Oral History Project

Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project
Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Interview of Lois-Ann Yamanaka (LAY), conducted by Gail Kuroda (GK) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project via Zoom, on December 12, 2023. Lois-Ann speaks about her education, her teaching, the influences on her writing, AAAS awards controversies, Na‘au, and returning to writing. Lois-Ann also recalls Eric Chock, Darrell H. Y. Lum, Wing Tek Lum, Faye Kicknosway (a.k.a. Morgan Blair), Albert Saijo, and others.

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Lois-Ann Yamanaka (LAY) on December 12, 2023. The interview took place via Zoom, and was conducted by Gail Kuroda (GK) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. This interview is one session in length.

Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Gail Kuroda have reviewed the transcript and made their corrections and emendations. This transcript has been 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.

GK: Okay, so today is December 12, 2023. My name is Gail Kuroda, and I am interviewing Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Alright, one of the first questions that comes up in local conversations is: what school did you go to?

LAY: Okay. My journey starts at Waiākea Elementary School. Fourth grade, my dad was reassigned to Konawaena El., so I lived in Kona. And then he was assigned to Pāhala Elementary and Ka‘ū High School. And then we moved to Hilo. So I went to Waiākea Intermediate and Hilo High School.

GK: Oh, okay. Good. And your father was in the D-O-E as a teacher?

LAY: My father was an administrator in the D-O-E. And my mother was a teacher. But my father was a real Renaissance man. Thirteen kids off of the Kīpū Sugar Plantation. And he got a bachelor’s from University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. And then he got a master’s degree from Michigan State University. He was also a taxidermist. He was a photographer. He was a historian. He was a stone carver. He painted. He was a musician. He wrote a book called Kauai in My Heart. And also authored four-hundred short stories—so, kind of my idol, you know, like he traveled around the world three times—by himself. So when he took an early retirement, he moved to Japan. And he worked in Fukuoka as an English teacher. But all he had to do was read USA Today in English to his class.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And then he would save the money to plot how he’s gonna spend it in the places in the world he wanted to see. So he was abroad for about three years. He was a really incredible man.

GK: Wow, that’s awesome. And I guess, going on to the next question, what kinds of literature were you exposed to in your childhood?

LAY: You know, it’s really kind of sad for me because there weren’t many books about Hawai‘i and Hilo and the only book that I recall that really, really spoke to me was Hawaiian Heart by the Reverend Ruth Tabrah. And it was retitled Emily’s Hawaii.

She also wrote a book called The Red Shark. And it was about a boy in a plantation town. I totally saw myself, you know, for the first time in literature, but I was a slow reader. So my mother thought it was because of an ear injury that I gave myself when I was two years old. I poked my ear with the bobby pin—

GK: Oh!

LAY: —and then I damaged my eardrum. So she always made me sit in the front row in elementary school. She would go tell the teacher on the first day that I had a hearing problem, and then when I couldn’t read, she wanted me tested for special ed. [Laughs.]

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: But, so in second grade, the book called The Green Caterpillar?

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: I read that but nothing where I saw myself. Like Darrell Lum once told, until you see yourself in literature, you don’t exist.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY; It really hit me. Hard. You know, like the power of words and representation. And it brought about for me the acknowledgement of the sound of memory.

So, it also spoke to how we felt very déclassé speaking Pidgin. And how our mainland Japanese counterparts would look down on us because we spoke funny kind Pidgin.

And Japanese nationals kind of gave us the snub too, but my parents spoke minimal Meiji-era Japanese. A lot of the terms and traditions, Japanese nationals don’t use those words anymore, like the word for “iron” [“sadiron” –Ed.] in Meiji is that iron that you put on the hard hot coals, you know what I mean? But that’s not the word today, we get the cordless kind. That’s not what they call it. So my father felt very embarrassed to speak Japanese during his three-year tenure in Japan and was very self conscious.

GK: And then I guess that kind of segues to when was the first time you felt you connected to something you read?

LAY: Yeah.

GK: And what kind of literature did you first feel connected to? What was it like—poetry or was it prose?

LAY: I wanted to, I read all those Y-A books? And I read The Outsiders and The Pigman and all of the Judy Blumes. And they were good reads, but didn’t really connect because there wasn’t a bridge for me for the vicarious kind of understanding of those works. And I also read a lot of books that were published by Petroglyph Press in Hilo.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: So they were legends of Hilo and legends of Hawai‘i. And I could buy them at the Book Gallery, which was a little bookstore in Kaiko‘o Mall. Those were the books I read.

The press was on the corner of Kino‘ole and Haili Street. And I said to myself that one day I’m gonna do a book with them. So lately, because I’ve been doing a lot of work involving that time in my life, I contacted them. And I said, “Hey, how about a project?” But David Reed, the original publisher with his wife Christine, just passed away. Such an important part of my life.

GK: And when did you first start writing stories or poems?

LAY: I wrote—in fourth grade, I remember I started a book, a story. It was set in Chicago. And I’d never been to Chicago.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And my character was white, but then when it came to name the dog, I wanted to name the dog “Hoku,” but then I thought that haoles don’t name their dogs “Hoku” in Chicago.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And then I just gave up. I just thought, you know, for lack of that very phenomena that Darrell talks about: until you see yourself in literature, you don’t exist. You don’t see yourself in pop culture. You don’t see your families or hear the voices of people in your neighborhood.

You don’t see yourself on television. There were depictions of us, but they were not us. They were what somebody thought we were. The view came from the outside in, but it needed to come from the inside out.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And so what happened was what Eric Chock was doing, when I first started teaching English—I was at Kalākaua Intermediate at that time. And our department head was Debbie Ziemke. And she was just so visionary. She spent a large portion of our annual budget on Poets-in-the-Schools. So Eric would come and teach my kids and he would have like a six-week residency.

And then, my students were writing the most incredible poems. They were heartbreaking. They were tender. They were funny. They were, they made me laugh, they made me cry. And so I realized that good poetry gives you a physical reaction.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: So, your body should react to it, or good writing. Like your body gives you chicken skin [goosebumps –Ed.] from your head to your toes. You get chicken skin on your arms. You laugh out loud. You cry. You know what I mean? These things are all inherent, I think, in the way that the kids were writing. And I said to myself—this is 1987—they only twelve years old and I never read anything like this. I have a master’s degree, and I cannot do this. Then I said, yes, I can. And so I went back to the university at twenty-seven.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: Okay. So I went back to the university and I met—and I hadn’t had a good time there, you know, when I was an undergrad because of my Pidgin. And even if I spoke standard English, the inflections in my standard English sound Pidgin. I mean, it sounds like the Hawaiian language. So I’m speaking standard English, but it sounds like Pidgin.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: I decided that I didn’t want anybody to know that I was stupid. So I never asked one question in all my undergraduate years. Unless I approached the professor or I met in an office appointment.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: Everybody that was from outer islands was living in the dorms. So we all knew which professors were, you know what I mean, were friendly to, or were accepting of local kids.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: So, everybody was saying, take John Heckathorn, take John Heckathorn. And I did. He was amazing. He used to smoke cigarettes in class—you know that time you could smoke, right? He used to put his feet up on the desk, and I wrote a poem, but I hadn’t—this was when I was like, nineteen or twenty—and I wrote about the old men that used to sit under the banyan tree near the sugar mill.

And behind, Ka‘ū Sugar Mill, behind that was the manager’s—I don’t want to say “mansion”—the manager’s home. Beautiful home, beautiful landscaping. But the Filipino old men used to sit under the shade of the banyan tree on wooden crates and talk story. It was like a daily thing, we’d see them when we passed the camp.

So I wrote about that. And then he talked to me about that. Then I said, “Oh, thank you,” you know, but I didn’t feel very comfortable. But after the semester ended—he was the only one of my only undergraduate teachers in the whole university system who I wanted to thank in person. But I never have money, yeah? So I went down to Jr Lou & T and I bought a little vase with a single rose with baby’s breath.

And I went to Heckathorn’s office. Then I thanked him because he really understood that I had a lot more to say but I wasn’t saying it. He said to me, sometimes it’s okay to go back there and revisit times that were not so poetic in any way, but they were poetry. That was poetry.

And then, we became good friends. When he became the editor at Honolulu Magazine, we’d have lunch, or I talk to him, I’d see him often. So when he died, it was like—he was young. It was so very heartbreaking and we lost a treasure. But he was my teacher.

So. Eric. Was teaching my students through artists—it was called Poets-in-the-Schools. The sad thing about that was that the D-O-E became his position did not provide health benefits or any kind of job security or—and it was just a really, really beautiful, beautiful way for our department to spend our money. But he wasn’t receiving any kind of decency from the Department of Education.

He would just read a poem to my students, like his poem called “Strawberries” and it says, “Leave me alone I’m just an ordinary man who wants to eat strawberries.” He told them: fold your paper in half, hot dog–style, and open it, and then write down the first column, and then turn it over. When you get stuck, you repeat the phrase.

And they wrote the most incredible, incredible poems! “Leave me alone. I’m just a typical Samoan. Just because I am special ed. no mean I stupid, I’m not stupid, I’m just an ordinary Samoan boy who wants,” I mean—he just went, “no call me pineapple and no call me,” you know, was just so full of this kind of rage and shame, and he was actually—I saw him, I saw him as an adult.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And he wasn’t in special ed., but he thought he was. He was in E-H, which was the acronym for Emotionally Handicapped.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: So, you know, I guess that’s where the kids with A-D-H-D, and what you call Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and you know, all those kinds of students who need help now qualify for other programs that are suited for them.

Later on in life, I saw him at a pet store and I said, “[Redacted]?” And he said, “Oh, Ms. Yamanaka.” We were talking and he was doing good and he had a good job. And I said, “[Redacted] Eh, I can tell you something?” He said, “What?” I said, “You know, you wrote that poem, yeah? A long time ago, when you was thirteen, about being in special ed.?”

I said, “I don’t think you knew that you weren’t really in special ed. It was a program called E-H you know, Emotional Handicapped, because you were so naughty! And rotten. And nobody could handle you. So, that’s why you were there, not because you were special needs.” But he shocked me when he said that he works with special needs kids now. I mean, that’s what he was doing.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: That’s kind of amazing that it came full circle that way. And he said, “You know, I didn’t know that.” I said, “Well, now you know, right?” I said, “I hope that helps because you came from a chief’s family, you know, your kids are—”

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: I forget what they call them—ali‘i? But your lineages are chiefs’ lineages and—and you weren’t special needs.

He reaffirmed my decision to go back to school, and the class I took was English 400: Form and Theory of Poetry. She was, at that time, Faye Kicknosway, now she is Morgan Blair.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And she started the class by reading Allen Ginsburg’s Howl.

GK: Oh.

LAY: I was so stunned and shocked. And I sat there, I remember, like, pulling back in my chair and feeling afraid, you know? So I went up to her after class and I said, “I don’t think I’m in the right class. I don’t think I qualify for this class.” And she said—she looked up at me, but she really didn’t crack much of an expression—and she had those blue eyes—and she said, “Stick it out.” [Pause.] So I said, “Okay.”

And then what happened was she talked about our literary tree. And I had none, you know, because there weren’t any authors that I could read who influenced me, but I realized it was what Eric refers to as a “constellation of writers.” Now every book that I write there is a constellation because of Faye and because of Eric—a constellation of writers that inform the work.

Do I need structure? Do I need language? How do I do a sex scene without going into the nasty details, right? How do I do the fade out? How do I flashback? How do I, you know? And the constellation of writers for every book changed. And then, I realized that I did start having a literary tree, heritage, lineage, whatever she called it. Yeah. But I call it my literary constellation now. And that’s what I teach my students to call it, their literary constellation.

In English 400: Form and Theory of Poetry, what she did was she asked us to write a journal. And we had to read the—what do you call that? The—what do you call the kind books that they make you read in class? Assigned reading?

What she did was she asked us to write a journal. Then at the end of the semester, she just threw our journals back on our desks.And then with mine, she said, “You got good stuff in here.” Then she went on, and then the girl next to me, the big mouth, you know, the one who was constantly asking questions and showing how smart she was. She said her first words to me, “Can I see your journal?” You know what in that journal? I took Eric’s word lists. He has adjectives, nouns, and verbs.

Yeah, he makes them just pull the words using intuition. And I started the journal just doing, the vermilion sunlight spills. The splintered sunlight. Spread the splintered sunlight. Paint. I just went over and over, like, kind of, like, crazy The Shining–kind writing, but then I would extend them. I would do it over and over and over. Flip the page. Do it over and over and over. And then take the one I like best and try to extend it as long as I could.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: But I couldn’t go very far, you know, in those days because I was still wanting to be, you know, a lyric poet? And then—it was like, it was crazy. You know what I mean? I thought it was—but that’s what I wanted to do because I always felt like with free writing, that’s what they taught us in college, right? Was such a waste of my fucking time. Like you have to write non-stop.

Remember Peter Elbow writing nonstop and if you get stuck you gotta say my mind is blank, my mind is blank, my mind is blank, my mind is blank, my mind is blank until it unblanks and you can continue your train of thought? It was the most useless exercise I ever experienced. And so it made me angry.

So, journal writing for me, when I did it with my students at Na‘au, where I had a business for twenty years at a learning center—I told my students, the ones that were promising writers, you need to keep a journal like I did.

With Faye, you know, in music you play notes and you play scales?

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And then you, you practice the scales and then you practice, you know, the different keys and minors and it’s all a matter of practice, really, to get better. That’s why you know, Mr. Hershey, my band teacher in Pāhala used to tell us, take our clarinet home and annoy our parents, right? So, that’s what it is. That’s what I was doing. I was, I was playing notes letting my hand do something rather than my mind is blank, my mind is blank, or stupid journals like, today I went to Safeway. Apples were on sale. So my mother bought a pound. And that’s the highlight of my day. You know what I mean? Like, I just refused to grade things like that. So they had to do their journals the way that I did my journal. And do lines, just do lines, just play with the words, play with the words, play with the words.

And then they would come back, and then I started a curriculum where I would tell them, put noun of noun.

Okay, so I am the noun of noun. And then, a big lesson is cliches, right? That’s the first lesson, about recognizing cliches. We speak in cliches. One guy in my, in a university graduate-level class, cursed me with oral cliches.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: Oral cliches, and cursed me with cliches in my writing. I was like, Mary, go away [laughs] but, anyway, that’s the first thing I teach my students. Because when I judge contests or I look at works, I see a cliche in the first paragraph, I don’t let them pass. I going down to the end of the page, I see a second? That goes in a no-pile and the no-pile is the trash can. That’s all you get.

So I tell my students to understand that. You gotta start off and you gotta catch the reader’s attention, you know? And so, “I am the, I am a splinter of moonlight,” and then from there we do another “noun of noun,” but if it’s beautiful, I tell them, okay, now this is your poem: “I am a splinter of sunlight.” Finish the whole thought without writing a cliche.

“So I’m a splinter of light painting the waters of Makua Bay. While Auntie, while Auntie—” What her name? She go down Makua Bay every time. “While Auntie, while Auntie Suzuki barbecues chicken, and my cousins play in—my cousins Bobo and Junior—play in the shallow tide pools.” You know what I mean?

And then teach them how to line break, and stanza break, and reorder the stanzas. And kids as early as the—the real kind of precocious four-year-olds can do it—all the way to our oldest student who was 86, you know, because we had adult classes.

But it was so easy with Eric’s word list. I call it the magical word list. And I tell them you can make your own. So you want to write about such and such. You want to write about your dog. Try write down all the nouns related to the dog—proper nouns, names, places, and then the verbs. Try avoid “running” or “walking” because those are cliches. And I also teach them about near-cliches—how to avoid that writing trap.

So that’s what I did. They really got it. And they just need to know how to let it out. I would assign them work in a journal. My way.

GK: Wow.

LAY: The next semester was English 401: Poetry Workshop. Really, I wanted to be the next Cathy Song. You know, I wanted to be a lyric poet. And so in one of my poems, I’m talking about how Japanese women, they made their teeth black and had no eyebrows and shit like that, their version of beauty was all gossamer and ceiling fans kind of lyric nonsense.

And then I wrote something like, “Eh, pass me your lip gloss and gimme your strawberry musk.” And then she circled that one line and she said, “This is your voice.” I said, “No, it’s not.” And she said, “Yes, it is. Why are you so resistant?” I said, “Because if I write in that voice, everybody in the class is gonna know that I’m stupid. [Voice breaking] And I don’t want them to think that of me.” I said, “So I will not write in that voice.”

And instead of scolding me and, you know, lecturing me, she said, “Read this book.” And she kind of just tossed it over to me and it was Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf. And then she gave me Ai. If you remember her, she was Black-Japanese, but she was tough as nails. I heard that she did a reading in Hawai‘i and that somebody asked her a really inappropriate question concerning race and culture. And she got up and she walked off the stage and she never went back to finish.

And then I also read Jayne Cortez, Joy Harjo. I mean, she just kept giving me these books. After that, I said, “Oh. Oh, they’re all in voice.” And she said, “Who do you think you are?” I said, “I don’t know.” She says, “You’re just on the tail end of these writers. You’re part of the body of work by women who write in voice. You’re not different. You’re not stupid. You’re not—” you know, all of those fears that I had. And then what happened was, I wanna call it, an explosion? Implosion? But all these poems started coming out in Pidgin and those are the poems that made it into Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre [Bamboo Ridge Issue #58 (1993) –Ed.]. And I was like, I was like non-stop, you know?

So our particular class was very interesting because a lot of people went on to do books.

And they were [pause] there was kind of like a clique. I mean, everywhere you go, there’s a clique, right? And so when she told us to form writing groups of two-three people. Of course, I went to the girl who was the favoritism girl, right? And then I asked her, “Would you like to form a group with me?” It took a lot of balls for me to walk over to her and to ask. She looked up at me like that, and she said, “I don’t know.”

GK: Oh.

LAY: And I was stunned. I didn’t have a group, so the leftovers were me and Justin Chin. And Justin went on to do incredible, incredible work. And he passed away [voice breaks] real young, you know, but he’s brilliant. So he said, I’m gonna invite my friend, Zach.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And that was R. Zamora Linmark. And he said he’s gonna invite his friend Lisa Asagi.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: So, we became a group that met on Sundays. They all got into Lisa’s beater car. And drove out to—I used to live in Kahalu‘u. And then we would spend the whole Sunday, every week, just critiquing each other’s work. And we used these rules.

One was, when we’re critiquing your work, you shut your mouth. You have nothing to say. You sit back. And you listen and take notes.

Number two, you’re gonna have two minutes at the end to tell us how dumb we are and what metaphors we missed and how we missed the alliteration and all that.

And then you have two minutes to just grumble about everybody or, you know, tell them off or whatever.

And that rule became so important because if you don’t—the natural response is somebody says, “Oh, you know this word, it really doesn’t work here.” And then you interrupt, right? Oh, but that word is repeated or foreshadowed with this word and it’s gonna follow in what? And then it’s like, you’re not accepting the critique. So one of my funny stories is I always practice that rule in every group.

And soon enough, I was invited to join the Bamboo Ridge Study Group as a young writer. And my book hadn’t come out yet but I was part of the group. And then I remember one time, Eric, you know, people give you feedback, right?

So you just shut your mouth and you just write down in the margins like that. And then some people give you grammatical feedback ’cause they never really read your submission, well, whatever, but you make like, “Okay, thank you.”

And then Eric said, “You know, this is really evocative of Sandra Cisneros.”

GK: Okay.

LAY: And I wrote, “Fuck you, Eric,” [laughs] in the margins of my paper, [laughs] and he kept going on and on, [laughs] and I’m smiling, jotting down notes, like, “Okay, thank you. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, [mimes writing] Fuck you, Eric, you fucking asshole.” [Laughs.] And I went, [laughs] “Thank you, you know, for your critique. I really appreciate it.”—cause I never like correct them. [Laughs.] I don’t think I told him that even. [Laughs.]

But back to Faye’s Poetry 401 Poetry Workshop class: this is how Faye did it. At the beginning of every class, we all had to submit poems, so I was doing some voice poems already. I really wanted to be a lyric poet, so I threw a few in there. And then she came and it took a long time, you know, to come around back to you, so, and you gotta then work within the boundaries of that time frame. And then mine came up. And it was one of my poems about a Japanese courtesan, gossamer, and ceiling fans, exoticism to the max, but I thought I was being so [adds emphasis] wonderfully lyrical.

She went like this with her red pen and she went like that [slashing motion], right across the page. And she said, “I don’t want to ever see this poem again. I want to, maybe in five years, show me a rewrite.” And I just went [leans back in seat]. I never cry. I was like, you know, but she didn’t crack a smile. We went on to the next poet.

So, by the end of the semester, she scheduled a reading. And we called ourselves, the “Folder Poets” because we all had our poems in a folder, and then she would go through it in class.

So, it was my first reading of my life. And I’m so afraid. What happened was I was running around all day after work. I had to go pick up a lei for Faye. I had to go pick up this for the potluck, and I had to, you know. And then I got to Kuykendall and I was so, like, jittery already. I hadn’t eaten all day because I was so nervous. And then Gary Tachiyama said, “Oh, we go outside.” So I took out a little plastic cup of wine. And then I started smoking cigarettes with Gary and we were talking. And then, by the time we went in, I had had four little cups of wine—and fourteen cigarettes.

So, I think, we went in alphabetical order. And Yamanaka is all the way in the back. When I got to the podium, I started reading. And then this, you know how this, when you’re gonna faint, there’s a screen that appears in front of you? And you can hear your voice funneling out? [Raises hands up, shoulder width apart.] And then the screen just closes like that? [Brings hands together.] And then when you wake up, your orientation is: you’re looking at the ceiling [looks up, points up]. And you’re wondering, why am I looking at the ceiling? You don’t even know that you fainted.

My poor friend, who came to support me, was a teacher at Kalākaua Intermediate. She said she thought it was part of my act. Like, what poets do is we spin around, because she said—I was wearing a skirt—she said, it was like I spinned around, and then I just kind of laid down on the floor, so she thought it was part of what I was supposed to do.

I guess everyone was stunned, because the only person who came up to the front was Faye. She was fanning my face and she said, “You do it next time, yeah? You wanna—” And then I said, “No, I, I wanna read.” So I sat down on a chair in front of all the professors that thought I was special needs and all my peers. And then I just fainted again. And I fell to the floor.

GK: No.

LAY: But I got up and I finished the poems that we had rehearsed in class. When I went home, I had a nervous breakdown. And I called Eric Chock. That was the first person I called. I said, “I’m never writing again. I’m never writing another poem. I’m never doing another reading.” And I told him what happened and I said, “You know what? I cannot, I cannot do it. I just, I cannot believe it, all the teachers—” I went cry, cry, cry.

So when they started publishing me in Bamboo Ridge, they did alphabetical order, too. I said, “You guys gotta change the rules, Eric, cause I get P-T-S-D, you know, from when I fainted.” So I always had to sit in the front row, the chair with the closest access to the podium. I still have that habit. Because I still get P-T-S-D from that fainting. And was so embarrassing and humiliating. And my friend said, “Oh, lucky, your skirt never fly over your head.” I was like, “Shut up!”

You know, it was very traumatic, but I remember Eric, giving him my poems, and he put it in a plastic shopping bag when they were free? [Laughs.]

Gail: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

And I remember watching him walk down the hallway of a building in his Eric Walk, carrying my bag of poems. And then, then he selected them. It was, I think, the first poem that came out was “Lickens,” “Boss of the Food,” and then—yeah, so those poems, “Tita: On Fat.” Yeah, my “Tita” poems. They’re all different personas.

GK: Hmm.

LAY: I remember, yeah, graduate school was another story. Because after I took that class with Faye, I decided that I might as well put these credits to use and get a degree in English. So I wanted to apply to graduate school and then I got hāpai [pregnant –Ed.], so I have to drop out, but.

During that time, I realized that graduate students, they may be nice to you, but they’re not your friend. So I found people leading me off the beaten path. Like taking my story and telling me, “Oh, this is really not what you should be saying. Maybe you should take it this way.” And I was like, I had to keep silent when being critiqued, right? So in my head, I’ll go, “Why?” And then I figured it out because, “Sista, you trying to lead me off the beaten path,” and “You, bruddah, cursing me with oral dyslexia and oral cliches.” And I said, you know what? You need to—you can say what you like. But I’m not, “Yeah, thank you. Thank you for your feedback.” And then had this other guy, he was from Virginia. He was white and he said, “I’m offended by your use of the word ‘haole’.” And I said [pause] and I couldn’t say nothing, right?

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: He went on and on about discrimination and racism, but that was just the beginning of what was to come, right? [Laughs.] I’ve been called everything else. But graduate school was very, very—was a very disenchanting kind of experience.

I already had my master’s in education. So at age 27, I was like, what you call that? When you do the second return, to school, kind of person? What do you call that? Second wind? No.

GK: Like nontraditional or—?

LAY: Yeah, nontraditional student. Yeah, I was 27 years old. So, I guess I was a little bit more, a little bit wiser and, you know, I knew what was going on, like, guys [pause] it was incredibly harrowing—without naming names, yeah.

GK: Hmm. So, how did people react to your first published work? Like when it—?

LAY: You know, I had all those poems that had been appearing in Bamboo Ridge. And somebody’s book got pulled at the last minute and they needed to fill the grant slot. So Eric said, “Can we do a book?” And I was like, “Yeah!” You know, I said, “Of course.” So I put together—and I put in all my lyric poems and, you know what I mean like? And then, of course, he chopped them all up. And then I had this period where I loved writing in this makeup language that was Pidgin, but it sounded more—it had overtones of ebonics, and so it wasn’t really Pidgin, but the way that I could use language gave me a different perspective on the persona in the poem, the, you know, the surrounding scenes in the poem. And, of course, he chopped them all out.

Then I went to do a reading at the [University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa –Ed.] Campus Center Ballroom? And I thought everybody was gonna love me. But I had a brutal wake up. Because—there were 500 people in that audience. And I wasn’t expecting people to not like my work. I don’t know why. So that when that book won the Asian American Association of Studies Award for that book. And people were coming up to the table, and opening the book, and saying, see that’s the one, and it was Kala told me—“Kala Gave Me Anykine Advice Especially About Filipinos When I Moved to Pahala.” They would say, “See?” And they would close the book and walk away. And then, there was a protest. But really, people hadn’t read the book. They were just looking at pieces that were, to them, stereotypes of Filipino men [pause]. But they gave me the award.

And then, the next year [1996 –Ed.] when I published Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers they gave me the award. So, I was kinda happy, you know what I mean? And then I thought, Wow, okay. So it was in Seattle that year.

I went to the Bamboo Ridge table looking for the gold sticker right on the cover. And I told Darrell, “Eh, where my gold sticker?” And then he said, “Oh. You never know.” I said, “What?” He said, “They rescinded the award.” I said, “What? While I was on my flight to Seattle?”

I was just astonished, because at the table, they had Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre. And they were doing the same thing, you know, essentially just looking at the poems that offended them and not reading the entire text. And that bothered me. And I was—I was very, very—It was—I don’t want to keep saying “humiliating.” It frankly felt sad. You know, like, what? Why would they do this? I’d ask if they read the whole book. Many didn’t even bother. Like dog-earring the sex pages in Judy Blume’s Forever.

Academics the same color as the writers are the worst critics. Hawai‘i people, we have the crabs in the bucket. So instead of adding to the adolescence of our literature, our body of literature, adding spokes to the bicycle, they plucking people off, myself included. And I was like, you know what? My next act is, I’m not going to engage in a response. What I gonna do is I’m gonna write my next book. And that’s what is important, that I just continue.

Asian American critics have their own personal agenda of publication, or they have their own personal agenda of tenure, whatever they need to do. And they often use writers of their own kind as fodder. So it was really sad and appalling when Blu’s Hanging was released [1997 –Ed.] and they gave me that award again. And I said, I don’t want this award. I don’t want to be present at your convention, which is in Honolulu. I will not be in attendance. Do not give me this award.

So I was told that the four academics on the selection committee who til this day I don’t know put their careers on the line to award your book. And they deserve your support because they put their necks on the chopping block for your book. And you know in this Association of Asian American Studies that was just blown up? I mean, it was imploding, you know?

And so, my three Filipina students from Kalākaua Intermediate School, they were adults already. And, they were just out of college. And they came to my house in Kalihi Valley. They said, Ms. Yamanaka, you know. We want to go get the award for you. And I said, What? I gave them my permission, but I also warned them, you know. They knew.

But when they went to receive the award, they went to the stage, and the Filipino contingency, and mostly Filipino Americans from the mainland—they were wearing black armbands—turned their backs to my students. And one girl started crying because she said she couldn’t believe it. Like what are you doing? What are you thinking? You know, separation of author and narrator? It’s a basic of English 200. The author is not the narrator. The author is the author. The narrator is the narrator.

And then I further understood that to mean that the discrediting, I mean the jump to that, also includes the disregard for any of my experiences that I saw with my own two eyes, that I heard with my own two ears—I mean, my one-and-a-half good ears. [Laughs.] You know what I mean? It’s like just wiping the slate and I was, [pause] I was angry.

Because then they started coming out of the woodwork. Calling me a hard porn writer. Racist. I was a reincarnation of Japanese soldiers when they bayonetting Filipino men and women? I was a reincarnation of the rapes and—and then I was getting threats.

And so I spoke directly to one of the—one of the people who remains one of my harshest critics after twenty-five years. I asked, “Why are you doing this?” And she goes on and on to justify why I offended her. So then I just asked right out, “Are you using my work to forward your own personal agenda? She said, “Yes.” It’s never about me. That’s when I learned, you know, the four agreements. They point like that at you, but three fingers pointing back. It’s never about you when somebody does things like that; it’s about them.

That’s how I learned not to take it personally and put on my big girl panty and just say, you know what? That book has its own life. I am separate from that book now, like a child when it goes to college. You say goodbye and you wish them well, but you ain’t going to every damn class and every damn symposium to be with your child, you know?

So I do my own ceremony. When I put down the last period, [sighs]. I always have a bottle of something that I’m favoring, alcoholic, because I might finish at twelve when nobody’s, everybody’s still at work. I might finish at two in the morning, nobody wants to go out for a drink. So I do it myself and I wish my book well. You are now—I’m gonna give you to the world. And once you leave this threshold of my doorway, you have your own life and I continue my life. And that has worked for me. Until the very book I just pau [“finished” –Ed.], completed, you know? That I put the last period. And then when I send it, I wish it well. And let it go.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: But, you know. [Pause]. It’s non-ending. Yeah?

GK: Well, thank you for talking about this. And I—were there any local or national authors who particularly supported you in this time?

LAY: Oh yeah, Wing Tek [Lum]? I’m so in gratitude for him and Darrell [Lum], who is my hero. Because I learned how to write prose, Pidgin prose with Darrell’s work. Eric, the foundation of all genre of my writing is poetry. And Wing Tek because in times of crisis like that I always call Wing Tek. He has a wisdom that is beyond what we see on this dimension.

[Crosstalk.]

GK: Like I guess, when there were certain challenges to the book—

LAY: —Wing Tek contacted every person that he knew locally and in the Asian American diaspora. And he wrote a petition in support of my work, you know, and that went out too.

A lot of male academics came to my support. You know what I mean? So the same thing, I mean the whole thing with male critics, whether Black, Latino, Asian American—because the women get published—they attribute it to the exoticism. The same thing happened to Jade Snow Wong, happened to Maxine Hong Kingston, where they were harshly criticized. Amy Tan. You know, it was the same thing.

But for our generation, there wasn’t a generational token, because so many people started writing. So every generation of, for Black women, you know, Alice Walker got it. Bluest Eye? Toni Morrison? You know they, they just went at it. And then the same thing happened with the Latina. Julia Alvarez got it. Sandra Cisneros got it.

And, you know, because the times before, they—the American public or readership for multicultural non-canonical works were writers’ groups with women. Yeah, that was the demographic. And because there were many to select from, often one became the generational token, where they could look in from the outside into, let’s say, Maxine Hong Kingston’s book, Woman Warrior, and just glimpsed at that.

So, it became like voyeurism. People wanted to believe that, oh, that was you, yeah, in front of your grandma’s shrine praying and lighting the candles for the Shinto gods and goddesses? And it’s like they make that leap so easily with—I hate [the term] “women of color,” for lack of a better term, you know what I mean? That’s what was happening, because my example always is—okay, so I read Joyce Carol Oates. If I see her at a conference or reading, I’m not gonna approach her and say, Eh, Joyce, that was you and your sister driving in the ’57 Chevy through the cornfield, yeah? That was your sister, right?—I’d never do that! But why is it so easy for people, or readers, to do that to multicultural writers? You know what I mean? It’s because of that voyeurism and, you know, tokenism.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: It’s really sad.

[Digital distortion.]

GK: So, maybe—this is a little light-hearted. What is one of your favorite Bamboo Ridge publications that you were involved with? It could be like a poetry or story collection or issue.

LAY: Well, before the fabulous—that’s a no-brainer—before the fabulous Joy Kobayashi-Cintron came on as managing editor, I was briefly a part of that, very briefly. But the book that I worked on was Albert Saijo’s book. What was the book called?

GK: Was it Outspeaks: A Rhapsody [Bamboo Ridge Issue #71 (1997) –Ed.]?

LAY: Yeah. And the book design was his actual tablets. You know that Albert lived in Volcano Village? And because my dad was so far out there, I don’t know where—he met Albert at a reading.

And then Albert, you know, just kind of blew his mind, right? So they became really good friends. So my father used to drive all the way from town and he used to give Albert Saijo smoked meat. And they would talk all afternoon and then sometimes I would go with him. And Albert showed us his tablets. He writes in these big blank page tablets and he does drawings.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And they’re a stack. And he was showing us the poems that he wrote and the drawings that he had done. And my father started doing rock carving and he would take the carvings and give it—give them—to Albert.

And Albert would say, you know, talk to a stone and say, “Oh, where do you want to go?” And then go outside and walk around his property and then put my dad’s jizo [a carved stone statue of Jizo Bosatsu, guardian deity of children and travelers. –Ed.]—my dad only did stone carvings of the jizo-sama, but some of them, the early ones, they looked like frogs with crooked eyes.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: But he was trying to make the jizo, so he took some to Albert.“This no look like one croaking frog to you, Albert?” He said, “No, it’s beautiful.” He go like that, you know, like he said, “What was the intent, yeah?” he asked my father. And my father would say, “Jizo-sama.” And then he said, “Ah”—you know what I mean? He used to blow my fricking mind. [Pause]. So I had to arrange for him his book tour.

GK: Oh.

LAY: So, you know, I made contact with different universities and different bookstores along the West Coast. And then so he says, “You don’t have to. I have a friend in Marin County. You don’t have to. I can stay with her, Marta.”

And I said, “Oh, okay, so I don’t need to book, maybe. Is it by San Francisco? I mean, or you know what I mean? It’s kind of north, yeah? So—”

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: He said, “Yeah, I really do need to see Marta again.” And I traveled with him too, and then he said, “She has a son, you know?” He go like that, yeah? Son. “And he’s from Marin County. He used to like to play rock and roll.” I go, “Oh yeah, go on.” “Oh, he was like a son to me.” I go, “Oh yeah? What his name?” “I don’t know, I used to call him Little Huey.” And I look at him and I said, “Huey Lewis and the News?” [Laughs]. He go, “That’s him!” [Laughs]. He would just surprise me like that. Like Albert [laughs] I cannot even [laughs]. And he would have those surprises.

When I started looking into the works of Jack Kerouac and how Albert Saijo appears as a character. He was Zen guruji.

He was actually the maintenance guy at a Y, or some place like that, where all these guys just flock to him. So, Lew Welch, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and he was friends with Jack Kerouac. They did up that cross-country spontaneous haiku and they slept over at Allen Ginsberg’s flat.

And I was so proud to be a part of that process. Yeah.

GK: Hmm. That’s great—it kind of comes full circle. Like when you started with Morgan Blair’s class.

LAY: Yeah.

GK: She started with Howl.

LAY: Yeah.

GK: Hmm.

LAY: You know, the Beats. They were, they were just brilliant. Brilliant. But yeah. [Pause].

GK: So, I think at one time you mentioned Na‘au. You had a learning center?

Would you like to comment on some of the, that experience, the teaching—

LAY: Okay. Na‘au came about with my best friend and soulmate, Mel Spencer, who was a counselor in the College of Ed. When we were 19, we were undergraduates and we met in Peter Nicholson’s, History of the Indo—the whole tree, the Indo-European Language Tree. And we had to memorize the whole tree.

And then one of our required readings was we had to pick a dictionary. And our choices was Webster’s, Merriam-Webster. What’s the other famous one? [Pause.] And, Webster’s Dictionary. Had another one. It’s another real famous one.

GK: Like Oxford?

LAY: Oxford—that was too big. No, wasn’t Oxford. That was our reference. And anyway, American Heritage. And he would describe each dictionary. So we could choose. And then we didn’t know who chose what.

But as it turns out, because American Heritage had pictures. [Laughs], Me and then my—I didn’t know him—and Mel chose the same one because—so we got to know each other really, really well. And it’s kind of funny [laughs] because we both chose the one with pictures and we were the only two in the class who did that.

And then he student-taught, I think, a year before me at Radford. And then I was assigned to Radford. And he was already there in his first year of teaching. So we were very, very close.

But when we were 19, the father used to be a limo driver for Kahala Hilton, yeah? And then he used to pick us up in the long stretch limo, but we were so shame, you know, because one big limo coming to pick us up like that.

So we told him, pick us up by that U-turn by Sinclair Library, right? And was blazing hot summer. And we were fat and sweaty. And there wasn’t shade over the bus stop. It was in the blazing noon sun, so we used to go and hide behind this tree that, it’s a native tree, but I don’t recall the name of it, but it has these protea-like blooms.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: Anyway, and that tree with the noon sun provided little shade except if we stood under it, right next up to the trunk.

But we said that when we become teachers, we’re gonna have our own school one day. And then we even named it at 19.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: So we’re gonna call it “Na‘au.” And then he said, “Yeah, yeah, let’s do that.”

But, we went the traditional—he worked for the D-O-E, then he took a job at UH. And then I worked for the D-O-E, but what I discovered is, I’m not good at taking orders.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: I mean if the principal tells me. Because I loved a couple of them, not all of them. Some of them weren’t—especially the women who wanted penises during that time. And they used to be real harsh on us, you know, like, one female principal was standing at the corner of my room listening to what I was saying to the kids. Because I would sing to them, you know, to keep them engaged. I would have to read aloud and do a performance six periods a day so that I knew they all read the book.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: It involved me singing, and me, you know what I mean? Just keeping them engaged, right? So she was wondering what the hell was going on.

She took one student who told me, “Hey, I was in the office, you know.” So, I said, “What you did?” And she said, “I don’t know, but I was answering questions about you.” I said, “Really? Like what?” and she told me.

And then, anyway, okay, so, [pause] I don’t take orders as well. One that remains my top two bosses of my life was Bernie Williams. And he did everything for me, because I did everything and more to help the kids, you know? So he funded everything that I needed.

And so I said, “I like take them to Kennedy Theatre at night.” And I like, I mean, the school needs to pay for the, you know, however we’re gonna get there. And for the—I gotta get all of the permissions, and then you gotta show me how to do this. He said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s done.”

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And then, he would make things happen for me, but what happened was the other teachers in the department, they [pause] faculties in general, yeah, they are a wide range from really, really helpful and kind—but my experience has been on the other end where they’re jealous because you’re the young teacher or they think they need to do this power struggle with you and tell you what to do and how to. They would not just leave me the hell alone.

My first full-time job at Kalākaua Intermediate, this one teacher—she took it upon herself to come up to me at any given time she felt like.

And I was doing after school rehearsal because they gave me drama, right? I would do lunch rehearsal. And then, you know, she came by the door. She said, “You know, I talked to the librarian, and she said that you didn’t do the library unit.”

I said, “What library unit?” And she said, “Well, it’s in our curriculum if you read it.” I said. “You know what,” I told her, “You no tell me what to do.” I said, “I don’t answer to you.” I answer to Bernie. So when Bernie come down here, and he tell me, “Lois, do the library unit.” I’ll do it. But until such time [pause] I swore. I saw the kids got all startled, you know—

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And so, after ten years, six months, three weeks with the D-O-E, lucky thing, I lasted ten years because I got vested with the six months, three weeks, and eight hours, right? So I’d be vested.

And so she said, my boss at the time was—I was in the district office, another story—

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: —in the ivory tower holding sit-down luncheons, continental breakfast, and talking bubbles like they’ve never been in a classroom before the glut and I would think to myself, all the money I spent buying my students, you know, like the teachers talk about now, they buying their supplies with their own money. But before we just did because there was nothing.

So anyway, I—she said, “Oh, I have to give you a ten-year commemorative pen.” I said, “I get one pen?” She said, “Yeah, it’s one of those the kind—” what you call the kind of expensive pen? The one—what was the one we all just gave to each other at graduations and shit? Cross pen. Silver. Anyway, I said, “Is it engraved with my name? She said, “No.” I said, “You know where I live right?” And she said, “Yeah.” I said, “I get dogs in the yard, so just stay in your car and just fly ’em over the fence.” [Laughs.] And she said, “Are you sure?” I said, “I’m positive.”

And then, at that time, my son was diagnosed with autism. So I left the D-O-E and then I got a sabbatical.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: I paid back the sabbatical by working as a visiting writer at the University of Hawai‘i.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And then I sold my first book.

GK: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]

LAY: So, you know, God works in mysterious ways for me, but it’s not mysterious. It’s a plan. It’s not coincidence that all those things collided. For ten years, I freelanced and it was such a good time, but then Mel had gone around the mountain. I had come around the mountain and we met—I mean we were always friends, but the time came and it was 1999.

So he said, one night he just says out of the blue, like, “You think it’s time for Na‘au?” I said, “Hell yeah.” I said, “It’s hard, you know, freelancing. I mean you really gotta watch how you spend and it’s really difficult.” I said, “But a steady paycheck, you know.” And it is time. So we went forward and we were first called Na‘au, a Place for Learning and Healing,

GK: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]

LAY: Our mission was to serve the underrepresented minorities in the Kalihi-Chinatown-Palama area, but the students that we were getting were Punahou, ‘Iolani, Mid-Pac, you know, H-B-A [Hawaii Baptist Academy –Ed.], Sacred Hearts. And the kids that did meet our mission statement or our vision, we often just had to—not had to—we made the decision together, manuahi [“gratis, free of charge” –Ed.], you know what I mean? So, there wasn’t a fee attached to the kids coming.

And it evolved into a lot of test preparation because a lot of these families wanted to have their kids ready. So, it involved essay writing, but we always said, it starts in poetry. If you agree with that, we can do, you know, S-S-A-T [Secondary School Admissions Test –Ed.] or S-A-T [Scholastic Assessment Test –Ed.] prep.

When Na‘au closed because of the pandemic, we went back to the tree near the U-turn by Sinclair Library. Our office manager, I called him, “The Angry Hawaiian,” and he called me, “The (Wannabe) Indigenous Ainu,” but he is now getting a doctorate in Hawaiian language. So he worked for us for a long time, 15 years, 10 years? I don’t know, but anyway, he chanted.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: And on the tree was an O‘ahu ‘elepaio [monarch flycatcher endemic to the Big Island, O‘ahu (endangered), and Kaua‘i. –Ed.] because I kept looking at it and it wouldn’t fly away. And I went up to it and I looked at it and I took a picture and then he said, “What is that?” I said. “I don’t know what, I’ve never seen this bird before.” I said. And then, you know, as the years went by, I mean, I always going and looking at native birds and stuff like that.

Somebody had posted that they saw an ‘elepaio, O‘ahu ‘elepaio in an urban area. Then I called my office manager and I said, “You know what? You know the bird that was on the tree when we was doing our closing ceremony? What you call that, that was one O‘ahu ‘elepaio and it’s out of its habitat.” So either something’s happening to its habitat or was a blessing? I mean it was both maybe, you know?

And we took Holy Communion. And I sang the doxology in Hawaiian and in English. And I read a poem that I wrote for the closing of this chapter and [pause] we sat there, you know? In gratitude for a good twenty years, you know. [Pause]. But teaching’s a drag.

GK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative].

LAY: I mean, it’s really hard. I didn’t write. So for 20 years, all I did was about our business. The last 15 years, I didn’t write at all. So that was 15 years out of the scene. So coming back—Oh, the whole landscape changed and was stunning and staggering and confusing and [pause] there was understaffing at agencies and publishing houses; it became like a nightmare for me because I’m very computer illiterate.

You know, it’s a whole different scene, but understandable, [pause] but a second wind—it’s kind of nice.

GK: Are there other avenues you’re exploring like audiobooks or—?

LAY: Yeah, I just did a whole bunch of audiobooks. I did four books, but I didn’t read it myself—so Heads by Harry. [Pause]. Heads by Harry, Blu’s Hanging, Father of the Four Passages, and Behold the Many are on Amazon Audible now.

GK: Well, thank you so much for your time on this oral history project. Is there anything you’d like to add—I don’t know—anything like shoutouts to people, or—?

LAY: Yeah. I do.

GK: Yeah?

LAY: You know, so throughout this, I talked a little bit, I talked about Wing Tek and Darrell and Eric and Joy. [Pause] I think what I want to say to Bamboo Ridge Press is, that, what I said at the first reading, so maybe let me say that. What I wanna say about Bamboo Ridge Press is, that without you, there would be no me.

And the reason that I was able to garner a larger audience for my work was because editors at large publishing houses at that time were sharp. They were subscribers to literary—regional literary magazines—’cause that’s where you find the real writers. And I was found by two different editors—one from Henry Holt and one from Brasilier Books—in an issue of Bamboo Ridge. And they contacted me—never have cell phones that time. They contacted me through Bamboo Ridge and that’s how I got my break, you know, ’cause I didn’t know what to do because [pause] but that was such a blessing. That’s why when I say without you, there is no me.

I was found in Bamboo Ridge Press. Nora Keller was found in Bamboo Ridge Press. So, their generosity, their vision, everything—it’s beyond what they feel about themselves or know about themselves. What an incredible—I don’t wanna talk about what I share already. But [pause] they [pause], they are, they are life friends, in da kine you keep.

I did away with all my Christmas card friends years ago. And at this age, the ones that are left are few.

I will, always, always consider them, through the difficulties and through the ups and the downs. And they were always willing to hear me out. [Pause]. So that’s gratitude. [Pause]. Yeah. [Pause]. Oh, thank you, Gail.

GK: Oh, thank you, Lois. Thank you so much.