Out loud! Creative voices bring books to life at WCC

HONOLULU (KHON2) — Stories are one of the most common threads that bind all of humanity together. Regardless of who you are, there are stories that define your childhood and possibly your adulthood.

These stories are obtained from lots of different sources, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends, society, podcasts, books, videos, the list can go on forever.

The point is that we all want to hear stories. But reading them is a whole other venture. Some people like to read while others aren’t as inclined.

For those who don’t want to read, they tend to turn to videos, social media or podcasts to satiate that desire to hear a good story.

Some stories come from poetry. William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer are two iconic story tellers who routinely relied on poetry to tell their stories.

On Wednesday, April 17 Windward Community College is offering you the opportunity to meet two local authors and hear them bring their stories to life.

“We have events in our library,” said Dr. Susan St. John who is Assistant Professor in the Language Arts Department of Windward Community College. “The Out Loud! events are a collaboration between our library and the language arts department. We also bring in artists from the community such as literary artists as well as playwrights, musicians, visual artists.”

Dr. St. John explained that it is meant to be a forum at the school for the community and also for students to see living, working artists.

The Out Loud! in the Library event is featuring the works of Drs. Susan M. Schultz and Gary Pak.

Dr. Schultz is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hawai`i Mānoa and the founding Editor of Tinfish Press. She specializes in prose and will be reading from her publication Meditations: December 2019–December 2020.

Her books of poetry include Aleatory Allegories (2000), And Then Something Happened (2004), Dementia Blog (2008) and other works about her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s. Dr. Schultz edits the journal Tinfish, which focuses on experimental writing from the Pacific. Her degrees are from Yale University and the University of Virginia.

Dr. Pak grew up in Kāneʻohe and is a retired Emeritus Professor in the English Department at the UHM. He will be reading from his poetry collection Kewalo Blues and Echoes.

He has published six works of fiction; Kewalo Blues and Echoes is his first published collection of poems. Dr. Pak’s latest novel is Borderless. Besides writing, other creative passions in his life are playing jazz piano and woodblock printing.

Dr. Schultz said that when she felt the urge to write poetry, she didn’t say no.

“I just started writing at a young age and pretty much never stopped,” said Dr. Schultz. “It’s just something that wants to be done. So, I didn’t say no.”

Dr. Pak considers himself to be cultural worker.

“I consider myself a cultural worker,” said Dr. Pak. “You know, I went away to college; and I came back and got involved in some of the community struggles here. So, when I write, I feel like I am not running just for myself. It helps to get things out. But I also, I feel like these stories are for the next generations. I feel that I’m trying to make a difference through my writing to my culture.”

He went on to explain how writing helps.

“I play music, and I do other things like wood carving and stuff like that,” added Dr. Pak. “But my writing is telling stories that come from the community here. I try to make a difference, to make this a better world.”

For Dr. Schultz, writing is about processing her experiences in the world that tends to intrude on our lives.

“I mostly write in prose, but what I’ve written most recently are two books about COVID and the Trump administration,” explained Dr. Schultz. “Both of them took place in 2020; both of them are written in kind of a diary form, at least in so far as there are dates attached to these pieces I write. So, ‘Lilith walks’ is about walking my dog; and there’s short story vignettes about running into people on my walks and talking to them and hearing some amazing things.”

She went to explain further how her writing is like music.

“The more recent book, the one I’ll be reading from, is called Meditations December 2019 to December 2020,” said Dr. Schultz. “And while I’m not a musician like Gary [Pak], I think of my writing in this vein as a kind of music that I get on a thread of thought. A lot of it is about the world, about George Floyd being killed, about responses to COVID and everything; and yet, it sort of gets wound together in spontaneous improvisation at the time. So, I think of it as a more musical activity.”

You can click here for more information on the event.

You can hear more from Drs. Schultz and Pak in the interview above.

But you can actually meet them this evening at WCC and get a first-hand experience of what writing means to them as they bring their stories to life.