New program makes navigating Book & Music Fest easy

So much to read, so much music to enjoy, so little time to find it all.

If too much of a good thing could be considered a problem, it’s the only one you’ll have at the Hawaii Book & Music Festival, which returns this weekend to the Frank F. Fasi Civic Grounds and Honolulu Hale. Nearly 200 events are scheduled, from author appearances and panel discussions to music and hula performances.

There’s a talk-story session, healthy-living discussion, hula halau or favorite performer to appeal to nearly any taste. To help find the program you crave, a printed guide will be available at the festival, but this year there’s also a techie improvement: a mobile program that allows visitors to set up a calendar and schedule according to their own tastes.

Roger Jellinek, the festival’s executive director, is particularly excited about that. “You create your own festival with it,” he said.

“Personalize your itinerary and your schedule, and it populates on to your own calendar, on your phone. You can email it to anybody you want — your family, friends,” Jellinek notes. It’s very simple to use, once you play with it, and it’s very playful.”

All events are listed on the festival’s website, hawaiibookandmusicfestival.com. It’s possible to sort through the events in a variety of ways to develop a kind of “playlist.”

Only have one day to devote to the festival? Choose to filter by date and time.

Interested in biography, food and movies? Select the color-coded buttons.

Or sort through events that interest you, such as a presentation on the Hokule‘a, or a discussion of the #MeToo movement’s impact on authors.

Once you’re finished, then choose how you want to see it — options include on your phone, via email or in a printout.

Mission Memorial Auditorium will be the site of the main attractions, which include Adam Johnson, author of “The Orphan Master’s Son.” Johnson appears at 11:30 a.m. Sunday. His twisted tale of a North Korean who kidnaps Japanese citizens won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, and since then he’s won a National Book Award for a collection of short stories. “It’s pretty rare for people to get both,” Jellinek said.

Given the interest now in North Korea, “Orphan Master” continues to draw attention, especially when Johnson speaks, Jellinek said.

North Korea is also the subject of an appearance by Patricia Steinhoff, a sociologist at the University of Hawaii, who edited a book about the Yogodo Exiles.

“They were a crazy bunch of radicals who hijacked a plane and took it North Korea in order to get the North Koreans to help create a world revolution,” Jellinek said. “The North Koreans … brainwashed them in the North Korean version of communism and sent them on to Europe and other places to create problems.”

Steinhoff speaks at 4 p.m. Saturday.

WITH IMMIGRATION to the U.S. a hot topic, people might also be interested in hearing the winner of the 2018 Elliott Cades Award for Literature, Tyler McMahon, an English professor at Hawaii Pacific University. McMahon’s new novel, “Dream of Another America,” is about a Salvadoran immigrant trying to get to the U.S. who is double-crossed by a smuggler and abandoned to make his way through Mexico. Meanwhile, his family back in El Salvador is “shaken down.”

“It’s based on the odyssey and all the things that follow the odyssey,” said McMahon. “One character is trying to do a journey and has memory of war in his background, and then there’s the trials and tribulations of his family at home in his absence.”

McMahon will receive his award and read from his novel at noon Saturday, and then give a talk at 4 p.m., alongside fellow Peace Corps volunteer Peter Adler.

The writers’ maxim is “write what you know,” and McMahon followed it for his novel. An English major in college, he joined the Peace Corps shortly thereafter, working in rural El Salvador between 1999 and 2001. “I heard a lot of stories about people being incarcerated, and in-depth discussions about whether it was worse to be incarcerated by Mexican authorities or the American authorities,” he said.

Being isolated in Central America helped spur his writing, McMahon noted, encouraging him to work on a schedule but with no pressure.

“I did a lot of writing there and got a lot of things out of my system,” he said. “There were no deadlines, no pressure and there were no teachers to impress. It was just doing the work yourself and seeing what you enjoyed about the process.”

McMahon, who said he considers himself a “novelist by nature,” will share some aspects of the writing process at the festival.

Though he’s written short stories and essays, McMahon said he prefers to work on large-scale projects that he can “escape into,” actually writing out his first drafts in longhand.

“It’s too difficult to separate the creative impulse from the self-editing process on the screen,” he said. “I need to give myself permission to write recklessly first and take chances and not be self-conscious about it. I find that easier to do writing longhand.”

MUSIC IS, of course, a big part of the festival, and this year’s event features an appearance by Jake Shimabukuro, Hawaii’s favorite entertainer. While touring consistently, with more than 140 dates a year, the prolific ukulele phenom has put together an as-yet-untitled album that will come out later this year.

Like a writer, Shimabukuro keeps himself on a tight schedule, spending treasured time with family between tours but working on new material between concerts whenever possible.

“Every moment I’m sitting with an ukulele, composing,” he said in a call from New Orleans, where he was appearing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. “On the bus we’ve got guitars and other instruments that we kind of mess around with. When we’re on tour we’re constantly watching all these great concert DVDs.”

The new album will feature six original songs and his versions of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” The Zombies’ “Time of the Season,” Jimi Hendrix’ “If 6 was 9” and others, all with full orchestrations.

“I’m really happy about the sound of this record,” said Shimabukuro, who will perform at 4 p.m. Sunday with the classic Hawaiian group The Pandanus Club. “I think this is going to be a fun one.”