“I’m looking for some edginess,” says Omer Kursat (seen above left), publisher of the boutique press Deuxmers, which he started in Waimanalo in 2011 to lend the Islands a bit more of an avant-garde literary patina than one often finds on remote tropical islands. Above right, one of Kursat’s photos from his 2014 book Young Turks.
I always joke that there are no basements or attics in Hawaii," says Omer Kursat, founder of boutique micro-publishing house Deuxmers. In other words, a writer's self-published vanity project won't find a home here in the Islands after it flops. In other, other words, Kursat, a Turkish immigrant in his seventies, has the ambitious, if quixotic, goal of publishing (and selling) literary works in the Islands.
"That's the hardest part, because in Hawai'i you can publish a surf book, you can publish a-whatever-pineapple poetry-related photography book. Of course, it's very different than literature, somebody baring their soul," he says.
In 2011 the balding, bespectacled, mustachioed Kursat started Deuxmers (French for "two oceans") in an unlikely place for literary book publishing: Waimanalo, a small, semirural town on Oahu's Windward side. Currently, he's moving the mostly one-man operation to an even unlikelier place, Waimea on Hawai'i Island. Kursat often discovers writers by chance, like at a grocery store in his new town recently. "The checkout clerk is telling somebody about the meaning of this word and that if it's used in that context, it means this," Kursat recalls, and asked whether the clerk was a writer. "So when I see an opportunity, or a photographer or something, 'Hey, let's do a book together.'"
Kursat has worked with photographers and writers of poetry and prose, editing their work, then designing and marketing the final product. "I'm looking for some edginess," he says. "The work has to be of a certain maturity, a maturity of vision." The nineteen titles Deuxmers has so far published range from Tony Kile's Keep Going, which chronicles the poet's depression and sobriety, to Lee Siegel's Typerotica, which takes the portrait-of-the-artist-as-youngster route to Paris-wine, cigarettes, women-and Los Angeles, where our protagonist falls in love with his teacher in a typing class. Kursat's own book of photography, Over the Pali, 2:00 AM, No Pork, documents Honolulu's Chinatown nightlife in the early 2000s. (The title refers to his route home to the Windward side-and to an islandwide taboo: no pork on the Pali Highway.) The most recent title, published last August, is Ted Myers' Tales from the Hereafter, which explores the terrain of death and the afterlife.
Kursat spent his teen years-the 1970s-in Turkey, listening to AM radio stations from distant places. It was his idea of a good time, taking in whatever crackling sounds came through. "That's what I compare the books to," he says. "These voices need to be heard. Otherwise, it's gone forever, nobody will discover it."
Kursat has his work cut out for him: Find more edgy writers, publish their work, get them into local bookstores. "Retirement is good but retirement is boring," he says. "I'm gonna keep going. Otherwise, you know, you're watching television."
