The Writing Life
Remembering 1882
On Saturday, May 6th, several hundred protestors gathered in San Francisco’s historic Portsmouth Square in Chinatown carrying such signs as “Remember 1882” and “2017 Has Become 1882.” They were there to mark the 135th anniversary of the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law implemented to exclude a specific ethnic group…
Read MoreGuidebooks to Sin
At opening night of the 2017 Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans, I met a librarian who also happens to be a champion ham kicker. She shimmied her way onto the stage of Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre in New Orleans in a sparkly black top and full-length skirt. Channeling the spirit of one…
Read MoreMark Ho’omalu and a “Kingdom Denied”
“Get your papers!” cried the delivery boys and girls, carrying rolled up copies of a Hawaiian newspaper printed especially for that evening’s show. Wearing natty caps and suspenders, they ran through the aisles clutching copies of the “Star of the Pacific,” yelling, “Get your papers!” Thus began an extraordinary one-night performance of the musical “Kingdom…
Read MoreThe Queen and the Clevelands (Grover and George…)
September 2 is the birthday of Hawai’i’s last reigning monarch, Lili’uokalani. Born in a grass house in 1838 and adopted by Hawai’i’s ruling dynasty, the infant girl who would become Hawai’i’s last queen began her tumultuous life 174 years ago at the base of an dormant volcano in Honolulu. For the past several years, historians,…
Read More“The Wave” by Susan Casey
The ancient Polynesians felt profound respect for the power of the sea. Their custom was to carry ti leafs with them when they went on risky journeys. As Susan Casey reports in her masterful book, The Wave, California-born but Hawaii-bred surfing legend Laird Hamilton, perhaps superstitiously, always carries a ti leaf along with him as he…
Read MoreSusan Orlean on Stagecraft (and How Writing Can Be Like Stripping…)
I just spent the past few days at the 21st Annual Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference. I was on a panel with Andrew McCarthy, who made his name as an actor in “Pretty in Pink,” “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and “Less Than Zero,” and is now an award-winning travel writer for National Geographic Traveler…
Read MoreHow an 1863 petition from Ni’ihau re-surfaced in San Francisco
The story begins in November of 1957. The chief photographer for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Warren Roll, climbed into the passenger seat of a small plane in Kauai. The pilot took off, heading towards a 73-square-mile privately-owned Hawaiian island of Niihau. The plane landed roughly, smashing its landing gear and splintering its propeller. Roll, carrying his…
Read MoreLunching with One of Hawaii’s Real ‘Descendants’
By Julia Flynn Siler, first published in the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog on 3/12/2012 Julia Flynn Siler and Her Royal Highness Princess Abigail Kawananakoa. A few days before heading to Honolulu on book tour for “Lost Kingdom,” I got a phone call from the assistant to Her Royal Highness Princess Abigail Kawananakoa, the woman…
Read MoreRetracing Lili‘u’s Footsteps…
Purely by chance, I found myself in the Washington, D.C. neighborhood where Hawai‘i’s last queen, Lili‘uokalani, had once lived. I was in Washington, D.C. to deliver a talk to a group of Treasury executives about my new book, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. I’d booked a hotel…
Read MoreTalking Story at the Outrigger Canoe Club
On my last night in Honolulu on tour for my new book, Lost Kingdom, I was invited for drinks at the Outrigger Canoe Club, which sits at the far end of Waikiki Beach, in the shadow of Diamond Head. The club is a key setting for the novel, The Descendants, which is now an Oscar-winning…
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