O’ahu Writers Retreat at Mokule’ia

07/16/2025

This Saturday, July 19 at 3pm, author and creative writing professor Donald Carreira Ching will be leading a casual writing workshop at Native Books! He'll guide writers through utilizing details of taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound to write to, and about, a place or memory. This workshop will follow a reading from Donald's new book, Blood Work and Other Stories. 📖

We welcome all writers, no matter your experience level! You'll get to take home new writing ideas, as well as the postcard featured in this post.

07/16/2025

Highly recommended.

This Saturday, July 19 at 3pm, author and creative writing professor Donald Carreira Ching will be leading a casual writing workshop at Native Books! He'll guide writers through utilizing details of taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound to write to, and about, a place or memory. This workshop will follow a reading from Donald's new book, Blood Work and Other Stories. 📖

We welcome all writers, no matter your experience level! You'll get to take home new writing ideas, as well as the postcard featured in this post.

06/06/2025

Keeping a culture alive, one step at a time

06/01/2025

05/25/2025

Join us in a Google Meet tomorrow (5/26) at noon. Mostly it's a gathering of alumni from the April retreat, but others are welcome. (Message me for the link or post your email address in comments.) A little coaching, a little kvetching, and a lot of klatching. And in the meantime, some photos...

05/07/2025

Oh how I would love to be at this event. I hope some of our alumni can attend and tell us all about it!

Send a message to learn more

04/15/2025

A message from one of our sponsors. I mean, teachers:

Aloha everyone,

My name is Donald Carreira Ching. I’ll be teaching two workshops at the retreat and reading from my new collection.

I was born and raised in Kahaluʻu on the island of Oʻahu and earned my PhD in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. My debut novel, Between Sky and Sea: A Family’s Struggle, was published by Bamboo Ridge Press in 2015 and was awarded the Ka Palapala Poʻokela award for excellence in literature, honorable mention, and is listed by Honolulu Magazine as one of Hawaiʻi’s “essential books.” My writing has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies locally and elsewhere, including StoryQuarterly, Every Day Fiction, and RHINO. In 2018, I was awarded the Elliot Cades award for Literature, Emerging Writer, Hawaiʻi’s most prestigious literary award.

If you’re interested in checking out my work, you can preorder my new collection, Blood Work and Other Stories, here: https://www.bambooridge.org/preorder-br127/

BLOOD WORK AND OTHER STORIES
What We Carry. What We Inherit. What We Leave Behind.

On the Windward side of O‘ahu, change moves fast—developers buy up neighborhoods, locals move away, and families struggle to hold on to what’s left. But beneath the surface of each loss is something more enduring: memory, love, and the small, steady acts of resilience that carry people forward.

Through finely drawn moments and layered landscapes, both physical and emotional, Blood Work and Other Stories offers a rare look at the complexities of local life in the islands, holding space for struggle while refusing despair.

In these seventeen haunting yet hopeful stories of family and survival, Donald Carreira Ching captures a Hawai‘i shaped by love, loss, and quiet resistance.

04/15/2025

Last questions before the retreat? Post them here. And here's an update from me. If you are local and want to do yoga on Tuesday morning, bring your mat!

Send a message to learn more

04/11/2025

Free and open to the public!

04/10/2025

Spotlighting Grant Faulkner, who will be teaching "flash" at the retreat and leading a fantastic Q & A about the #$*%! writing life. Here's a way to get to know him, and noodle around on his Substack!

Dear Readers,

04/06/2025

Well, *this* is exciting ... and a fantastic omen for the retreat starting in two weeks. This morning, an essay by our alum (and retreat coordinator) Christina Fang has appeared in none other than Travel & Leisure. Christina has agreed to share the story with us of how she got from last year' retreat to this moment of her first big published piece. Can't wait!

My time as an extra on the season 3 set strangely mirrored my two-sided experience as a traveler in Thailand—both as a spiritual seeker and a party chaser.