A forty-inch Samsung monitor that was a Christmas gift. Peak Services now has two desks, two monitors, two Mac minis, and one MacBook Air.
The following reflection on personal loss, creating, volunteering, and work was written by Pat Matsueda, head of Peak Services.
In December 2020, I lost my sister, Kathy, to a prolonged illness, and the new year started with attempts to accept her death. Then I lost Kikuyo, the mother of my mate, in April 2021. Losing Kikuyo, who was almost as much a mother to me as to her own children, compelled me to face the possibility of losing more people dear to me.
Events like these form the deep undercurrent of my life as a writer and creative person or—since I am frequently helping people to realize their own ideas or concepts—creative assistant. There is an urgency to make, create, and give before the time is gone.
Here is a list of things I worked on in addition to serving as a managing editor at my day job.
Winter 2020–2021
Interview with writer, editor, and publishing professional Rachel King for her Substack newsletter A Writer in Publishing.
“Illness as a Form of Existence,” an issue of the University of Hawai‘i ezine Vice-Versa, guest-edited by Tracy Robert and Liz Abrams-Morley.
Spring 2021
Bitter Angels, a chapbook of poetry published by El León Literary Arts and Mānoa Books. Dedicated to my sister, the book contains poems about death, love, violence, family, hope, and other subjects that form the armature of my reality. The title refers to the bitterness that I imagine angels feel in witnessing human tragedies. The cover is a composite of three images: a photograph of the Statue of Liberty, captured from the back, that I found at Flickr Commons; an astronomical chart produced by Copernicus; and a photograph of the Milky Way. The cover evolved over days of searching the internet for appropriate images, working intensively in Photoshop and QuarkXPress, and considering numerous elements, concepts, and alternatives. The last poem in Bitter Angels is about my coming across a headstone at O‘ahu Cemetery.
A broadside of my poem “The Hold” to mark the publication of Bitter Angels. After I came up with a draft, I approached print maker and book artist Laura Master, who, as the owner of letterpress studio Platemark X, suggested the typeface and paper. In March, Laura sent me fifty signed and numbered copies of the broadside, and I gave them to people who bought the book.
Fundraising and communications for Achieve Zero, a nonprofit organization that is based in Wahiawā and that provides services—such as finding shelter and rejoining communities—to houseless adults, teenagers, and families. Working with the board and staff, I raised funds and produced materials to help Achieve Zero spread its message and reach potential supporters.
Editing “The Edge of the World,” a novel in progress by a local architect named Mike. After meeting with him and our good friend Michael LaGory—who introduced us—I edited the first thirty-nine pages of the manuscript. With these pages and email responses from Michael and me, Mike decided to rewrite his book. “The Edge of the World” is about a soldier’s coming-of-age in the U.S. army and what he discovers about men, women, love, and morality while stationed at a remote military post in South Korea.
A review of Brian Komei Dempster’s poetry collection Seize (Four Way Books, 2020) for Manoa and the Ethical Imagination.
Summer 2021
“Mystery,” an issue of Vice-Versa. The short fiction was guest-edited by Jeffery Ryan Long. (Of course my favorite part of this issue is the long conversation I had with Gary Mawyer and Alex Mawyer about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.)
“The Dragon’s Tail,” a short story for One Humanity Writing Collective that I dedicated to Adam Rutsch and Challen Willensen and wrote with the help of teammates Lianda Burrows and Caylee Tierney. Adam and Challen are two of the people I’ve gotten to know through Friends of Trees, a Twitter group I started in May 2020.
Fall 2021
“Plant Grower with a Mission: An Interview with Manny Mellado,” an interview for Friends of Trees in Hawai‘i and Elsewhere. Manny is another friend made through the Twitter trees group.
Winter 2021–2022
Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Ugo Corte, an associate professor and scholar at the University of Stavanger in Norway. Recommended by our mutual friend Tom Farber, I was asked by Ugo to proofread the first pages of his book, which presents the North Shore surfing community as a subject of sociological research. The book is substantial—272 pages of typeset, composed pages, including seventeen pages of notes and references—and had to be proofed well in a short period (about three weeks). Ugo returned the page proofs to the production editor at UCP on January 13.
Reader’s report for “A Treasured Unimportance,” a book-length manuscript of fiction by Ben Schwartz.
