PS - To learn more about Ryka and why she writes click on this lovely article from Publishers Weekly. She dedicates to transgender, genderqueer, and intersex group.

Thanks! SYRACUSE, NY – Transgender writer, performer, and educator, professor of English at Santa Monica College, Ryka Aoki gives a speech at Watson Theater of Syracuse University on Apr. Please please please treat yourself to a lunchplate full of imagery and humor and joy.Īfter you read it, please let’s talk story about it in the comments below. Also wonderful uses of pidgin with a glossary at the back if you need it (which you won’t). It’s got hula dancers of different shapes, colors and hybridities, fast food makers, a billionaire and his wife, gods and spirits, and unending tasty chicken. It’s about hula, and Hawaii, and who gets to be Hawaiian, and what identity and tradition and history mean.

Um, so isn’t this novel going to be really heavy and political and deep? A kind of magical realist answer to G OOD Magazine.Įnter Ryka Aoki’s playful, brilliant, accessible and totally delectable novel, He Mele A Hilo. These days I’m wondering if the most radical imaginary thinking we can do these days is utopian thinking as a way towards addressing our daunting difficulties. I’ve been thinking a lot about the pastoral in my own writing. That sweet strange alternative universe is connected – as most stories that we tell are – to an old form, that in European lit, is called “the pastoral.” The pastoral is linked to both comedy and romance, and it features people cavorting in a natural setting, contemplating nature, frolicking, love-making, and - yes – camping in a world that is not always friendly, but where a natural order - a cosmic harmony if you will – eventually prevails. It can even be seen between the slow-moving spokes of that surreally lyrical cyclist anime – Y owamushi Pedal. It can be glimpsed in the hijinks of the post-humans in Adventure Time. That something else can be glimpsed in Secret Garden, the magical-realism inflected Korean drama that I spoke of in a recent post. But having looked at and read dark non-realist fiction for at least 30 years, I think I’m ready for something else. There’s a lot of dystopian fiction out there.

He Mele A Hilo by Ryka Aoki