A letter from Thomas Farber

pmatsued's picture
Submitted by pmatsued on Thu, 08/12/2021 - 13:24
Dear friends,
 
As you now know, my new book [Acting My Age] came into being as an issue of the remarkable Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing in collaboration with the University of Hawai‘i Press. It was my great good fortune that Mānoa Journal’s Editor Frank Stewart and Managing Editor Pat Matsueda took Acting My Age on, both because they have made such a beautiful book of it, including the photographs of Wayne Levin and Geoffrey Fricker, and because when I’d asked them to read it in manuscript in 2020, I was still recovering from open heart surgery. Pandemic raging, I had something more to live for.
 
My history with Mānoa Journal goes back more than thirty years, to 1990. I’d been invited to UH Manoa as visiting writer. Mānoa Journal was then just getting started. I was in my mid-forties, had yet another book of stories forthcoming (from Capra Press—Learning To Love It). Mānoa Journal offered to publish my novella Public Anatomy, the long second half of that forthcoming book, in its entirety. This was something no other literary journal at the time would have taken on. 
 
In the thirty-plus years since, Mānoa Journal has published a truly dazzling array of writers from around the world. Issue after issue, twice a year, always beautifully produced in collaboration with Honolulu designer Barbara Pope and the University of Hawai‘i Press. Authors of prose and poetry, editors Frank Stewart and Pat Matsueda are gifted—world-class!—people of letters.
 
Thomas Farber