The meeting room of the Thelma Parker Memorial Public Library in Waimea will host a gathering of a particular kind of quiet: a two-hour invitation to write about the dead. The workshop, called "Ma-Ke Die Dead: Writing Poetry About Loved Ones Who Stay Gone," will be led by the state's newest poet laureate, a man who has spent decades learning that grief, like language, is best faced out loud.
The title is pure Hawaiʻi, a doubling of the point about death. The subject is the people who "stay gone," and the teacher is Lee A. Tonouchi, the writer known across the islands as "Da Pidgin Guerilla." He is the third poet laureate of Hawaiʻi, serving a three-year term since February 2026, a position established jointly by the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, the Hawaiʻi Council for the Humanities, and the state library system. He joined the office's short lineage, following Kealoha Wong and Brandy Nālani McDougall. He is a graduate of ʻAiea High School (class of 1990) and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
The workshop's subject is personal to him. When he was two years old, his mother died in a car/bus collision, and he survived. He has spent his career making space for Pidgin and the voices of those who speak it.
The workshop will draw on the technique he calls "talk story," a way of writing that leans on the cadence of real conversation, which he believes can help everyone find their poetic voice.
It is a fitting mission for a laureate whose vision for his three-year term he boils down to two letters: "B-U." As he put it when the appointment was announced, "For da past chree decades, it's been my mission to show Local people that dey should be proud of their Pidgin. Through da technique of talk story, I believe everybody can find their poetic voice." He sees his role as giving people the tools to become writers themselves, so they can represent their own communities and lived experiences.
That mission began as a boy's quiet rebellion. Teachers kept telling him he wrote like he talked, and meant it as an insult. He kept noticing the gap between the words he heard everywhere — bumbai, hammajang, da kine — and the words he was allowed to put on the page. He was inspired by the works of Eric Chock in the journal Bamboo Ridge, which showed that Pidgin could be written and studied seriously.
He founded the literary journal "Hybolics" in 1999 to make room for Pidgin and local stories. In 2005, at Hawaiʻi Pacific University, he designed and taught the first college-level course devoted entirely to Pidgin literature. His poetry collection "Significant Moments in the Life of Oriental Faddah and Son" won the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award; the children's picture book "Okinawan Princess: Da Legend of Hajichi Tattoos" won the Skipping Stones Honor Award; and in 2023 he received the American Association for Applied Linguistics Distinguished Public Service Award for raising public awareness about language issues and promoting linguistic social justice. His latest edited anthology, "Chiburu: Anthology of Hawaiʻi Okinawan Literature," appeared in 2023.
The Waimea workshop is a stop on the long laureate tour. Tonouchi is tasked with traveling the islands for readings and workshops, organizing community-engaged poetry sessions for different audiences each year, and gathering voices from across the islands. Those with questions can call the library at 808-887-6067.
There is something fitting about the setting. The Thelma Parker Memorial Public Library, opened in October 1978, sits on the campus of Waimea Elementary and Intermediate School and is named for Thelma Parker, who inherited Parker Ranch, the largest ranch on the island of Hawaiʻi. That a workshop about writing through loss should land there feels natural.
When the two hours draw to a close, participants will likely leave with pages full of words for people they have carried silently for years. That is the point of the "Ma-Ke Die Dead" project: to treat grief not as something to hold in and carry on, but as something to hand over to paper, and to let it teach the rest of us that sharing is okay.