Three Years on Doreen's Sofa
Lee Cataluna

THREE YEARS ON DOREENS SOFA is the story of Bobby, a bumbling, affable ne’er-do-well, and his wildly misguided attempts to go straight after serving three years in jail for a stupid drug-related offense. His sister Doreen lets him stay on her sofa until he gets his life back together. Hilarious and heartwarming, this is a fun read that you won’t want to miss. Here’s a little sample:

Me and Doreen is brother/sister and we cousins at the same time. Same father, different mothers, but our mothers is sisters. Made on the same day, born on the same day, forty weeks after a Youth Rehab graduation party at Kepaniwai Park. We have a half-sister who is a week older, but she’s just a sister because her mother wasn’t related to our mothers. As far as we know, but, she was made around the same time in the same car in the same parking lot up Iao Valley.

Excerpts from THREE YEARS ON DOREENS SOFA were published in BAMBOO RIDGE Issues #91 and #94.

Issue 94
Bamboo Ridge

With the work of more than 30 writers, this issue of BAMBOO RIDGE opens with the work of the Editors’ Choice Awards winners, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán for poetry, Tyler Miranda for prose, and Janine Oshiro for new BR writer. Each will receive a $100 prize in addition to the author honorarium.

The award winners are followed by “Not Pau Yet,” a special section of selections from works in progress, excerpts from book-length manuscripts by Jeffrey Carroll, Lee Cataluna, J. Freen, Ann Inoshita, Juliet S. Kono, Alexei Melnick, and Kahikahealani Wight.

Featured artist in this issue is Fred H. Roster, professor of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. The veteran sculptor’s work has always been provocative, humorous, and inventive. A portfolio of his work is accompanied by an insightful article by Lisa A. Yoshihara, Director of the UH Art Gallery.

Also included in this anthology, new work by Juliet S. Kono, Wing Tek Lum, Joseph Stanton, Brenda Kwon, and Michael Little, as well as two intimate poems by Bamboo Ridge Press co-founder and poetry editor Eric Chock’s wife, Ghislaine D. Chock.

In the Company of Strangers
Michelle Cruz Skinner

Sixteen deceptively simple stories comprise Michelle Cruz Skinner’s much-anticipated follow-up to Balikbayan and Mango Seasons, many of them about Filipinos tongue-tied and alienated in the motherland, or scattered across the map of heartaches and homesickness in the company of strangers called countrymen, family, lovers. A book of quiet gems definitely worth the wait. - R. Zamora Linmark, author of Prime Time Apparitions and The Evolution of a Sigh

The essential subject of these captivating stories is memory, but memory filtered by what cannot–or even should not–be said. The corrosive effects of a secret history, the burdens of understanding, are limned through stories both spare and lyrical. In a way, these stories tell a kind of love story: the love of a daughter for a heritage that, even while suppressed or denied, can never be erased. - Marianne Villanueva, author of Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila and Mayor of the Roses: Stories

Michelle Cruz Skinner shows us again that exile sometimes captures the body and sometime the heart; she writes closely about love and life in a family and we see that distance, longing, and desire all can contribute to the things misplaced in translation. - Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies and The Signal