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Words and Wine

Words and Wine – Monthly Author Event

Each month Kona Stories hosts an event with local and traveling authors. This event happens the First Tuesday evening of the month starting at 6 PM. Authors are available to talk story while you are getting your plate of appetizers and glass of complimentary wine. Authors then give a 15 minute talk about their book and themselves, the writing and publishing process or a short reading from the book. After all the authors presentations there is a time for individual questions and book signings with the authors. Expect 3 -4 authors to attend each month and the evening to wrap up around 8 PM. Dress is Aloha casual wear.

If you wish to pre-order any of these books, click the links below and during check-out choose the "Pick up in Store" and "Pay in Store" to avoid any additional shipping fees.

September 6th Authors

At various times in his life, Alan McNarie has been a Missouri farm kid, an undergraduate English major, a teacher on the Navajo reservation, a graduate student, a potter, a frozen yogurt salesman, a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, a college professor, and a paralegal specializing in family violence cases. He was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri for writing a novel: Yeshua, which won the Editor’s Book Award and was published by Pushcart Press. But for the past quarter-century or so, he’s been a writer/journalist on the Big Island of Hawaii, where he’s published hundreds of articles in magazines and newspapers including the Hawaii Tribune Herald, Hana Hou, Ke Ola, Abstract and Honolulu Weekly; for years, he was the senior investigative journalist, then Senior Contributing Editor, for Ka’u Landing and its successor, the Hawaii Island Journal until it closed in 2008. 

While he was doing all that hard-core investigative journalism, however, a wildly creative new novel was simmering in his head. It has finally burst forth as The Soul Keys.

Alan McNarie’s new novel doesn’t just bend the rules: it explodes reality and puts it back together again. The setting is the contemporary United States, but it’s an America where white rats pop in and out of dreams, ghosts hitch rides in Winnebago motorhomes, and the Oakland Bay Bridge seriously considers becoming a dragon.

 

In this world, an unassuming aquarium keeper named Sander Keynes and his girlfriend, Jenny Duenckel, discover an empty flying saucer sitting on an Ozark riverbank. When he gets home, Sander makes another discovery: there’s an armadillo in his bathtub—and it can talk, and it has no idea how it’s gotten there.  Sander, Jenny and the armadillo, whose name is Dick, soon find themselves on a wild journey from Springfield, Missouri, to a secret military base on the Big Island of Hawaii—all the while being pursued by the FBI, the CIA, the Centers for Disease Control, NASA (no, not that NASA), mad scientists (well, pretty disgruntled ones, anyway), the tabloids, Jenny’s homicidal ex-husband, and someone with a French accent. Along the way, they learn why all butterflies are insane, how a real psychic makes a living, how to literally travel on the wings of a song—and how to find the Three Keys to Unlock the Soul and End the World.

 

Rosa Say is a workplace culture coach determined to reinvent our workplaces value by value, making them healthier and more rewarding for us all. As founder of Say Leadership Coaching, Rosa is hired as an expert coach on values-based management, and as a change agent leading business in organizational culture design. She is widely known for her work leading the Managing with Aloha movement within Hawai‘i and internationally, work which draws from her 30-year career in the resort hospitality industry and residential resort development.

Initially published in 2004, Managing with Aloha is considered a classic work which describes how Hawaii’s values can be brought to the art of business universally. The book is widely used as an indispensable resource for managers, for Rosa is their most vocal advocate and champion. Rosa publishes the popular Managing with Aloha blog for workplace culture-building, and her ebooks put valuable how-to in the hands of the Alaka‘i Managers she is committed to mentoring.

Managing with Aloha explores nineteen different Hawaiian values, and demonstrates how managers can bring these universal values into every kind of business practice today. With many examples drawn from her own successful career as a manager, Say eloquently shares her tested common-sense approaches to blending social and economic goals of business enterprise in ways that define a healthy sensibility for working and living

Every day, somewhere in the world, Aloha comes to life. As we live and breathe, our Aloha Spirit can define the epitome of sincere, gracious, and intuitively perfect customer service given from one person to another. If they are to prosper with honor and integrity, managers everywhere must proactively perpetuate this culture as a way of business life, and Managing with Aloha shows us how.

 

Carol Alena Aronoff is a Ph.D. psychologist, teacher and writer who co-founded SAGE, a psycho-spiritual program for elders, helped guide a Tibetan Buddhist Meditation center, taught Eastern spirituality and healing practices; imagery, meditation, and women's health at San Francisco State University. She guided Healing in Nature retreats in Hawaii and the southwest, and had a counseling practice in Marin County for many years.  She co-authored "Practical Buddhism: The Kagyu Path" with Ole Nydahl in 1989 and edited five books and four meditation booklets on Tibetan Buddhism. Carol Aronoff published a textbook: "Compassionate Healing: Eastern Perspectives" in 1992. Her poetry has been published in Comstock Review, Potpourri, Poetic Realm, Poetica, Mindprints, Dream Fantasy International, Beginnings, Hawaii Island Journal, In Our Own Words, Theater of the Mind, Animals in Poetry, From the Web, HeartLodge, Out of Line, Sendero, Buckle&, Iodine, Asphodel, Tiger 's Eye, Nomad's Choir, Cycla mens & Swords, The New Verse News, and Avocet. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including: Women Write Resistance; Before There is Nowhere to Stand; Malala; The Four Seasons; Bearing The Masks; Secrets and Dreams; Shattered; Elementary, My Dear and Shattered. She received a prize in the 1999/2000 Common Ground spiritual poetry contest, judged by Jane Hirshfield, and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She won theTiger's Eye contest on the writing life and has participated a number of times in Braided Lives, a collaboration of artists and poets as well as in SKEA’s Art and Nature event,  Ekphrasis: Sacred Stories of the Southwest, and (A) Muses Poster Retrospective for the 2014 Taos Fall Arts Festival. She was judge for the 2008 Tiger's Eye poetry contest. A chapbook of Native American/Hawaiian poems, Cornsilk, was published by Indian Heritage Council in 2004, and her illustrated poetry book, The Nature of Music, was published by Pelican Pond in 2005. An expanded, illustrated Cornsilk was published in 2006, Her Soup Made the Moon Weep, in 200, Blessings from an Unseen World in 2013 and and Dreaming Earth’s Body, in 2015. Currently, Dr. Aronoff resides in a rural area of Hawaii--working her land, meditating in nature and writing.

Dreaming Earth’s Body is a remarkable collaboration that seems to spring from a single consciousness.

Carol Alena Aronoff’s poems evoke the spirit of nature as well as the personal inner spirit. She reflects deeply on the nature of everyday experience and the transformative opportunities offered by listening to and acknowledging Gaia. The text is spare and direct, yet lyrical in its perfect descriptive beauty.

Betsie Miller-Kusz’s stunning paintings are powerful visual evocations of Earth’s beneficence and beauty. They form a kind of narrative cycle that reveals itself simultaneously with the text. These powerful symbols of the female spirit inspire the same awe and appreciation for natural life and its healing potential that Aronoff’s poems provoke.

This work of devotion, so clearly offered as a gift to the reader, is one that I will open with anticipation again and again.

—from the Introduction by William Torphy, poet, author, art critic, and curator

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Date: 09/06/2016
Time: 12:00pm - 2:00pm
Place:

78-6831 Alii Drive #142
Kailua-Kona, HI 96740
United States