Local Author Nina Macheel has just completed a new book titled: Don’t Call Me Moana – A Daughter Reckons with Her Hawaiian Heritage. We are honored to announce its release here.
Jim Dittmann
Nina Macheel
From her birthplace in Honolulu and her childhood in the rural Midwest, to the places where she’s resided – New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, the Washington coast, and the Wasatch Mountains of Utah – Nina Macheel has ventured widely and lived expansively. After university in Wisconsin (Eau Claire and Madison) and at Columbia (NYC), she volunteered with the Peace Corps in Turkey. She’s traveled globally, always as off-the-beaten-path as safely possible, and chose to raise her children in the ski resort town of Park City. After 35 years of alpine living and parenting, she moved to the Pacific Northwest to immerse in its robust writing and literary communities. She took a long hiatus in Hawaiʻi that catalyzed her first book, Don’t Call Me Moana, available in late 2022. Coming full circle, she now lives in a tiny cottage on a tiny lake in Wisconsin, where she has begun a novel based on the many diverse and novel people she’s met along the way.
“My book is now available in paperback and eBook! Individual and retail order links are below, making it easy to get your copy. Hope you enjoy the read.“
Author Remembers Growing Up “Oriental” in 1950s Small-Town Wisconsin
“It was complex and nuanced, never overtly unkind, but often thoughtless,” author Nina Macheel says of her family’s reception in the rural community where her father brought their multi-racial family to live after World War II.
Don’t Call Me Moana delivers Ms. Macheel’s unflinching memories of her mother’s strivings to seamlessly fit her South Pacific/Asian children into the region’s dominant white population. The author reclaims the cost of that effort, shielding them from their cultures of origin and their faraway family, by mapping the milestones of Hawaiian history to her mother’s fears and ambitions. Reviewing the 19th-century American takeover of the Hawaiian islands and its disastrous marginalization of the Hawaiian people, Ms. Macheel explains, “It was hard, but essential, that I honestly convey the environment that my ancestors had to find their way through. The intergenerational implications on me and my own children became obvious, reflecting a universal experience that I felt I had to convey.”
Don’t Call Me Moana, A Daughter Reckons with Her Hawaiian Heritage
Don’t Call Me Moana is 316 pages with ten photos. It was produced by Luminare Press, Eugene OR, and is available for order at Amazon and other online booksellers.
For information contact bookinfo@ninamacheel.com
