Journal 1 and 2

I first came up with the idea to start a journal when Susan M. Schultz asked a group of her graduate students to create poetry chapbooks. She challenged us to make something happen and produce something interesting. At the time I was working at McKinley High School in Honolulu and asked some of my math students to contribute writing to a chapbook, which I would create and then distribute to them. The response was overwhelming that I had to create two separate chapbooks.



The first book was difficult to format on MSWord, but somehow I did it! The second book proved to be more challenging. I asked my artist friend, Tigie Fofanadura to send me some of his drawings so I might use it as the cover art. However, his work was very detailed and I could not get the color quality I needed out of my lowly inkjet printer to feel I was doing his art work justice.



I was also struggling with the title. I finally settled on a title of a student's poem: How Do You Say Hi. This poem was about an absent father. I noticed a lot of the poems the students were writing were about their fathers or about father figures or the lack thereof. So I dedicated the second book to fathers. Here is that dedication.

for fathers who fall
for fathers who fail
for fathers who kind
for fathers who hit
for fathers who write
for fathers who bring
for fathers who miss
for fathers who lost
for fathers who lock up
for fathers who spoke up
for fathers who down
for fathers who yell
for fathers who wish
for fathers who scold
for fathers who try
for fathers who fight
for fathers who cry
for fathers who know
for fathers who lie
for fathers who tro'
for fathers who run
for fathers who broke
for fathers who stay no mo'

In the end I settled on a black and white cover with foliage crawling over the title.