 out to you, John. And what it means is that the water will find a way, and that's what happens to bigotry, and it finds a way. This is Shantek, Hawaii. Community matters here. You guessed it. You guessed it on the first try. Okay. That's Roger Gellinick camera on Roger drinking water. There it is. Okay, got it. He's the founder and organizer of the annual Hawaii Book and Music Festival, and I'm his host today. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. This is Community Matters. And we're going to sort of inquire with Roger about what all this is. It's the 13th annual Hawaii Book and Music Festival, and it is on May 5th and 6th, which is what? A couple of weeks away, actually. Three weeks away, yeah. Let's not rush things. Three weeks away. On May 5th and 6th, what days of the week are they? That's Saturday and Sunday. Okay. This is the 13th time you did that. Couldn't you skip from 12 to 14 just to avoid the 13th? No, we want to go through this. It's like a trial of fire. So we have our disaster behind us. I'm sure you'll be fine. Because the first 12 were really terrific, Roger. We did have an almost disaster last week. We had a company, it should be nameless, that said, oh, we'll get you 100 volunteers. Don't worry. It takes about 100 volunteers to make it work. And then last week they said, oh, sorry, doesn't look as though we're going to be able to do that. A month out. So we had to scramble. It took a week to scramble, put together a campaign. You know, it's funny you should say that because this morning in my reading, my various things that I get, there was an article about a point in American culture called bailing out. Bailing is the word. Bailing. Bailing. And it's permissible, you know. It's a day before you get a call. Sorry, can't do that. Bye. It's altogether too much bailing going on. Anyway, got fixed. But you survived. You will survive. Great. I want to talk about the Book and Music Festival because I want to get my head straight on it. I'd like to sort of come together with you on exactly what it means and where it fits in the landscape of these kinds of activities. You look around Hawaii, you know, you have lots of cultural things, lots of different cultural orientations having events. You have a lot of intellectual events, you have a lot of performing arts going on. You know, gee whiz, you know, if you look at the average week in Oahu alone, I can't speak so much to the Abraham Islands, but it happens there too. You know, there's probably that come to my attention 10, 12, 15 things going on. And actually my sense of it, you know, in my age now is there's more of this. We as a community put together more programs. We come together more often. We sort of celebrate more of our own shtick here in Hawaii. And this is a wonderful thing. So question, where is the Book and Music Festival? Well, let me give a little piece of history. I got into this scene about 2005. At that time, there were two projects for a book festival. One was for-profit, one was non-profit. But they were going for the same sponsors. And the sponsor said, it's ridiculous. We can't sustain two book festivals in Honolulu. Go sort it out. Ironically, both of them had come to me to ask them to program their festival, unbeknownst to each other. The non-profit model one, and when I looked at the paperwork of the for-profit one, I found that the executive director, the wannabe executive director was going to pay himself literally the entire budget that we have every year. It's not sustainable, I can tell you. I can assure you it's not sustainable. I spent six months just putting that together. So book festivals are in major cities across the country, across the world. They're actually increasing in number. This is not the only one. There are many of them. I get a lot of push emails from other festivals. They're all over the world now. Some of them are enormous. Over 100,000 people show up. There's some really surprising ones. Tucson, you don't think of as a cultural hub of the world. They have 125,000 people show up. We get between 20,000 and 30,000, and we think that's pretty good. It's pretty good for a lot anyway. The National Book Festival in Washington, DC gets over 100,000 people in one day. The oldest one in the country is in Miami, and they get well over 100,000, and so on. What defines Book and Music Festival? Not only here, but the ones you've been describing. The standard model does not have music as a major element. They do some music, obviously. You can't have a festival really without music. But the standard model is for mainly New York publishers to send their current promotion, authors that they're promoting to the festival. So the program essentially is free to the festival. It's promotional? Yes. For new books? For new books, books just published. Now, they don't send them here for two reasons. One is it's too expensive, and the second one is we no longer have any bookstores here or very few. Everything's online, if at all. Well, we lost 17 border stores in one day in 2011. I used to spend a lot of time with borders. So our festival is actually quite different from most of them. It's become much more a kind of free TEDx theater of ideas. It's not all books. Our music program is very strong, mainly Hawaiian music and hula, which not many other festivals have access to that kind of regional tradition. But the fact is that Hawaiian music and song is really important here, and everyone likes it. It defines us as a state. It's also a remarkable part of the Hawaiian Renaissance. We are the beneficiaries of the immersion programs, because now it's been going 30 years. In fact, we have a couple of sessions on just on that subject alone. They're now producing a steady stream of people go from kindergarten to PhD in Hawaiian. We no longer do Hawaiian history if you don't know Hawaiian or if you don't have access to translation. Every year, there may be half a dozen books that are published, not just here, but universities that specialize in indigenous material. In Hawaiian? No, they're in English, but they're about Hawaiian history. So they're not that readable often. They're professional books to further a professional career. But they're extremely interesting because they reveal whole new aspects that we never knew about. So this Book and Music Festival here, you founded it and it's an extension of your, was it New York? You were an editor in New York, a book editor. So you're in Hawaii and you have a special skill, a special experience, and this is part then of your editing, your personal editing tradition. I've been involved in publishing since the 1960s. Did they have books then? Yes, they had books then. Gutenberg had been around for a while. So I was involved as a journalist. I was an editor on the New York Times Book Review. I was editor-in-chief of the New York Times Book Company. I've had a literary agency for the last 20 years. So when I've been involved in a publishing house on Maui, it was a metaphysical publishing house. It was a national distribution. So I've been involved in every aspect. So to me it's a very... It's a natural. It's a natural, yes. And you're appealing to whom? And maybe this has changed over the past 13 years, but who are you appealing to? Who is your audience? Who is the crowd that you want to bring into this? I'm not sure we know. Because we do an onsite survey for about 10% of our attendees. And there are all sorts. And we do programming for toddlers and we do programs for centenarians. We even tell you how to die. This year it's especially relevant, because of death with dignity. Yes, well, we have that. So we've actually amplified the Orthodox book programming with theme programs. So we have two days on health issues with about 50 top-notch doctors and experts on health issues. So that's not a book thing. And that's what I think I want to get from you. This has migrated from pure books, like the models you described on the mainland, has become a center for thought and community issues and expertise, a center for coming together on so many things. So why have you moved that way? Do you find it inconsistency or do you find it all connected? The original reason was economic. When we started, Hawaii probably had the most vigorous regional publishing scene in the country because of our isolation and there were a bunch of publishers. Then when publishing went digital and with the great recession, it really knocked the local publishers for a loop. They started publishing very few titles. They became very conservative. There was no place to display their books because the bookstores went away. So we had to do something to sustain that. So what we do, for instance, on the health program we have, we'll bring in a keynote speaker as a kind of anchor. So this year we have John Kabat-Zinn, who's probably the world's leading expert on meditation and mindfulness. And so a number of the panels in the health program are connected to that issue. So that's the way we bridge the... It's like a think-tech all at one time and place. It's like a concentrated, high-octane kind of think-tech because you have all this happening all at the same time. Pretty much everything you cover in think-tech is... We do, one way or another, in two days. Yeah, very compressed and available. You walk around 50 feet away there's some other great topic or conversation going on and you can get a PhD in a matter of hours. Well, we try to make it as interactive as possible. We require that 20 minutes of every hour is Q&A. That's good ideas. We don't let people lecture. We try not to let them... Some people say, oh, ask me a question and start off that way, but we don't permit that. They have to give at least a brief presentation to get the thing going. Over the years, I've been involved a couple of times in the book and music panels and whatnot. I was always impressed with the quality of the speakers and the careful selection. I guess only a book editor can do this. Careful selection of topics. It is a kind of book festival in the sense that these are very important topics with people who could... If they haven't written a book, they could write a book. The intellectual leader is available, the way you have to bring them in, into this crucible in the back of City Hall where you can learn so much in such a short amount of time. There's an old joke about... It says that 80% of people who graduate from high school never read a book again. 100% of them know they have a book in them. What percent write that book, though? That's a small percentage. This has become an increasing... Part of what we do is that self-publishing has become respectable. At least three UH Press, Watermark, Mutual Publishing, the old most established publishers now run self-publishing operations. They don't do rubbish. They do memoirs of somebody who had an important life. It's not so much that a person does write the book or not. It's the idea that in the 21st century you have the possibility of writing a book. So you see your life maybe a little differently. You walk down the street, have an experience and say, I could write about that. If I choose to be disciplined over it and do whatever kind of self-publishing I can find, I can write a book. Therefore, your life is potentially preparation for this hypothetical book. Well, a lot of people towards the end of their careers want to know what did it all mean. A book is kind of a way of painting a portrait of yourself. A legacy thing. It gives you some meaning to your life. Provide the world with a gift. I don't think it's a wonderful thing. Certainly your wife and your favorite nephew then have to read it. But who knows, maybe you can give value to someone else. All the technical aspects of bookmaking are available to anyone who wants to write a book. It's extremely difficult to get a self-published book adopted by the world because they can't find you. We like to review books here. As a matter of fact, that's your show. To review books with people that let everybody see the strum and the drum of the author, the grease paints and the crowd and all that stuff and smell him and smell what he's about. That's very valuable. Behind your questions is another question. Why do people come to a book festival? They want to hear the voices. Even if they've read the book already, they want to hear the voice of the person I think it's a grand idea to sort of evolve strictly a book festival into a festival that covers this kind of intellectual activity. You can meet the people, you can hear the voices. After all, we don't live in a world where a lot of people, as you said, read books after high school. But they do read social media. They do watch tons of TV. They do have that interaction. In our world today, you have to go there in order to be part of that conversation. We reckon 60% of our attendees come as families. That means that it's a very safe, beautiful place. Once you arrive, you can all go in your different directions. But when they take the survey, the most frequent response, we ask them, why did you come? They said to bring our kids to expose them to reading, to books, and to performance, to live performance. Because you get less and less of that in school now. It's touchy-feely. It's actually engaged with the minds of people directly, flesh and blood. So we're going to take a short break, Roger, as you know. We'll be back in a minute. We'll talk about the specific programs, the specific venues on May 5th and 6th behind City Hall at the Book and Music Festival this year. We'll be right back. I love music and tape live there. So we're running. Apparently the State Library cannot get that off the show. Most of our think-tacks show where the drone leads before we talk. And this is a movie that came out last year. So the subjects remain in tune. The more emerging technology and the reason is of drones as they might apply here in Hawaii. But we don't, you know, there's hips. Education, legislation, technology, public safety, all the things that you might want to do. We'll try one year to do books to move the experts from across the country. So join us at noon on every Thursday. And we'll have a new subject. And we'll have new faces to move the experts. In case you were wondering, in case you were sort of examining your experience here this afternoon, that's Roger Jelenick. He's a book editor from New York, actually. And he is the founder and operator of the Hawaii Annual Book and Music Festival. This year it's taking place, as it does, on the grounds of City Hall, behind City Hall, on May 5th and 6th. It's the 13th annual one. We've been talking about where it fits in the landscape of this kind of activity. But it is unique, for sure, in its own category. And I'd like to get a handle on what's going to happen so that anyone listening, you know, can sort of map out where he wants to, where she wants to go on May 5th or 6th to get the maximum, you know, result. We've had a really interesting new development this year. We've installed a new scheduling program on the website, which enables you... you click on... it's geared to the schedule, not to the data about the people in the festival. So you go to the website, HawaiiBookandMusicFestival.com, and you press Click on Schedule, and up there's a list of what's happening that day, and you click on what's happening at the specific time that you're looking. Cool. And you click on... and then it's color-coded, according to category of the kind of event that it is. And so if you're interested in YA, or if you're interested in philosophy or interested in politics, they all have different colors. And you click... if you're interested in politics, it's one of... a politic one, and immediately there appears the names and images of the speakers at an event at a particular time. And you can create your own itinerary that way. You can connect immediately to social media to tell your friends that's where you're going to be. It's a really remarkable program, it's very dynamic. This is all geared to phone use. What happened was at the end of last year, on Thursday we had an elaborate post-mortem. We looked at the analytics on the website and realized that most people were looking at the program on the phones now, no longer on computers. And that they were most interested in what was going on at a specific time. And so we... we went completely away from what we used to do, which is a very static, solid-looking schedule and ABC of authors, and went to this very dynamic thing. That's great. And it's really fabulous. Well, the thing is that although it's a fair amount of geography there behind City Hall, everything is close to each other. And you can make a beeline from one thing to another thing, even if it's across the field in only a matter of seconds. So you can cover a lot of ground. You can cover a lot of ground. It takes about five minutes to go from one side to the other. So it's a big side. Yeah, so you can have your kids go this way and there's food in case you need sustenance while you're going around there. I always need sustenance myself. So, okay, so who are the headliners? We put our headliners into the Mission Memorial Auditorium. It's the only indoor venue we have. It seats about 350. And we have a really wide variety. Kicking off Saturday morning is a big book on the Hockolair by Jennifer Allen and John Bilderberg. Jennifer Allen is the daughter of the famous football coach, George Allen, and she was on the Hockolair for much of the voyage, taking kind of the authorized version of what happened. And John Bilderberg took a lot of wonderful photographs. We hope to get Nino Thompson there and a couple of navigators. And there'll be some OEV video. They did a lot of video of the thing. So that's the first event. That's really good. It can be very popular. Then we have Bill Finnegan who got a Pulitzer Prize for a memoir called The Surfing Life. We have a YA author named Jessica Ewn whose book was called Everything, Everything was on New York Times Best Settlers for almost a year and the movie was made of it last year. And she's written another book. Another movie is being made of it and we're showing that movie in the State Library on Saturday afternoon. She's flying in, arrives at 12.30 and the movie starts at 2.00 and she should be there by 3.30. By the skin of a cheese. Typical logistics for us. We have a number one best-selling romance writer, one of I think a dozen who are in the Romance Writers Hall of Fame. She's actually a Harvard graduate and she's written an endless series of romances with one set of characters. Usually authors are very articulate. And they have a way with the language and they have a way of communicating and it's a thrill for them to actually talk to their audience instead of just writing. Well these are authors who are very experienced at this kind of event because part of their success isn't that big. Promoting their books. We even have a play. I hope you bring some of them down here on the show. Well they only arrive on the Friday. So if you want to give me think tech for Friday afternoon. There you go. You were saying you also have... We also have a play, The Houses Goods that he wrote about Henry Opuhaya who was the first Hawaiian to go back to... Not back, he went to the East Coast in order to get the missionaries to come to Hawaii. Interesting. This is the first shot in what is to be the 200th anniversary of the missionaries into 2020. And there's a whole series of events that we will do with them. So we do a lot of partnerships of that kind. We do a lot of Hawaiian culture. We have one, we've always done that. We've always had one, we call them pavilions. They're tents that are 30 by 30. They hold about 100 people each. It's comfortable especially when it's very hot sunny which it was I think last year. And this makes it much more comfortable. So because of the immersion programs we now have a steady stream of books that we can present. We're usually in panels. So we're developing a core of public intellectuals who know how to talk about a whole revisionist movement in Hawaiian history. Yeah. It's not only history, it's current sociological... Well, for instance, we have one panel with Aaron Sala and Nogomaya on how the movie Moana is being translated into Hawaiian. And I chose that because I always watched the Mary Monarch Festival on TV. And there was Aaron Sala explaining what he was doing to commentate it. I got to get him, pick up the phone, and he said, sure. Well, I hear you talk about this and I've heard you talk about it before. And I get the impression that this is a huge amount of work. If you look at the schedule and look at all the venues you're filling, it's enough work to fill up a whole year. It is. And you're picking up the phone all year long, every day, to try to shape this and tune it and frame it so that it works. Well, as a literary agent, I'm used to a life of rejection. It should be a lesson for everybody. So it doesn't affect me. It doesn't bother me that when something doesn't work. And a lot of these people are really busy. And they have plans. They go elsewhere. I'm always annoyed that they're not there that weekend, but it happens next year. But what is the test for you? What are the parameters to make that call? Who are you calling? Why are you calling this person instead of that person? It's actually not that mysterious. We select books that have been published in the previous year. So that narrows the choices down considerably. So it's not an arbitrary, you know, what I'm dreaming up should be talked about. It's pretty much guided by what's being published. So there's a need on the part of the publishers. There's a need on the part of the authors to be present and to make themselves available. Where it becomes more a question of real choice and real selection is in the theme programs that we do. And we do a number of them. So, for instance, we have one venue dedicated. It's called Wellness. And it has 40 or 50 top-notch doctors, experts, policymakers on a dozen leading health issues that affect Hawaii, from climate change to homelessness to opioid crisis to teenager suicide and so on. And I don't invent that list. I have an extremely knowledgeable and connected mentor in Ira Zunin who runs a clinic in Honolulu. And he just knows everyone. And so when I sit down with him and we dream up the list of what we want to cover, he just knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. And over three months it just begins to take shape. So we have a really impressive list this year. Sure. And you're getting information about other topics from other kind of consinguity. I'm also getting a lot of people who want to be in and who approach you. Approach me. We have about two minutes left. I'd like to give you the highlights list of what's going on. You have a copy. Can you just run through what's happening in what venue or at least some of the things that are happening in each venue? We have ten venues. And they are competing for attention with each other. So we have two venues that are dedicated to current authors in their books and panels. And the panels range anything from a me-to feminist panel to a YA genre, how that genre is changing to panels around, you know, specific topics. There's a biography of Larry Mayhouse. So we have a dialogue about that. And we'll have two illustrators talking about the art and illustration and so on. We have a very lively, cakey stage that has nonstop entertainment, a lot of music. Mr. Steve, who's the national host for PBS Kids. It's his fifth year here. He's a Pied Piper. He's extraordinary. One of the biggest events we have is a free concert every afternoon featuring Jake Shimabukuro. Oh, that would be very popular. We expect three to five thousand people to come for that. You don't see him free very often. We have the Hawaiian culture, the program that I mentioned. We have storytellers, professional storytellers. These are not telling stories to kids, they're telling stories to you and me. And we have storytellers and children as well. So it's a huge variety. Huge variety. And it goes on. A lot of music, a lot of first-rate music. And local music. What appeals to me is when you say festival about this, you really mean it. People come and they celebrate this. And they may know, like the music, they may know one of these venues, one of the events that are happening, but they don't know the others. And all of a sudden you're expanding their consciousness into other areas. And that's the real gift. You draw them down for one thing, but then you hand them a smorgasbord. And they go home a little more aware about the world. And I'm the only one that knows where something's not working. Yeah. Because it's so complicated. Well, Roger, I look forward. I'll come down there this time. And I'll see you then, if not sooner. And everybody should write it down. 15th and 6th, 13th annual Hawaii Book and Music Festival. A lot of work goes into it. A lot of people involved in it. A lot of strains of awareness and activity and engagement. Really worth, raise the quality of your life on that weekend. And check out the website, HawaiiBookandMusicFestival.com. Thank you, Roger. Thank you. Very nice. You want to do a fiber on this? Okay. Behind the scenes. What's that mean? Is it as good for you as it was for me? As soon as you cut it through. Turn the cameras.