Julia Flynn Siler

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Awarded Two Golden Poppies!

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Each year, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) presents its Golden Poppy Book Awards “to recognize the most distinguished books written by writers and artists who make Northern California their home.”

I learned yesterday that The White Devil’s Daughters, my history of a pioneering group of women in Chinatown that fought human trafficking at the turn of the 20th century, won Golden Poppy awards in two categories: regional interest and nonfiction.

 

 

This is an honor bestowed by the people who nourish Northern California’s thriving literary culture: its independent booksellers. The NCIBA has recently joined with its Southern California counterparts to form the California Independent Booksellers Alliance (Caliba.) Thank you!

My congratulations to the other winners, as well. To my friend, the wonderful mystery writer Cara Black, who won the Martin Cruz Smith Mystery/Thriller Award for Murder in Bel-Air (Soho Crime) and to Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson for Tartine, A Classic Revisted (Chronicle Books) whose cookbook is one of our favorites.

The White Devil’s Daughters was a long labor of love – five years long – that was midwifed by my brilliant editor at Knopf, Ann Close, and her colleague Todd Portnowitz. The project was adeptly guided to publication by my longtime friend and agent Michael V. Carlisle, a co-founder of Inkwell Management in New York.

During this difficult time of quarantines and social distancing, I am deeply grateful for this honor. It brightens an otherwise dark time. Wishing you and your families health and courage.

 

 

 

Five Books of Narrative History

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As a teen, I fell in love with narrative history —  the use of classic storytelling techniques, such as characters, scenes, and dialogue — to write compelling histories. My first crush was on Barbara Tuchman, a journalist-turned-author who won the Pulitzer Prize for her books The Guns of August and Stillwell and the American Experience in China.

A history teacher assigned me to read A Distant Mirror, a book about what Tuchman called “the calamitous 14th century.” Her writing was so evocative to my eighteen-year-old imagination: I could almost feel and see the fine particles dust kicked up during the jousting matches she described.

Now, her somewhat old-fashioned prose doesn’t quite stir me in the same way, and I’m aware that academic historians haven’t always been her fans. But I still appreciate Tuchman’s ability to synthesize beautifully information and her gift for recreating a distant world with the delicate brushwork of a watercolorist.

I was honored to have been asked to pick five books that influenced my life as a writer by Jane Ciabattari, a columnist for Literary Hub. My choices included Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas, Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains,  The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson, and Last Boat Out of Shanghai by Helen Zia.

You can read our lengthy conversation here. With the recent passing of Tony Horwitz, a former reporter turned-bestselling author, I wish I had added one of his many wonderful books to my list (I read Baghdad Without a Map many years ago and, more recently, Blue Latitudes, in which he follows Captain Cook to Hawaii and elsewhere. His wonderful Civil War book, Confederates in the Attic, is also a favorite.)

Here’s an article by one of my favorite historians, Jill Lepore, from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation on the blurring line between scholarly and popular history writing. I’d love to hear what your favorite books of narrative history are!

The local settings of my latest book…

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The women who ran the Mission Home in THE WHITE DEVIL’S DAUGHTERS crossed the country for their work. They pursued sex trafficking cases and checked up on former residents in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Sacramento, Fresno, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

The charitable organization that supported them, the Occidental Board, was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area. And surprisingly, many of the places those 19th and early 20th century churchwomen founded are still around, providing education and social services to their local communities.

Here are some of the most notable settings for the book, as well as links to the non-profit groups that now occupy those same buildings. I originally compiled as part of a Q&A with longtime Mills College journalism professor Sarah Pollock for Local News Matters. You can read her excellent piece here.

The main entrance today to Cameron House in San Francisco, photo courtesy of Julia Flynn Siler

Disrupting the Business of Human Trafficking – Then and Now

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In 1874, a group of women opened a “safe house” on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Because their work disrupted the thriving trade in women between China and America, they faced endless legal challenges and even sticks of dynamite placed on their doorstep. By offering a place for survivors of sex slavery and other forms of servitude to escape to and drawing public scrutiny to the crime, they threatened their century’s existing business model of human trafficking.

Today, activists are using digital tools to challenge the business of modern-day slavery. I was particularly struck by the story of Berkeley doctoral grad Rebecca Sorla Portnoff who has used her computer sleuthing skills to track down and catch sex-traffickers. Portnoff, who is 29, graduated from Cal in 2017 and since then, she’s been working for Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children, a group that uses technology to fight the sexual abuse of children.

There are some notable differences – and at least one surprising similarity – between some of the first organized efforts to disrupt trafficking, which took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, and Portnoff’s twenty-first century work. Those pioneers in San Francisco wore tightly-corseted dresses and elaborate piles of hair. Few had college degrees (women were first admitted to U.C. Berkeley in 1871, and far later to most Ivy League schools.)  Many professions were closed to women and they did not have the right to vote.

Portnoff, by contrast, knew by the end of her freshman year at Princeton that she wanted to follow her father into computer science. And while most students in her field were men, she wasn’t the only woman as she earned her doctorate degree from Cal. She wears her dark hair in a bun or tied back in a pony-tail, usually wears jeans and a t-shirt to work, and was inspired to work for a non-profit by the book HALF THE WORLD: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn. “I was moved and inspired by the efforts women made to improve their lives,” she told me, and Portnoff decided to help.

While the Victorian-era activists were known to climb ladders, scramble across rooftops, and barge into brothels to help vulnerable women in children, Portnoff creates computer codes that spot or identify similarities in traffickers’ online ads and to hunt down the Bitcoin accounts used to pay for the advertisements. She works on a laptop, often tracking down traffickers who are operating hundred or thousands of miles away.

I was fascinated by this video produced by UC Berkeley of Portnoff’s work. She hasn’t faced the sort of threats that the women of Chinatown’s Presbyterian Mission Home experienced, but, notably, comments have been disabled from the recent video posted of her work, since trolling is one of the hazards that Portnoff and others in her field face. She faces off other kinds of threats through teamwork. “This is not something any single person can do by sweeping in and saving the day,” she says. “I have a team to watch my back.”

There is another clear similarity between then and now: both instances are examples of women helping other women to find their freedom, deploying teamwork, organization, and grit. Both the 19th century anti-trafficking pioneers and Portnoff were inspired by their religious faith.

“I’m a Christian, and my choice to work in this space is directly derived from my understanding of the core tenets  of the Christian faith: to love God, and to love my neighbor,” Portnoff explained to me. “In this modern era, my neighbor can be both my physical neighbor next door, or the child a thousand miles away that I will never meet.”

While technology has changed (and, thankfully, women can exercise the right to vote and most, thankfully, no longer wear bustles) the compassionate spirit that infuses Portnoff is similar to that which inspired her anti-trafficking sisters many years ago. #antitrafficking #womensempowerment #womenshistory

 

Julia Flynn Siler is the author of The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Trafficking in San Francisco’s Chinatown, which is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf in May. www.juliaflynnsiler.com.

Donaldina Cameron (center, with toddler on lap) surrounded by Mission Home workers, who were early anti-trafficking activists. Courtesy of Cameron House.

Remembering 1882

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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 from immigrating to the U.S. It was one of the most shamefully racist pieces of legislation ever enacted in America and was repealed in 1943.

The crowd and speakers at the event drew parallels between the 1882 legislation, which was passed in an ugly outburst of nativism and was signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur, and the current administration’s proposed travel bans,  barring of refugees, and immigration raids.

“We’re here to remember!” the Rev. Norman Fong, a Presbyterian minister who is executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center. “What’s happening now in D.C. is like what happened to us before.”

The Rev. Fong’s remarks were proceeded by a pair of playful lion dancers, who wove in and out of the crowd before making their way up to the podium. There were also folk singers, and protestors in wheelchairs carrying signs reflecting the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s.

Portsmouth Square, the site where the American flag was first raised in San Francisco in 1846, is normally filled with men huddled around cards laid out on cardboard boxes and Chinese music. I’ve walked through it often over the past few years as I’ve researched my new book.

Just up the hill, in a spectacular building designed by the architect Julia Morgan, is the Chinese Historical Society of America‘s powerful exhibit, “Chinese American Exclusion/Inclusion.”

It is well worth visiting both places – Portsmouth Square and the Historical Society –  if only to remember philosopher George Santayana’s warning that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

 

Signs at the May 6, 2017 Rally for Inclusion in San Francisco’s Chinatown: the Tule Lake jersey the sign carrier is wearing is a reference to the Japanese internment camp.

The Rev. Norman Fong speaking at Rally for Inclusion

The end of the library (as we know it?)

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Ralph Lewin, executive director of the Mechanics' Institute, photo courtesy of the Sacramento Bee.

Ralph Lewin at the Mechanics’ Institute, photo courtesy of the Sacramento Bee.

A few months ago, San Francisco’s venerable Mechanics’ Institute hosted a discussion titled “The End of the Library (As We Know It)?”

As the oldest library in the city of San Francisco, the Mechanics’ Institute founded in 1854 and opened a year later with a grand total of four books, a chess room, and a mission to offer vocational education to out-of-work gold miners. (The San Francisco Public Library was founded more than two decades later, in 1879.) As one of the oldest libraries in the state, the Mechanics’ was a fitting place for this discussion.

I care deeply about what happens to our local libraries. I’m the proud holder of library cards in San Francisco, Marin, Napa, and Palo Alto. I recently renewed my membership in the independent Mechanics Institute, where I’ve been invited to speak about my books over the years. I regularly visit U.C. Berkeley’s libraries for research and also volunteer as a member of its Council of Friends of the Bancroft Library.

Libraries play a crucial role in supporting our democracy, encouraging the free flow of information, and as a much-needed non-commercial oasis. As Ralph Lewin, the Mechanics’ Institute’s executive director, told me recently, the fastest growing segment of his organization’s new membership is under 40 years old. Some tell him that they joined the Mechanics’ because it feels like an authentic institution that represents the soul of San Francisco. I’d agree with that.

In a city where there seems to be an ever deepening divide between the haves and the have-nots, libraries remain one of the few places where people of different ages, experiences, and backgrounds come together to discuss ideas. That, in itself, is a powerful argument for supporting our libraries at a time when public discourse has become increasingly fraught.

The discussion on libraries is an example of that and you can watch it on YouTube. But because I’m a bit of a library geek, I also took notes, which I’m sharing with you here. It was an all-star gathering of some of the country’s leading thinkers on libraries and is well worth watching. But if you don’t have the time, here’s my summary as well as some links to library resources.

Moderated by Ralph Lewin (RL), the panel included Susan Hildreth (SH), executive director of the Peninsula Library System and previously President Obama’s Director of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, Luis Herrera (LH), San Francisco’s City Librarian and a board member of the Digital Public Library of America, Deborah Hunt (DH), Library director of the Mechanics’ Institute, and Greg Lucas (GL), State Librarian of California.

Here are some of the highlights from my edited notes on the discussion, with the speakers identified by their initials.

Spiral staircase at the Mechanics' Institute

Spiral staircase at the Mechanics’ Institute

RL: “Is the library a relic? And what’s happening at the San Francisco Public Library these days?

LH: The idea that libraries are a relic is highly exaggerated. We’re thriving. We’re renovating eight new buildings. We’ve got close to 7 million visitors each year. Our circulation is about 10.6 million items borrowed, about half of that e-media, which saw a 50% increase last year.

GL – As state librarian, my job is spreading the good word and listening to people. People love libraries so much they don’t think they are part of government. We see immigrant families coming into libraries – know nothing bad will happen to them there and someone there will help them with their issues. You see filled rows of computer terminals – a high percentage of people still don’t have Internet access at home. Remember – it was a big idea at the time when the Internet first took off that people wouldn’t need libraries anymore. Instead, we’ve seen libraries quickly adapt.

SH – The Gates Foundation decided to sunset their investment in libraries. Gates helped fun Aspen Institute’s report on library: “Rising to the Challenge: Re-envisioning Libraries.” One of the key ideas from report is that libraries remain an important platform for community and individual development.

DH – I’m often asked “why do we need librarians when have Google search?” She holds up a copy of the “Badass Librarians of Timbuktu,” a new nonfiction book by Joshua Hammer on the librarians’ race to save precious manuscripts from destruction. “Sadly, the “l” word has become very stereotyped…. I don’t tell people that I’m a librarian (mimes yawning) and instead I tell people that I am a strategic information professional!”

LH: Libraries are among the most democratic institutions. We welcome everyone. We serve everyone from a research scholar to a new immigrant. When the idea of us working with public health department came us, we said, why not? Libraries are also a focal point for civic dialogue. SFPL has half a million people attending its functions. We play an important role in encouraging civic engagement and and as a community hub.

RL: (Question to Greg Lucas, a former journalist.) “You covered politics for a long time. How do libraries fit in?”

GL: They’re part of local government, usually in the general fund expense. The general fund is fairly small and fairly prescribed. In places where libraries aren’t valued, there’s some debate over whether to fund public safety vs. libraries. (But I’d argue) the library is the happiest face a city or county can put on itself. Libraries have to get out and demonstrate their value to the community. Some libraries have contracts with the county to do literacy classes in county jail. It’s a whole lot tougher then for sheriff to throw library under the bus (in terms of funding) when working together, adding a film reference, “It’s Chinatown, Jake.”

DH: I think libraries are the most democratic institutions we have.

GL: We talk about how libraries are engines of economic development – we often have someone coming in and asking a librarian to review a resume.

Q: Last week, while looking through microfilm at the SFPL’s main branch, I overheard a librarian handling a difficult client – perhaps a homeless person. How do you support your librarians in addition to the social worker you have on staff at the main branch?

LH: Incidents have dropped dramatically over the past year and a half, in part because partnering with the San Francisco Police Department and social service agencies. Also, we’ve set some limits and expectations about behavior – after that, there are consequences.

 

Devotees of the Bancroft Library: “We’re archive rats!”

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This past Saturday, I went to the annual meeting of the Friends of the Bancroft Library. I love this University of California campus and especially U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, which houses some of the most precious and rare manuscripts of the American West. That day, I met other people — historians, authors, and avid readers – who are also devoted to preserving and supporting the library’s treasures. It was a gathering of fellow “archive rats.”

I worked in the Bancroft while researching both of my books. For The House of Mondavi, I found a wonderful resource in the Bancroft’s Regional Oral History Office, which conducted a series of oral histories with California’s leading winemakers, including Robert and Peter Mondavi, as well as Miljenko (Mike) Grgich, Jack Davies, and Warren Winiarski.

For Lost Kingdom, I found materials related to both Hawaii’s royal family and to San Francisco’s colorful Spreckels family, including an 1890 pamphlet describing a secret society that Hawaii’s King David Kalākaua was involved with, (the Hale Nauā society, also known as the Temple of Science”)

index               Over the weekend, I was one of nine people elected to join a distinguished group: the Council of the Friends of the Bancroft Library, which helps support this great public institution. The library was founded in 1905 when the University of California acquired historian Hubert Howe Bancroft’s personal collection, which included priceless documents, such as those of General Mariano Guadelupe Vallejo, a Californio military leader.

 Today, it includes the Mark Twain Papers and Project, the Regional Oral History Office, the University of California Archives, the History of Science and Technology Program, the Pictorial Collection, and the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. It has become one of the largest — and busiest — special collections in the United States. Elaine C. Tennant oversees it all as the library’s director.index2

 The current projects at the Bancroft include everything from a new series of oral histories with pioneering African-American faculty at U.C. Berkeley titled “The Originals,” to a new exhibition, “Saved by the Bay: The Intellectual Migration from Fascist Europe to UC Berkeley” at The Magnes Collection. Just closing is a marvelous exhibit on “Comics, Cartoons, and Funny Papers” – based, in part, on the Rube Goldberg papers housed at the Bancroft.

Robert M. Senkewicz (left) Rose Marie Beebe (center) and Susan Snyder (right) at the presentation of the Hubert Howe Bancroft Award on June 7, 2014

Robert M. Senkewicz (left) Rose Marie Beebe (center) and Susan Snyder (right) at the presentation of the Hubert Howe Bancroft Award on June 7, 2014

 It was a special treat to meet one of the recipients of this year’s Hubert Howe Bancroft award – Rose Marie Beebe, who received it for her work on early California history with her husband and colleague at Santa Clara University, Robert M. Senkewicz. They teach Spanish and history and are now involved in a mammoth project to translate Vallejo’s five-volume memoir from Spanish into English.

 “Vallejo is finally going to have his voice,” said Beebe, after accepting the award from the Bancroft’s outgoing head of public service, Susan Snyder. “He’s my man!” Beebe also fulsomely praised Snyder, whom she’s worked with for many years: “I call her the Goddess,” she said.

 Beebe  and her husband have spent countless hours with the Bancroft’s collection for their books Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846, Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815-1848 and the Guide to Manuscripts Concerning Baja California in the Collections of the Bancroft Library which they edited.

As Beebe said at the ceremony, “We love primary sources,” she said. “We’re archive rats!”

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Historian Rose Marie Beebe, Author Julia Flynn Siler, and Bancroft Library Director Elaine C. Tennant

Historian Rose Marie Beebe, Author Julia Flynn Siler, and Bancroft Library Director Elaine C. Tennant

Dispatches From Squaw’s Annual High-Altititude Literary Gathering

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Almost a decade ago, I joined the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley for an intensive, week-long non-fiction workshop. It was a summer camp-like experience in the high Sierras. Each morning, about a dozen of us in the non-fiction workshop gathered around a table to critique each other’s manuscripts — usually discussing two submissions each morning. In the afternoons, we’d either stay for the craft talks or hike through the mountains. After dinner, we’d stay up late, swapping stories with fiction and non-fiction writers alike.

That week in Squaw in August of 2004 was both scary and inspiring, in part because the caliber of the teachers was so high. Coming back for more, I came back again the following summer. Joining the Community of Writers at Squaw was critical to my taking the leap from being a newspaper reporter to an author. To this day, I remain deeply grateful for the experience and for the many friendships that began in that high-altitude setting.

For one, Squaw led me to my literary agent and friend Michael Carlisle, who founded Squaw’s non-fiction program and is a co-founder of the New York-based literary agency Inkwell Management. It also helped me reconnect with someone who I’d first met as a teenager and who, in the subsequent years, built a remarkable career as a journalist, author, and media entrepreneur: Frances Dinkelspiel.

Like me, Frances had graduated from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a longtime newspaper and magazine reporter. She was also hoping to take her writing to the next level by writing a book. The result was her magnificent biography, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California (St. Martin’s Press, 2008.)

After spending that week together at Squaw’s non-fiction workshop in 2004, Frances invited me to join her long-standing writing group, North 24th Writers (named at a time when all ten of the writers in the group lived north of San Francisco’s 24th Street in the Noe Valley. Now that the Stanford-based historian Leslie Berlin, author of The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (Oxford University Press, 2005), has joined North 24th, our name is not entirely accurate, but we’re still sticking with it even so.

The non-fiction workshop helped me expand an early draft of my first book, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty (Gotham Books, 2007) during my second visit to Squaw. After that, I wrote a narrative history, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure (Grove/Atlantic, 2012). Michael Carlisle beautifully represented both of my books.

Now, eager for fresh ideas as I head into my third book, I headed up to Squaw again this summer, sitting in on one of Michael’s workshops and attending the public literary events in the afternoons and evenings. Joining me was my friend and fellow North 24ther, Allison Hoover Bartlett, who wrote The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, A Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession (Riverhead, 2010.)

Allison and I could only stay for a few, mid-week days, but we especially enjoyed the book editors’ panel, which was moderated by Michael Carlisle on Thursday, July 11th. Michael teasingly asked Ann Close, who is Alice Munro’s longtime editor, about Knopf publishing E.L. James’s bestseller, 50 Shades of Grey.

Knopf never published the book in hardcover, but instead decided to publish it only in paperback and as an e-book. Typically, if a publisher thinks a book is unlikely to make it into the review pages, it will publish it as a less costly paperback.

“We figured we’d sell 50 Shades without reviews and I had the sneaking suspicion we didn’t want the Knopf name on it…” Ms. Close admitted to the audience of about 150 people. “But we did want the profits!”

It was widely reported that Random House, which owns the Knopf imprint, awarded all of its employees a $5,000 bonus based on the erotic novel’s success (particularly, as an e-book, offering its readers relative anonymity)

Jokingly referred to as 50 Shades of Green, the book topped the New York Times paperback best-seller list for 37 weeks.

Another funny story from the book editors’ panel came from Reagan Arthur, who recently became the publisher of the venerable Little, Brown & Co. and was quoted in the New York Times this past weekend in a story by London-based Sarah Lyall about J.K. Rowling’s pseudonymously published debut detective novel.

Ms. Arthur described working with comedienne Tina Fey on her bestseller, Bossy Pants (the title, according to Ms. Arthur, came from Fey’s husband.) Ms. Arthur admitted to having some doubts about the arresting cover art of Fey with a big, hairy, man’s arms.” So the publisher decided to do market testing on the cover art.

“Everybody loved the arms,” Ms. Arthur recalls, adding that Fey quipped afterwards to her that it “was the only time market testing ever worked in my favor!”

I also learned a bit more about the publishing trade terms that were tossed around during the panel.

From Knopf’s legendary senior editor Ann Close, we heard the term “figures” – which is the publisher and editor’s educated guess on how many copies of a book it might print and ship. Before bidding on a manuscript, the acquiring editor will give the “figures” to Knopf’s accountants and ask for a profit and loss statement. Close says that when she first started in the business in 1970, the practice was “just kind of to make up an estimate of what the book would sell and what kind of advance they could pay the author.”

From Reagan Arthur, Little Brown’s publisher: “track” as in an author’s track record for sales of his or her previous record. “Track does matter,” says Arthur, but then told the story of Maria Semple, the author of the bestselling novel, Where Did You Go, Bernadette? which was published four years after her 2008 sleeper, This One Is Mine. Because her first book didn’t sell many copies, Little, Brown could only offer Semple a modest advance for her second book. But, as Arthur explained, it “went on to be a very happy story!” (This hilarious book became a national bestseller.)

From Carolyn Carlson, the executive editor of Viking Penguin: the code for authors who are gorgeous or charismatic is that they are “marketable.” The code for authors (or potential authors) who have 100,000 twitter followers, or are married to the biggest bookseller in the Northeast, or who work for powerful news outlets, is that “they have a great platform.”

Other bright spots from the public events at Squaw were the published alumni readings by Amy Franklin-Willis, who wrote The Lost Saints of Tennessee (Atlantic-Monthly Press, 2012) and Alison Singh Gee, from her memoir, Where the Peacocks Sing: A Palace, A Prince, and the Search for Home (St. Martin’s, 2013)

Amy, as it turned out, is a good friend of Squaw alum and novelist Christina Meldrum and Alison is friends with Squaw alum and dear friend Dora Calott Wang, author of the wonderful memoir, The Kitchen Shink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World (Riverhead, 2011)

Other highlights were screenwriter Gill Dennis’s craft talk on “Finding the Story.” It was just as inspiring as it was the first time I heard it almost a decade ago. Between panels, I had the chance to sit down with Gill, documentary filmmaker Christopher Beaver, and Martin J. Smith, a longtime editor and journalist in the L.A. area and author most recently of The Wild Duck Chase: Inside the Strange and Wonderful World of the Federal Duck Stamp Contest, was a pleasure: Marty and I many years ago overlapped as reporters at the Orange County Register.

I also met the well-known Hawaiian singer and author Waimea Williams, who gave a craft talk on Saturday titled “How To Be Your Own Editor.” She is the author most recently of Aloha, Mozart (Luminis Books, 2012) and, as it turned out, have friends in common in Hawaii. In western literary circles, the circle of Squaw alums is very large indeed.

Book group pick: Lost Kingdom is now out in paperback!

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Mahalo nui loa –  Hawaiian for thank you very much – to the dozens of book groups I’ve spoken with from around the country that have picked Lost Kingdom as their monthly or quarterly read. I’ve met some of these groups in person and have skyped with some and phoned in to others. It’s been a wonderful experience and now that Lost Kingdom is just out in paperback, I hope to meet with even more groups (including a wonderful group in Kentfield, Ca. that invited me to join them to discuss the book over a feast of kalua pig, poi, and coconut layer cake — so ono!)

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I’m truly grateful to all of you – from Liz Epstein’s Literary Masters groups (10 book groups in the San Francisco Bay Area) to the marvelous ladies of the Hawaiian Historical Society, to the book group that met in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights and included descendants of the Dillingham family as well as an astonishing pineapple cake, to Catherine Hartman’s lovely group of Stanford alum and other book-loving friends in Chicago to Jason Poole (The Accidental Hawaiian Crooner) who also organizes a reading group in Pittsburgh. I’m especially grateful to Julie Robinson of Literary Affairs, who organizes book events and moderates book groups in Beverly Hills and the Los Angeles area, for choosing Lost Kingdom as one of her recommended reads.

Here are some questions to discuss on Lost Kingdom that come from Liz Epstein at Literary Masters and adapted by Beth Baily Gates, who’s been running the Fairfax Public Library’s book group for nearly a decade. Hope they’re helpful and if you have other questions, I’d be delighted to skype or phone into your book group for a chat if my schedule permits: here’s the link to request me.

 

Points to Ponder for Lost Kingdom

  • Whose story is Lost Kingdom and who should be telling it? Do you think Julia Flynn Siler, a mainland writer, does a good job of showing all sides of this story about nineteenth century Hawaii?  Do you think it is an important story?
  • Is there a hero/heroine or villain/villainess in this story?
  • How do you feel about Hawai’i’s last ruling queen, Lili’uokalani?  Could she have done anything to alter the course of historical events?  Should she have?  Do you consider her a tragic figure?
  • How responsible was King David Kalakaua for the course of events?
  • How do you feel about the way the United States handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Grover Cleveland claimed “Hawaii is ours…as I contemplate the means used to complete the outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair.”  Do you agree/ disagree with him?
  • How do you feel about the way the Hawaiians handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Did you get a good sense from the book as to how and why they behaved as they did?
  • What surprised you about Claus Spreckels?  What about Dole?  Are there other characters in the book that you feel played a pivotal role and you’d like to know more about them?
  • What were the motives of the original missionaries in coming to Hawaii, and then how do you feel about their descendents?  Was everyone generally well-intentioned, or was self-interest paramount?
  • What is the relevance of this history for us today?
  • Can you imagine an alternate history?  Where would Hawaii be today if the US hadn’t annexed it?  Where would the US be today without Hawaii?
  • This was our non-fiction selection for the season.  Do you think this particular history of Hawaii could be better told as ‘historical fiction’?

 

 

Hau’oli Lānui from San Francisco….

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My husband and I went to several holiday parties this year and perhaps the most heartfelt took place in early December, at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center in San Francisco.

We were invited to the J-Town hui’s annual holiday show and potluck. The hui (Hawaiian for a club or association) was made up of students in the music and vocal classes led by a beloved and longtime Hawaiian music teacher in the city named Carlton Ka’ala Carmack. There were ukeleles, hula performances, and mountains of delicious food. As the island saying goes, it was real ono!

Julia Flynn Siler, author of “Lost Kingdom” (left) and Carlton  Ka’ala Carmack, Hawaiian music teacher (right) in Dec. 2012

Ka’ala grew up on Oahu and performed in a play written by John Dominis Holt, whose 1964 essay “On Being Hawaiian” helped spark  the Hawaiian Renaissance movement. Also known as Dee, Ka’ala moved to San Francisco in 1978 and played a key role in educating a new generation of students in the Bay Area on the subtleties of Hawaiian music.

An ethno-musicologist who speaks six languages and a gifted singer and musician, Ka’ala’s done everything from serving as an artist-in-residence for the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University to teaching a pilot course in Pacific Islander Studies at San Francisco State University.

For more than a decade, Ka’ala directed the J-Town Hui, a well-loved ukulele and vocal ensemble based out of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JNCCNC) where he teaches ukulele classes and a course called “Hawaiian Expressive Singing.”

Members of the J-Town Hui performed at Roy and Kathy Sakuma’s  41st Ukelele Festival in Honolulu in July of 2011 and at the Maui Ukelele Festival in Kahului, Hawai’i last fall.

I got to know Ka’ala when he very kindly agreed to play some of Queen Lili’uokalani’s songs at a gathering for the launch of my book, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure, earlier this year.

After that, we did a number of events together – including appearing on KQED’s Forum show with Michael Krasny, the Foothill College Authors Series in Silicon Valley for Pacific Islander month, and as keynoters at this year’s Hawaii Book and Music Festival in May.

If you’d like to hear Ka’ala, he composed and performed the music for the recently released documentary, “Towards Living Pono,” produced by the award-winning filmmaker, Rick Bacigalupi. (Pono is a Hawaiian word with many meanings, including goodness, uprightness, morality.) You can also watch him perform Queen Lili’uokalani’s Aloha Oe here.

Patrick Makuakane, the hulu kumu of San Francisco’s well known Na Lei Hulu troupe was also at the party to pay his respects to Ka’ala. He was one of a large number of people who waited in line to greet and thank him.

The afternoon of ukulele playing, hula dancing, singing, and a lot of hugging was made even more poignant because it was also a goodbye party for Ka’ala, who is taking a job teaching chorus, voice, and an introduction to Hawaiian music at the Windward Community College on Oahu starting this spring.

Hau’oli Lānui (happy holidays in Hawaiian) and aloha, Ka’ala. See you soon in the islands!

Carlton Ka’ala Cormack (left) and Julia Flynn Siler (right) at the Hawaii Book and Music Festival in May, 2012