Don Mitchell | Don Mitchell

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…