that because I was already doing PR for Poets in the Schools. Poetry is not something that people like generally. A large majority of teachers said outright that they didn’t like poetry and they didn’t want to teach poetry. They were glad that Poets in the Schools would come in, so they wouldn’t have to do it because it’s required or was required in the DOE’s Goals and Objectives. So, from early on, I had this obstacle as the Poets in the Schools coordinator and would be going to all these district meetings, principal meetings, DOE meetings, librarians’ meetings, and conferences, so I just added the Bamboo Ridge component to it.

It was fun in the early years, just to be given the chance to meet and talk with all these people. But it was only fun for so long. After a while, it’s just like, why am I having to convince these people of this thing? They’re educators. They should know about local literature. It’s not just poetry and how to teach poetry if it’s required of them. After a while, that is a challenge. In the beginning, you’re just happy to get an audience. Luckily, there were always some who were genuinely interested, and we ended up with a lot of support from the DOE.

Of course, just making the books was a challenge, and that’s where Darrell was ahead of the game because he knew how to make a book. From the beginning, we had friends helping us, giving us discounts because of Darrell’s connections, and he also had the equipment for us to take the layout boards home. In those days, you pasted pages, glued them to these boards, and took the boards to the printers, and you’d have to proofread all the pages and cut out sections that were mistakes. You’d have to go to the typesetter and get sentences typed out, cut them out and then make them fit into the print on the board. Just putting a comma in place, you know? [laughs] After a while you wonder, do you really want that comma there? Get my X-Acto knife and just cut out this little space here? So, that was fun actually. I liked doing that. More time to talk to Darrell. Stay up all night.

Then there were the basics of running a non-profit. At first, that was something that I didn’t know much about. I was kind of familiar with that because of HLAC, because Poets in the Schools, when you write a grant it has to be official, you have to pass the IRS requirements, all that paperwork, make a final report, keep a checkbook and financial records. And Darrell had formed his little publishing group Sun. We started with Sun with my book, but right away we realized we needed to have official IRS non-profit status to write grants that were acceptable to funding agencies. There was that kind of stuff, and we had to get a board of directors together. Friends, a spouse. Access, keeping the books, all that kind of nitty-gritty stuff was challenging. That’s why it was really helpful when Wing Tek volunteered to help us with that.

DCC: How long before Wing Tek got involved?

EC: Not sure. It might be two years.’78 was Talk Story. We had just met Wing Tek. ’79 there was Talk Story Big Island and they did another mini Talk Story conference there with Big Island writers because they had found some people on the Big Island like the Golden Rain society, at the time, the oldest haiku society in the world. There was also Steve and Arnold were working on a bibliography of all of the published ethnically Asian American writers in Hawaiʻi: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino. A lot of them were student writers at UH. They were writing and they were published, starting from around 1920. That was part of establishing our literary tradition. Wing was around for all that.

Then, in 1980, I became HLAC president. That means the year before, Frank Chin came and spent a month at Wing’s house. Basically, he had a workshop in Wing’s living room every night. So, we [Wing and I -EC] had gotten together on projects and gotten closer since Talk Story. But as for Wing becoming an official staff member of Bamboo Ridge—I can’t remember that far back. It just seems like he was always there after Talk Story.

DCC: Who else do you remember? Who else was involved during those first couple of years besides you, Darrell, and Wing?

EC: In the beginning, it was mostly me, Darrell, Jody Manabe. She was on our board. Wing was probably not until a couple of years later. Gail Harada, Vinnie Terada. Not sure.

DCC: Was Marie involved?

EC: Yes, Marie was involved, but at first more with Talk Story and Stephen and Arnold, and Darrell and I and Bamboo Ridge were kind of doing our own things separately. We were not working together on everything, like when Steve did the Big Island conference, I don’t remember going. We helped to publish the anthology from the conference. We had some connection. We were all young, too, still in grad school or maybe just coming out and starting our publishing careers, jobs. I was figuring out how I was going to be a writer. I was the only one really trying to be a full-time artist/activist and Poets in the Schools activities programmer. I don’t remember a lot of other people doing that the first couple of years. I remember getting to know Gail [Harada] early on because she was also in Poets in the Schools. After 1980, after we took over HLAC, after Wing helped us with our books [bookkeeping], then Bamboo Ridge became more established and various people helped out.

But after Wing became involved, we had Study Group after 1980, we had a monthly meeting that drew in a lot of people that were the core group of local writers who we thought were good writers, so we would ask them into doing some of the work of Bamboo Ridge. Things like proofreading, mass mailing parties. And delivering mail to the post office. Production and artwork or contacting the news media. Then, after a while, Wing offered to let us meet in his office. That formalized things because before that we were just meeting at somebody’s house, Darrell’s house usually or at his office. I didn’t even have an office. So, Wing’s office became the center, and he would have the books stored in his basement in Chinatown. When the books came from the printer, they would go to his office. We used his office for mailing parties, for deliveries, or to pick up books to take to conferences we were going to. It became a big hub for everything we were doing.

Once the study group started, people like Jody Manabe and Gail Harada and then Marie Hara became more involved. Lots of meetings were at Marie’s. Stephen came once in a while, but Stephen moved after Talk Story, he was finishing his PhD on the mainland. Also, you find out that people like Steve and Arnold were not creative writers, they were more scholars and critics and so they weren’t as interested in coming to our writers’ study group. And our publication became more writer-driven rather than an academic journal that has a lot more critical articles in it. Then we had other people like Dennis Kawaharada who was important. He was one of our managing editors early on and he was important in establishing a strong Hawaiian focus to certain issues. At one point, Cathy Song was a managing editor. I always remember that because Cathy pulled her mother in and got her mother to be mail clerk, and so Cathy would take bunches of boxes of books from Wing Tek’s office to her home. And every day I would call Mrs. Song [or she would call me -EC] and she would take down the orders by hand that I had copied from my phone machine. I always had the phone machine in my house and would get all the calls from the orders and mostly from the mainland, and she would take them all down, and then she would go to Cathy Song’s and fill out the orders, and make invoices, box them up and take them down to the post office. And that’s the kind of thing, that volunteerism, that kept us going. We did have a lot of volunteer help. That’s how it kept going.

Like one memory we have is from early on when Juliet used to deliver the mail bags. We’d have a mailing party and stuff all the books in their envelopes and stick on the address labels and sort them all by zip codes, and then there were these thick heavy canvas mail bags with the metal clips that we’d fill with the bundles of books, and Juliet would lug those out to her little car and fill up the car and drive off to the main post office. She would have to lug all those bags from her car to the mass mailing window and get them processed. And you know she’s not a large person. That’s the kind of volunteerism I mean. Of course, later Juliet was instrumental on keeping BR going, being on the board and becoming editor when Darrell and I stepped down. She’s one of those really committed people, not just a wonderful poet and writer.

DCC: What was it like to see that first issue?

EC: It was amazing. I can still visualize that first issue. Even though it wasn’t made with expensive paper or binding, it felt good in my hands. We were young in those days. Everything was great. Getting anything done was great. The style of Darrell’s line drawings that we used for several issues was great. Seeing all those names in print together, to us formed a different sense of Local Literature. [Maybe I should say that the philosophy of university lit mags used to be to have professors and so-called professional poets as the featured content, and with promising students published alongside them, as if that would help them get noticed. We, obviously, did not need to have those so-called professional poets as a main feature. It was almost reversed. In issue one we explicitly asked for local topics. -EC] Also, according to my copy of issue number one, we were already getting funding support from the State Foundation. We were getting legitimized for going local.

Having your own magazine, having your own press, getting it started, getting it off the ground, that’s always a big deal. Of course, then you have to get it out there. Then comes all the leg work, and aside from all the educational contacts that I already had, I also drove around the island to do my different one-week residencies for Poets in the Schools (I eventually visited every school in the state, many more than once), so I also stopped at all the little bookstores around the island. There weren’t that many, but there were a lot more back then than now, before computers. People used to have, like, used records shops, and then they’d have magazines and books on the side. I would go to all the new and used book stores, or magazine shops, or Longs, from Mōʻiliʻili to Haleʻiwa, and try to get them to carry it. I remember at one point, I got us into several Longs, and I thought, “Wow! We made it big.”

And Darrell, with his art background and his silkscreen background, he made the logo for the Bamboo Ridge cover. Then he made the logo for the Bamboo Ridge cover. And he made a big [silk] screen of it, and I was driving in an old, used white Valiant, and he silkscreened it in deep blue on the doors of my car. On both sides of the car. So, for a few years I was driving around the island with this Bamboo Ridge car. And he silkscreened some t-shirts. So, we had the t-shirts, the car, and I had the magazine issues, and that was my job, part of the time. It was fun. It was work though there were not a lot of financial reward in doing all this. That’s what we learned fairly soon. After a while, when you have to keep asking people to volunteer time to do whatever it is you want them to do, you think we really should pay them. You’re gonna make some money and you have to start thinking of budgets and more grants and higher prices, and better cuts from bookstores or Booklines or whomever. And briefly, you’re not thinking about creative writing, you’re not thinking about poetry, you’re only thinking about all the things that you have to do to sell it. That can be disturbing. That’s a challenge.

DCC: Did you think about giving it up at any point during that those first couple of years?

EC: Oh, yeah, all the time. I became known for that, like it’s been great, but enough already. Even Wing Tek told us at one point, it doesn’t pencil out. It doesn’t pencil out when, every time you sell an issue, you’re losing three dollars. You’re putting money into it way more than you’re getting out of it, and so you have to be happy doing it to lose money because you just want to get it out there. You love it that much that you’re going to keep doing it. I’m pretty sure we were getting paid less than students at the Hawai‘i Review.

And everybody else had a regular job and a life. This was my entire life. I lived in a little one-room studio for like ten years. It was a struggle, so there were times when I said, you know, I got to move on, especially after I graduated and stopped living at home, and I had to pay for my own place. I can’t be doing all of this kind of organizational work and teaching and kids at the same time. It didn’t pencil out, and it didn’t make money, but on the other hand, I did have contact with all those educational communities. There were many teachers, a lot of local teachers, who related to it. At that time, there was the Pidgin controversy in the schools, and the Board of Education even took it up and talked about what kind of policy we need to have. Whether you could speak Pidgin in school or not as a teacher in class to local students. And one of the Poets in the Schools at the time, Diane Hina Kahanu, she actually testified because she felt very strongly about the need for it, especially in places like where she lived in Wai‘anae. When teachers or administrators saw that, when they saw Darrell’s stories, it resonated with many of them. Some felt good about, hey, there’s this stuff that’s literature, that’s being used in the Cal State system, in the University of California system in their Ethnic Studies classes. It’s being recognized in different places in the country, so why not at home? [This was one of the ways the Asian American movement helped us: national recognition. -EC]

And it was gradually, but more slowly, getting accepted at UH too. I think we actually did have to wait for some of the older English Department faculty to move on, figuratively and literally, but there were people who were already supportive, and we had to cultivate those, and they had to keep supporting us, and more of the younger ones had to come in, and some of the older ones had to leave before we got more traction there. I don’t know if you know the story about the Ethnic Studies Department being called a project, the Ethnic Studies project. This was already kind of a big deal when I was a VISTA community organizer, along with Ethnic Studies instructors and students. The UH wouldn’t let it be called a department because that would mean much more of an established kind of funding and recognition of something that many people at the time didn’t want to recognize. There was a plantation mentality again. Credit Franklin Odo for hanging in there and fighting for it all those early years.

There was quite a bit of stuff happening at the DOE. When I was in the Poets in the Schools program, it was partially/largely funded by the DOE, and I taught a lot of teacher credit courses or teacher workshops in the schools or district workshops, or those statewide union conferences, and I and other local writers began to make appearances at those and bring our books. I don’t know how the system is anymore, but it used to be that you needed these DOE B credits or UH Continuing Ed. A credits to get a pay raise. So that helped. I was teaching B credit or UH Continuing Ed courses all the time, every summer for years, and a lot of that would be around Local Literature and Bamboo Ridge. I mean not completely, some of it was just PITS creative writing strategies. So there was a lot of that in the educational system, system-wide, all the islands. Gail Harada did a lot of that too, and eventually wrote a guidebook for the DOE.

Then there was the slower acceptance at the university level, Chaminade, the community colleges, Windward, Leeward, Honolulu Community College. It’s daunting, it’s a challenge, it’s a lot of work, a lot of non-poetry effort, and a lot of everything else logistically, but when you get rewarded, that can be really exciting. As Darrell said, we were trying to change the world, and we could see that little by little we were making changes. It was working. That spirit of getting the establishment to be more relevant to local culture was kind of working, at least a little bit, so we kept going, and it kept working more.

We still struggled to get local writers to subscribe. We got more teachers to subscribe. Just readers, not writers. People that were interested in something that they had not seen published a lot before, Pidgin, but maybe heard about. Maybe it was popular because of Pidgin in local comedy, like K.K. Kaumanua or Lucky Luck on the radio in the morning, or J. Akuhead Pupule, or Hal Lewis. Then there was Booga Booga. Local comedy helped to establish the idea that Pidgin could be written down and performed, and maybe even have a serious theme. And before Milton Murayama, we’d heard of Joe Hadley. He was big with us. chaloookyu eensai. That composition book written in that scrawl of his. Just all in Pidgin and with a small plastic record so you could hear him. That Kaua‘i Pidgin, so strong when he performed.

DCC: What drew you to that when you saw it? Did he submit it like that in the composition or was it handwritten?

EC: We didn’t publish his original book, though we did publish some of his later work. Joe Hadley is a force unto himself. He was an art major, and as soon as you go into Wai‘anae, towards the end, right around where the high school is, there’s some sculptures that are body casts. He used to do body casts and face casts. I think he was already kind of known for that and then he did this book that I think the linguistics people caught onto. There was this linguistics professor, Elizabeth Carr at UH. She wrote a book, Da Kine Talk, which impressed me, just that a recognized linguistics professor published a book with that title. And, another linguistics professor, Michael Forman, he was a big supporter of Joe Hadley. They did this thing when Darrell and I were still in college. It was the composition book, and we had never heard of him, and it had this little green floppy record in the back, in a pocket inside the back cover, that you played on a record player.

And you heard this guy recite, “Chaloookyu Eensai.” I mean it just blew our minds, like when we read Milton Murayama for the first time. So, I’m just saying, there are these things that turn people on when they hear it. Teachers liked it. Even some principals and administrators could relate to it. Then the people in curriculum, who were more in touch with ethnic trends on the mainland, they started getting into it and realizing that there were Ethnic Studies majors and courses that were coming out. Ethnic heritage was being recognized as important, multiculturalism as opposed to one mainstream American culture. So, they would see things like Joe’s Pidgin book, try to incorporate that into their curriculum. Joe Hadley. He’s not Asian or Hawaiian. He’s haole I think from Kaua‘i. But he was local culture, not haole culture. He spoke to us.

There was that going on. Little successes and we were rewarded. One of those successes was we started getting subscriptions and orders for classes on the mainland. I think for years most of our subscriber list was not local, not in Hawai‘i, it was from the mainland, and that started happening after a couple of years and into the 80s. A lot of California or West Coast college and university orders. Then there was the next level, which was that once they started assigning our books with other books, they would start inviting us to come read, too. And a lot of these were like real invitations, with a paid trip and a small fee for the writer, and a stay in a hotel. Like what we had hoped for with HLAC and Major Writers vs Local Writers committees, and different fee schedules. That was like big time to us, going to San Francisco State, San Jose State, Washington State, Wisconsin. After a while, Harvard and Michigan. As years went by, that kept going, and places across the country and also foreign people in foreign countries started paying attention. I would get calls on my phone machine from all over. A lot of it is graduate students. But why would someone in Germany want to do a thesis on Pidgin? It’s amazing to me.

At one point, much later on, somebody even asked me to publish in the Kyiv Journal [Vsesvit -Ed.], and my poems are in Ukraine. Mind blowing. When Lois came along, there was other stuff in different places in France, Holland. Then, with other BR writers making trips to Japan, China, Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, Philippines. As years went by, we started getting placement and regular appearances in these different schools, maybe conferences at these places, Asian American conference, the Smithsonian Institute. So, when you ask me about how challenging it was back then, sorry, I tend to jump ahead because I like to remember that there were many successes that followed. We worked hard enough. We were lucky. Things really panned out, for quite a number of years.

DCC: Is it the fact that it just didn’t pencil out the reason you folks transitioned away from a quarterly?

EC: For me, that was a big thing. It became easier timewise and maybe financially too to have a special issue, or a double issue, and spend a little less time doing it. I’m actually not sure about the cost because sometimes we had like three times as many pages as we would normally have. Paper costs, I don’t know about that, but maybe the setup, printing costs, that kind of thing we saved money on. Like anything you buy in jumbo size is supposed to be cheaper. Also, I think of the time, especially two issues versus four a year. Four is a lot of set up time. Advertising, getting all the stuff, reading through all the bags of mail, getting it typeset and proofed. Then there’s all the PR work, trying to arrange readings to promote the new issue. And you have to be working on the next issue before you’re done with this one, so that became very difficult, especially if it’s not totally professional, when we’re semi-professional, and we have a lot of volunteer help, it’s hard to keep a frequency schedule like that. Lots of people in Hawai‘i have a second job, but usually you make money doing it.

Of course, from early on, we both wanted to do a fiction issue but not just fiction. It’s excerpts from novels, so that could be a big double issue. That was one of our earlier special issues [Issue #2: Excerpts from Unpublished Novels -Ed.]. We did a playwright’s issue [Issue #10: Special Drama Issue -Ed.]. Then we started publishing people’s collections, like Darrell’s book. I’ve always been a big Darrell supporter, and why doesn’t he have a book, especially if people are going to be mimeographing him out of an issue and giving free handouts to students. He should just have the whole book. We knew teachers would love it. Just seemed like the right thing to do. But there was that idea that there were other people that we wanted to publish, and as time went by, all these other people or topics that we wanted to cover, like excerpts from novels or plays, or Intersecting Circles, Marie and Nora Keller’s hapa issue, the Pākē issue [Issue #42/43: Pake: Writings by Chinese in Hawaii -Ed.], the George Helm issue [Ho‘i Ho‘i Hou: A Tribute to George Helm & Kimo Mitchell -Ed.], whatever.

DCC: So, circling back, it seems like the transition to special issues was writer driven. You folks were seeing this work, and you wanted to publish those things and give them a platform?

EC: Yeah, I mean the idea was, we were publishing people that wouldn’t normally get publication elsewhere, meaning New York or on the mainland, so we were always writer driven at some level. Local writer driven. Around that time, a friend of Darrell’s suggested that he go to this conference where agents were going to be doing a panel, and afterward you could take your manuscript and show it to someone, and they could look it over. One of those big New York houses looked it over and gave that classic thing, “It’s good but it’s not for our audience.” They’re not going to be able to get this and so we can’t publish it. So, there’s an idea that there are a lot of people who are writing things that, again, it’s not gonna pencil out but we think it’s good. You have to add that part to it. We think it’s good, and we think it’s good for local literature in particular, which helps local culture overall, going back to our semi-political cultural roots for why there’s this activism in the first place. So yeah, we wanted to get lots of things done. Writer driven.

From the beginning, we also tried to make it writer focused in terms of the copyright. The thing about saying oh, rights revert to the author, which became more and more popular from the ’70s on. We started having all subsequent rights revert back to the author before others did that.

DCC: Why is issue #2 so much larger than issue #1?

EC: Maybe we were just experimenting back (with the dimensions of the publication). That’s the excerpt from novels or fiction issue. So that was another thing about trying to establish that idea of our tradition, that we were a legitimate tradition of literature. And there are these people that have been writing all along, but they just couldn’t get it published. Like the excerpt from Toshi’s “A Letter to Hisae” from Born of the Pacific. Thirty years before we had started. That was a prime example and a really good one about Japanese American identity before and during the war. And Toshi, he had these big artwork things on campus during the ’70s, these huge sculptures like towers. He’d take this scrap, this junk, and put it all together and just make this tower, higher and higher. People thought he was just this crazy guy on campus. He looked like a homeless guy. I mean really scruffy looking guy. For some reason the University let him build this tower, although at one time I know they moved it across from Bachman Hall to the UH Lab school side to get it off campus. Then you find out that this guy was writing about a Japanese Nisei growing up on the plantation on Big Island and loving American and English literature and novels, and Dickens, but then having this conflict because of his Japanese identity. Stuff like that, if we had that growing up in high school, Wow! That would have a totally different impact on us than just reading Hemingway, which is great, but to have this other perspective, I mean, why not? So yeah, there was stuff we wanted to get out. And also because it was going to be fiction and excerpts from novels, it might be longer.

I think we were trying to keep to that forty-eight pages or whatever, when they fold the big sheets of paper before they cut them with the printers. Maybe we were trying to save on paper costs, but we didn’t really go back to that. It was obviously just an experiment. I know some people like just to have them 6✕9, all the same size, so they all look good on the bookshelf. It’s hard to put something large if your shelf only fits this size.

DCC: Who did the line drawing, was that Darrell?

EC: Yeah, I think they were tracings of photographs he took, I like that style. He’s got similar pictures inside of the authors, too.