Tom’s Blog Posts

THE WORLD IS AFLAME WITH POLARIZATION AND VIOLENCE—in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and now Minneapolis, which is having its own "Mauna Kea moment" of nonviolent protesters risking arrest against armed government forces. All this amplifies the timeliness of my nationally award-winning novel Mauna Kea and makes its themes more urgent than ever:     Finding courage in the face of adversity.     Forging hope amid disillusionment.     Facing personal and societal truths honestly.     Confronting the sorrow and fear that often underpin anger and hostility.     And the transformational ...

KILAUEA'S CURRENT SUMMIT ERUPTION WILL LIKELY BE TALKED ABOUT FOR GENERATIONS—fourteen months of spectacularly high fountains viewed by tens of thousands of national park visitors and by millions more worldwide via USGS livestreams and other internet sites and news feeds. And this stunning eruptive dynamic continues . . . at least for the moment. Since my last Kilauea post in May 2025, we’ve had many more high fountain episodes, including at least one that towered 1,500 feet, and others spewing lava from as many as three vents simultaneously. We’ve also ...

Just before Christmas, Hawaiʻi’s volcano goddess Pele returned to her legendary home inside Halemaʻumaʻu with a series of high fountain events that have dazzled Big Island residents, visitors, and volcano watchers all over the world. Here's a representative photo log of those marvels from the past five months (and some cool video links). As of this writing in mid-May, the on-and-off eruption—22 episodes punctuated by numerous brief pauses—continues! Fortunately, all of this has occurred within Kilauea’s summit crater inside Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park with no significant activity noted along its ...

Living on an active volcano assures a life of dynamic surprises, with constant reminders of the primal power and beauty of our planet. This past year has been no exception. Since last fall, we’ve had three spectacular eruptions on Kilauea—in September 2023, June 2024, and September 2024—each uniquely reflecting the potent handiwork of the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pelehonuamea. Here’s a photo-rich log of what’s been happening. All photos by Tom Peek unless otherwise credited. After the devastating East Rift eruption in 2018 that caused the collapse of Kilauea’s summit caldera ...

Mauna Kea: A Novel of Hawaiʻi just received another national literary honor—a 2024 Nautilus Gold Award for Fiction (small press fiction category). Founded in 1998, the prestigious Nautilus Awards are given to “better books for a better world,” to “honor books that support conscious living & green values, wellness, social change & social justice, and spiritual growth.” Previous Nautilus Award winners include Barbara Kingsolver, Julia Cameron, Deepak Chopra, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thom Harmann, Amy Goodman, and the 14th Dalai Lama, among others. Only a few weeks earlier, Mauna Kea won ...

Mauna Kea: A Novel of Hawaiʻi has received three honors from the prestigious Eric Hoffer Book Awards, including being shortlisted as a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize — the highest honor in their panoply of annual awards. The novel also received an Honorable Mention in the Hoffer General Fiction category, as well as being a da Vinci Eye Finalist for the book’s stunning cover art and design. All Night Books, a new fiction imprint of Easton Studio Press in Connecticut, published Mauna Kea in October 2023 and shares ...

Interest in Mauna Kea continues to grow, creating a busy spring season of book events and television and social media interviews. These included an April 13 “Newsmaker luncheon” with the Big Island Press Club at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, a May 4 reading and book signing at Native Books in Honolulu, and three new author interviews. Photos by Catherine Robbins unless otherwise attributed. Since 1967, the Big Island Press Club has been the “watchdog for openness and credibility” in our local media, and a provider of journalism scholarships ...

The new year has started off with growing momentum for Mauna Kea: A Novel of Hawaiʻi—including media and podcast interviews and more book events. Our UPDATED 2024 CALENDAR below reflects all this. Among the broadcasts were a March interview on Hawaiʻi Public Radio's daily program, "The Conversation," and two earlier social media interviews for audiences well beyond the islands—on Daniele Bolelli's Drunken Taoist podcast and on Whitley Stieber's Dreamland podcast and videocast. READ ON for details, photos and easy links to those discussions. AND THERE'S MORE AHEAD, including an April ...

As word spreads about Mauna Kea: A Novel of Hawaiʻi, positive reviews and endorsements of the book are coming in, including from Native Hawaiians and other islanders, scholars, and young, avid book reviewers on Instagram. The novel continues to receive enthusiastic receptions at our book launch events, book clubs are reading it, and I’ve now been invited to speak to the Big Island Press Club at their "Newsmaker luncheon" in April. Here's a sample of what reviewers, scholars, and other readers are saying about the the book. “Compelling,” “authentic,” “beautifully ...

After returning from Mauna Kea book launch events in the Twin Cities and in Honolulu, I immediately did readings and signings on Hawaiʻi Island—in Hilo, Kona, Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, and Volcano Village. These lively events provided numerous opportunities for me to interact with a wide range of Big Islanders and island visitors—including fiction readers, fans of my previous novel Daughters of Fire, former writing students, and island residents long connected to Mauna Kea—as well as to sell books! Read on to see photos of these events and some of ...

I’m back on the Big Island after a month on the road for the book launch of Mauna Kea: A Novel of Hawaiʻi. The launch is going very well, with positive reviews of the book at events and now starting to show up on the internet. I've had marvelous one-on-one contacts with readers, authors, media folks, and members of the literary community. Word-of-mouth attention to the novel is beginning to spread, and I’m stoked! Here, to share the excitement, are some photos from the Twin Cities Book Festival in Minnesota ...

Tom’s new novel, Mauna Kea: A Novel of Hawaiʻi will be released on October 10 and is already available at some Hawaiʻi bookstores and on internet booksellers all across the globe.  TOM'S EVENT CALENDAR APPEARS BELOW. This literary adventure is a gripping tale of clashing passions—science and spirituality, vengeance and compassion, fear and courage—set atop 14,000-foot Mauna Kea, realm of revered goddesses and star-wise explorers. It's a heart-opening novel that illuminates the power of aloha in an age of polarization and violence. A young vagabond running from America’s turmoil is forced to ...

After hitchhiking by boat through the South Pacific Islands, I landed my first job in Hawaiʻi, as a four-day-a-week tour guide for the Mauna Kea Observatories. I started there in 1988 and did my last stint as guide in 1996, but the mountain has continued to be one of my most important touchstones—a source of primal beauty, spiritual connection, and inspiration. Here, to share that wonder with you, are some of the photos I’ve taken over the years. All photos by Tom Peek Back then, in the late 1980s, I ...

This winter has been a dramatic one on the Island of Hawaiʻi, with repeated snowfalls—including blizzards—on the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa and one of the most spectacular lava lakes at Kilauea in memory. To Native Hawaiians these are the handiwork of two potent deities, Poliʻahu, the goddess of snow and ice and Pele, the goddess of volcanoes. Here are some photos that document those recent wonders while we wait for the next round of Big Island marvels to unfold. (Photos by Tom Peek unless otherwise credited.) While ...

When people think of Hawaiʻi they usually conjure up images of sundrenched beaches on Oʻahu, Maui, or Kauaʻi. But the real heart and soul of the archipelago are the massive volcanoes that created it, something affirmed yet again by the recent eruption of Mauna Loa, Earth’s largest active volcano. The twelve-day event that started at 11:30 p.m. on November 27, Mauna Loa’s first eruption since 1984, generated an explosion of media coverage across the globe. Millions watched the spectacle via television, social media, and the internet, transfixed by the handiwork ...

For decades now we’ve been bombarded daily—in the news, on social media, and in our own communities—with chronic, anxiety-producing strife: economic instability and poverty; racial, religious, class, and gender prejudice; constant war and empire building; gun violence and crime; the direct impacts of climate change; and ever-rising, often hateful cultural and political conflict. This leaves many of us confused, dispirited, anxious, even rageful. We seem stuck in a societal malaise that all our efforts to muster hope cannot seem to quell. And as my Alaskan poet friend Gene Ervine said ...

Pele has returned to her legendary crater home on Kilauea. Once again the summit lava lake is rising and our night skies are adorned with the auburn glow of her fiery spectacle. After six months of quiet, on the afternoon of September 29, lava fountains broke through the frozen lava lake inside Halemaʻumaʻu. Scientists at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) declared this a “new eruption”—with new vents and initial eruption rates rivalling those of the devastating 2018 eruption—not a resumption of the recent December-March eruption that had created the ...

In 1993, the caretakers of a Tibetan Buddhist temple in the Big Island’s Wood Valley risked their lives to smuggle an eight-year-old boy out of occupied Tibet. He was the reincarnation of Nechung Rinpoche, a high-ranking lama who had been imprisoned by the communists after their 1950 takeover of Tibet and who later became the couple’s beloved teacher at Wood Valley Temple in the 1970s and ‘80s after the Tibetan diaspora. Collaborating with a cadre of brave Tibetans and Tibetan monks, and with blessings from the Dalai Lama, the couple ...

The protest roadblocks that kept telescope construction equipment off the summit of Mauna Kea from 2015 to 2019 are on hold, but the cultural clash over the future of Hawaiʻi’s most sacred mountain is far from over. Despite the protests’ clear message of community opposition, proponents of California’s Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) continue to push their Hawaiʻi plans, even as they pursue permits for an alternative site in the Canary Islands. They’ve tapped old allies in the state legislature and recruited a potential new ally in the federal government, the ...

The Big Island of Hawaiʻi—with its Native Hawaiian traditions, exceptional ethnic diversity, dramatic coastal and volcanic landscapes, and unique ecology—is an extraordinary place, but never more so than when our volcanoes erupt and blizzards drape our highest peaks with snow. Both happened this winter! It started with a new summit eruption at Kilauea on December 20 followed by heavy January and February rains that deluged the island’s lower slopes and brought blizzards to its 14,000-foot volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. (Photos by Tom Peek) For my Native Hawaiian friends ...

By the time I came to maturity in the mid-1970s, the post-World War II Beat Generation literary movement had all but vanished in the public mind, supplanted by hippies, rock and roll, the New Left and a growing counterculture. But the movement’s quest to plant a “new consciousness” for peace, nonmaterialism and racial and economic justice—and its dedication to frank writing about all that—had been seeded throughout post-Sixties America. A key leader in that movement was San Francisco poet, painter, bookstore owner and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died February 22, ...

Five days before Christmas 2020, at 10:36 on a Sunday night, our rainforest cottage trembled as a large earthquake struck the island of Hawaiʻi. My wife Catherine Robbins and I dashed to our computer to check the quake’s location and magnitude on the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory’s Kilauea website page. But it wasn’t the big red dot pinpointing the temblor on Kilauea’s southern flank or its 4.4.magnitude that took our breaths away. It was HVO’s webcam image of fiery illumination above the year-and-a-half-old water lake inside Halemaʻumaʻu crater. (All photos by ...