HONOLULU STORIES

GUEST: GAVAN DAWS

FIRST AIR DATE: 6/10/08

Aloha no and welcome to Long Story Short. I’m Leslie Wilcox of PBS Hawaii. Today, on Long Story Short, we get to share stories with a professional storyteller best known as an author, Gavan Daws.

 

Australian transplant Gavan Daws was the first person to earn a PhD in Pacific history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The academic and teacher became the bestselling author of Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, Land and Power in Hawaii, Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai and many other books. Now he’s collaborated on an 1,100-page anthology, Honolulu Stories: Two Centuries of Writing ñ full of voices of Hawaii.

You’re a storyteller in so many forms. Your latest form is this very hefty book with Bennett Hymer. What other ways have you told stories in your life?

Well, if it comes down to twenty-four words or less, I suppose that all of my life has really been about words and audiences. Words is all I have; I have no other skills of any kind, either creative or financial. So it’s words; words are my currency. And I kinda grew up on the edge of the Outback in Australia, where when I was a kid, there was no radio, and where for a long time, there was no TV. And storytelling was what everybody did. And when you got old enough, which is around sixteen, you’d go into the pub two or three years below drinking age; and that was storytelling territory as well. And on top of that, I’m about five-eighths Irish, and there’s genetic storytelling in the Irish. I’ve done it in books and in stage plays and in song lyrics. And I’ve done the libretto for an opera, and I’ve done documentary films, which are not my talking, but other people’s talking. And I’m a huge admirer of standup comedy; I just love standup comedy. So words are the way that things come to me; and on a good day, they’re the way that things come out of me.

In this anthology, Two Centuries of Writing, Honolulu Stories, among the things you include is a comedy sketch by Rap Reiplinger.

Yeah. When we were setting up the anthology, Bennett and I made a decision that we wouldn’t limit storytelling to what most people think of as, you know, short stories or bits out of novels. We’d have scenes from plays and musicals, and operas, and we’d have Hawaiian chant, we’d have poems, we’d have song lyrics, we’d have cartoons, and we’d have standup comedy, and we’d have slam. And the all-time great standup comic of my life, and I’ve seen a lot in a lot of different places, is Rap. A genius; absolutely genius. And as I say in the introduction, he’s the youngest standup comedian who ever made me, A, fall off my chair laughing, and B, snort beer through my nose.

[chuckle]

Nobody else has ever done that, and he could. And of all his, I think Room Service is the best; Mr. Frogtree trying to get his cheeseburger. So in Honolulu Stories, in the section about modern Waikiki, that was, of course, you know, had to have that. And so, Jon DeMello of Mountain Apple very kindly gave us permission, and it’s just a joy to have that in there. One of my big things about living here, and having hopes, my own private hopes for the place, is that more quality stuff from here can become exportable. You know, think of Iz, Brudda Iz; think of that. There’s the most local musician imaginable; who could be more local than Iz?

Going global.

And he sings a Hollywood classic from the 1930s, Over the Rainbow, and he’s got the first platinum CD from Hawaii, with half the sales outside Hawaii. And he’s in six movie soundtracks, he’s in commercials all over the world, and he’s a ring tone. The ultimate exportable, right. And that’s good quality, okay. Let’s have more of that; let’s have more of that.

Posted on June 9th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: The Writers