Points of entry are myriad in 100th Bamboo Ridge issue

"Bamboo Ridge Issue #100," edited by Eric Chock and Darrell Lum (Bamboo Ridge, $18)

One hundred. A pleasing, round number in a culture with a base-10 monetary system. One hundred dollars used to be a lot of money; now it’s two bags of groceries, not quite two tanks of gas, a fraction of the rent or mortgage, the least you can spend on a good dinner for two.

One hundred. One hundred times Bamboo Ridge Press released its Journal of Hawai‘i Literature and Arts.

In the new, 100th edition, adorned with Grant Kagimoto’s cartoon of "Waiting Fo Da Big Fish Tournament," there are more than 100 selections: writings of newer poets and short-story authors, a profile of Kagimoto (the Cane Haul Road T-shirt guy and a longtime supporter of Bamboo Ridge), a collection of works by the late Hawaii island beat poet Albert Saijo, entries in "Waiting for the Big Fish: Bamboo Ridge’s 100 word/100 line online contest" and a selection of Editors’ Choice Awards in prose, poetry and a "new to Bamboo Ridge" category.

No devaluation of the 100 here.

There are so many ways into this work: comparing and contrasting to the earliest pieces (see the first edition, now out of print, online at www.bambooridge.com and scroll down to "Documents"). In general, I see darker themes today, more troubling places and no fear of going there; less nostalgia, more nuance.

Some works are so spare and experimental, I frankly couldn’t understand them. Others fit like an old slipper, worn ball-and-heel grooves, straps that slide between the toes, so familiar they’re like wearing nothing. You put on these pieces and you know just where they’ll slide over your consciousness and tuck into your experiences.

Lee Cataluna’s "Koloa," about an auntie whose whispered asides about her neighbors telegraph the painful stories of their lives, was that. I’ve got that auntie, and Cataluna helped me understand her better.

The essay on Kagimoto supported a concept I’ve often noticed: It takes someone with some perspective to reveal a culture to itself. Though he had family ties here and visited often, Kagimoto didn’t grow up here; this not-quite-of-the-island experience honed his eye for the icons that define local culture — slippers and Maneki-neko cats, plantation houses and saimin with "hardly any char siu nowdays."

Capital letter-loving poet Saijo, with whom wordy, worldly, Martha-not-Mary me could not have less in common, expressed my dichotomous feelings about communication: "I WANT THERE TO BE NO DIFF BETWEEN WHAT I THINK AND WHAT I SPEAK … NO BELLE LIT IDEAL — JUST UTTERANCE — LIKE BOW WOW LIKE MOO."

And he said it for me about writing, and being a writer, how the telling takes you over even as it alters what you think you’re trying to say: "I’M NOT SURE I LIKE THIS BUSINESS OF WRITING … IT IS DIRECTED THINKING AND I’M BEGINNING TO SEE DIRECTED THINKING LIES AT THE BOTTOM OF ALL OUR ILLS."

And yet, he wrote, "BECAUSE I WANT TO TELL YOU I WANT TO TELL YOU I WANT TO TELL YOU."

Even the short bios of each writer are interesting.

How to summarize an anthology? I stare at my notes: torn scraps of blue notepaper sent us by some charitable appeal or other, pink jellyfish and bubbles of water and lines of blue hosting my scribbled reminders. "Living between homes." "Dark." "Death: The thing that separates beauty from danger." "Promise unfulfilled." "Suicide averted." "You can’t always be." "Identity." "Mother/Dancer Flight." "Known after the fact." "Reading to build a life." "No fitting in."

They are as suitable a summation as any, I suppose.

As a lover of long, character-rich novels and deeply researched nonfiction, short stories and poems have to me seemed like literary scraps; I prefer to enter a more fully fleshed-out world and stay there awhile.

But this 280-page anthology proves short works can be valuable scraps, vital scraps, even if elusive, like that piece of paper with the phone number on it you just have to find. At best they leave you with a thought, an impression, an uncomfortable feeling, an aha that flirts with your mind’s edge, sometimes for days.

They don’t complete the circle, provide a road map, answer their own questions. But they keep you "trying" (as in "try wait, try go, try write, try, try") as you wait for that big fish tournament.