Don Mitchell | writer / photographer / book designer / anthropologist

Tsunami 2010

On 27 February, 2010, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake rocked Chile, and sent a tsunami across the Pacific towards Hawai’i. Would it be large? Small? The NOAA image above shows an early prediction. 6 AM. Sirens. I’m lying awake, ready to get up, drink some coffee, go downtown and run 10k along the bayfront, where it’s…

.308 Winchester

The summer after my father lost his business in the great tsunami of 1960 we were cash-poor. I was just 17 and managed to get a job with the Hawai’i State Department of Fish & Game, which oversaw much of Mauna Kea, a large mountain with a lot of wildlife on it, out of a…

Easter Trolling

On Easter 2025 I found myself remembering an Easter thirty-seven years ago. Back in the eighties, my girlfriend Sharon and I started going over to the foot of Ferry Street to join the people fishing in the Niagara River, these being people whose circumstances didn’t permit boat ownership or trips to fishing streams. On our…

My Rolex

Before I gave it to my son, I used to put on my fifty-year old stainless steel Rolex Oyster Perpetual when I needed to impress someone. I’d take it out of the drawer and shake it a few times to get it running, snap the metal clasp in place, trying not to catch any arm…

Five Years Later…

Right now I’m in the process of looking for a literary agent to represent my novel Mauka. Agents often ask for a “logline,” which is a one-sentence description. Here’s my long one: “When an unexpected letter asking forgiveness for a gang rape she’d kept secret for sixty years sends June Nakashima angrily back to Hilo…

Deconstructing a myth in the bush

My story collection’s title (A Red Woman Was Crying) comes from a myth told by the Nagovisi people of Bougainville Island. The first chapter in the collection is the myth. In the myth and the deconstruction, reference is made to “slit gongs,” or “tui.” A RED WOMAN WAS CRYING Told by Tupuua, 1969 A red…

Shibai: Remembering Jane Britton’s Murder

Shibai’s website In 2017, the 1969 murder of my fellow Harvard grad student and friend Jane Britton took over my life. (The Wikipedia article is incomplete and misleading in some ways, but it’s a useful summary.) The case had been cold for years. It was solved — after nearly half a century — but along…

Script Carrera

I went out to the garage where I put some metal Diebold bank cabinets that I bought years ago at a surplus furniture place over on Main Street. They’d followed me around from house to house. My marriage had disintegrated. I’d moved and was setting up my new place. What I was looking for in…

Nuclear Families

Seventy-nine years ago today (9 August 1945) the bomb known as “Fat Man” fell away from the B-29 bomber “Bockscar,” and detonated about 1,500 feet over Nagasaki. Fat Man exploded with the force of about 21 kilotons of TNT, immediately killing somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 Japanese, mostly civilians. I was just over two years…

A Tale of Two youtube Channels

Can there be such a thing as an epistolary blog posting? Sure! Here’s one that played out in February, 2023. First up, an exchange with someone from the youtube channel Murder Murder News. Hello — Earlier today I was doing a reverse image search for some of my Jane Britton portraits, and I noticed that…

Sharp Edges

I belong to a Facebook ground called “Fraudulent Archaeology Wall of Shame,” in which people post astonishingly nutty “archaeology” that they find out there on the web, but especially on Facebook. Giants, mudflood, Tartaria, aliens made the pyramids, and so on and so on ad nauseum. It’s completely wacky stuff. But a few days ago…

Boom Box (for my mother on her 119th birthday)

When this woman and I moved into the new place and we each started unpacking our things I was suprised to see this pink boombox, not decorator pink, but little girl pink and I said, What the hell is that? She said, What does it look like, it’s a boombox. I got it at…

Life Up on the Ridge

Although there were many plusses to our life in Hilo (in my childhood home) in the end we realized that Hilo wasn’t the best place for us. So in 2020 we sold the house on Wailuku Drive that had been in my family for 75 years, and moved to Freeville NY, which is just outside…

How Much Of This Is Real?

Last week I was having dinner with my friend Bob, who hadn’t seen A Red Woman Was Crying. Bob works in network television. He’s the editor of a series and therefore is always dealing with the show’s reality (captured image sequences and sounds) which he arranges and rearranges and modifies according to his judgement about…

Bougainville and China aren’t so far apart

A few weeks ago, I surfed over to The Nervous Breakdown to see whether anybody had commented on a “self-interview” I’d posted. TNB lets writers have a lot of fun with the self-interviews. Some go for versions of stand-up routines, some are serious, and some — like mine — are meant to be read as…

About my writing (2014)

Back in 2014 I participated in an online group sharing their writing processes. We all answered three questions and posted our answers. Ten years later they are still reasonable answers, although the novel I mention went back into the archives and I have another one done that I’m sending around. I have a story collection…

Peter Matthiessen is gone

Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014) died today. I admired him greatly. This week I’ve been composing a three postings, and they’re all in the loose, undisciplined going-everywhere state that means they’re not close to being ready. One of them exists only in my head. I think about it while I’m walking…