Hawai'i Talk Storying

Swish swish swish the water-dipped paint brush swipes across the paper surface—a blank one. Gentle sound to illuminate color. The art template provides a black line contour, an outline of an image—bird, tree, or orange—but is still void of color. Once the paint brush applies water, then the colors start to appear.

Remember these pictures that render invisible pattern to newly visible colorful design? Blog writing can be that paint brush. Click click click go the key board letters and scratch scratch scratch the pen on paper. And what surfaces are an ordinary day’s new design, color, and adventure.

Writer Zadie Smith posits that writing gives two chances—to live the original event and to relive through reflective nonfiction story. Living on Big Island Hawai'i gifts plenty thriving life, first, and next the blog story reveals. Like the paint brush on a blank canvas, once writing starts, I find, the reveals are unknown, writing as I go into mystery so discovery happens so prose builds.

What serendipity awaits this lesbian Mama raising her 14-year-old son, a mixed-race African American and Caucasian contemporary youth? These essays delve into modernity topics via talk-storying, a suggestion that the circuitous often has purpose. Otherwise known as not all who wander are lost. Meaning that so far, we have had a set home in Kapaau, next to Hawi, two villages in the Kohala region.

For blog readers what I picture is you on a lunch hour whenever that time happens, noon for day laborers and midnight for graveyard comrades. On a last pecuniary hustle to distill money from an unlikely source: ordinary wage earning. One worker is staying late into the evening, meticulously entering database numbers. Another turns the key and flips the sign to closed on an early afternoon since her café barista employment begins at 5 a.m. This one exhausting shift is over. Maybe your gig is a 6 a.m. start time on the golf links—irrigating, cutting, and fertilizing someone else’s leisure lawn for the next eight arduous hours.

A gig I once had as a gas station cashier was me staring at a customer line that rarely receded. Was I caught in a what-if situation, the prospect of an endless work loop? Phone alarm screeches a wakeup call, coffee guzzling, and then go make the “doughnuts,” whatever the widget is in your day.  

Yet even inside long work hours, we nurture dreams. A path to hopes and their fruition is quiet time, simplicity space to relax and catch a breath or two. During this brief hiatus, reading is a kind of creative daydreaming that lifts the chance to wonder, to stay curious, and to ask what-if beyond clocking a shift. For an immersion reading moment, reciprocity a writer and readers share, let's collaborate.

I'll write the essay and you invest in the prose. Choose a starting place that works for your right here, right now economy. Asking ranges from $3 to $37. Monies arrive and I go frugally into creating prose. Simplicity. A day fueled on curiosity is one charged with feet-on-the-ground optimism. Let's invest in ourselves, one writer's version of the good life and her intrepid reader perhaps pondering a dream of her own. When I am building essays and framing photographs, I picture a reader’s reflective emo-bounce, a surprise laugh or cry. This is the grateful work I attempt now. Some life moments absolutely design you to go in a direction.

And this one is mine. For $5 online a purchase will bring you Audre Lorde’s social justice primer The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. She often was at a speaking podium where after announcing her identifiers: Black, lesbian, feminist, and poet, she claimed her “learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish…learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Dismantling a wage-earning day is why I ask for $3 to $37, an amount that agrees how likely many of us live on spare change.

If possible that a decision is made for a $37 collaboration, doing so supports three equilateral sides on a triangle. Those unflappable lines symbolic for balance and the geometry inside peaceful strength. And seven days in the week count how often I am idly essaying. Hence, we have $37. My vote is that we collaborate. Yours? Collaborate button is below.

Clearly, if you have an art project that requests a reciprocal donation, please ask. Seems impossible to quantify, yet reading Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help has taught me to seek “art patrons” as I go.

One clarity note on social media being useful. I get that. Yet I am not on there. Let us compare where a painting resides—in a neighborhood studio or casual art gallery—and so these essays are on a blog, the display space. My hope is that a reader has a pause moment to appreciate the words and photos. Online milling around and viewing creative work does not always provide an immediate commentary button. And so our blog does not either.  

I am creating a blog without advertising or a continuous e-mail campaign to sell merch on discount; hear the blissful quiet and shared solitude (zen koan)? An occasional hello through e-mail could happen. If you wish, send me a note: hawaiitalkstorying@gmail.com.

~Karolina Garrett

Karolina Garrett retains copyright to all prose and photos on this blog.