Announcing Whale Road Press

Word to Ride Us Home

Dear Readers,

I said in my last post that I had an announcement. If you’ve been waiting with bated breath, your wait is over! If not, I still hope you’ll join me in celebrating the news that after some deliberation about my best path forward in sharing my work, I’ve decided to found my own press.

Whale Road Press is inspired by the Old English kenning for the sea, called the “whale road.”

What is a kenning?

Kennings were two word metaphors used in Anglo Saxon culture as a means of referring to people or objects without naming them directly. Sometimes they are little riddles in a compact form – the reader may often have to put some work in to understand what’s being referred to. In this sense, kennings may seem exclusive or secretive, but I prefer to see them as esoteric. The effort required to understand them requires proper focus. In this way, understanding is earned, and because metaphors are associative, resonant beings, the meanings of kennings unfurl in bespoke ways every time they are uttered or heard. This creates ripe conditions for a perfect storm of revelation and awe when we both realize the absolute otherness of the myriad expressions of life beyond the border of our skin, while also knowing bone-deep that we are connected to them all.

To “ken” means to know, and kennings return us to a time when the English language was more deeply rooted to rock, tree, and river. If Whale Road Press has a mission statement, that’s it: words to carry us home.

I also had in mind the concept known in ōlelo Hawai’i as kaona, “hidden meaning.” Hawaiian is an incredibly sophisticated language where words have multiple hidden meanings. For instance, the word piko in my book title has multiple meanings ranging from a hat without a crown, the crown of a head, the summit of a hill, a belly button, and the source of creation. To understand kaona requires the listener to exercise multiple levels of awareness at once. The speaker is also able to communicate the mundane and secret at the same time. This is my aim for the books I will publish. I hope to disrupt the tyranny of the linear narrative with feathered language, night-blooming words, phrases born in jade mountains that return all your romantic longings with the rush of a waterfall.

In Hawai’i, I have refreshed my lineage. This is where my legacy will be born. Here I combine kenning and kaona and invite you all to join me on the Whale Road, the great ocean joining all the islands we all find ourselves upon at some points in our lives. Here you will find words to help you remember the holy songs.

Before I sign off, I’m sharing below part of the introduction to, “Piko: A Return to the Dreaming,” which you can expect from Whale Road Press sometime in 2023.

Kō aloha la ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Jen

Piko: A Return to the Dreaming

Introduction

In earlier times people believed a culture was maintained and a life could be saved by stories and ceremony. Some still do. I am one of those people, a living testament to how story can heal a sick body and a damaged soul.

In the old days I would have begun by reciting my lineage, announcing the names of my ancestors to the spirit world and summoning their support as I began this narrative, calling them in generation by generation going back to the ancient stories who tell us we arrived on Earth from the stars. While I know the names of a few generations, before that is blank.

I am the descendant of Europeans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean, migrants who left their villages for reasons not passed down, a daughter of lost forests. Orphaned blood travels through my arteries and veins. I feel the weak pulse of lost streams and rivers on the other side of the Atlantic where my grandfathers hunted fowl in the marsh, raised sheep, cut wood; while my grandmothers stoked fires, spun wool and wove, ears tuned to birdsong and children’s laughter, sleeping and waking to sun cycles.

This book is a ceremony, an umbilical cord of words to help humans reconnect to the piko, the navel of the world in Hawaiian where creation is birthed.

Inspired by storyteller Martin Shaw’s book, Wolferland, beginning April 1, 2021, Fool’s Day, I sat at the edge of two small anchialine ponds in the Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau, the Place of Refuge, on Moku o Keawe, known in modern times as Hawai’i Island, and told stories to the water from many cultures: Hawaiian, Haitian, Irish, Inuit, Greek, Sumerian, and Shinto. Day after day, I wove myself into the place with words given to me by Earth. I opened my senses. I watched. I listened. I smelled, touched and tasted. I felt...and I wrote.

As the ceremony evolved I found myself weaving my own lived experience of trauma into the narrative along with observations on the climate crisis, ecocide, and the legacy of colonialism in Hawai’i. This book is the resolution of my own trauma through reconnection with nature and the words here are the result of the sacred exchange that occurred between me and the elements. My wish is that this book moves you as much as the events related here moved me, and that you find here a guide that will lead you to your own internal compass as we collectively navigate the massive transformations occurring now on Earth.

Despite the illusion of density and permanence we’ve created through following a path away from nature, even today, with the night sky smeared by artificial illumination and smog, there are some cultures where people can recite their lineage back to the stars, speaking the names as the poems they are, cell memories that bind the speaker to the truth of where we came from and where we are going. Everything is in continual motion, even when it looks still. We are nature. Stillness in motion. Motion in stillness. The illusion is slipping. More of us hear the stars call.

I may not know the stories or the ways of my ancestors when they were still indigenous, connected to a place through relationship to plants, rivers, streams, deer, bear and boar, but I am here now. I am proof of my lineage, and while I may long for what was lost, I will no longer define my life by it. I will use the body my ancestors gave me to learn the stories directly from nature. I claim connection with the stars and proclaim my lineage through the living entity of a language sourced from within my bones and blood, held within the greater matrices of forest, ocean, lava field and waterfall. Words are spells. My hope is this book will help humans reconnect to our primal origins and realign with our divine potential through surrendering to the greater powers of nature and the dreamtime.

Bibliography: Wolferland, by Martin Shaw, Cista Mystica Press.

Whale Photo by Gabriel Dizzi on Unsplash