With her latest work, "The Fifth Book of Peace," Maxine Hong Kingston treads tenuous creative ground by trying to craft what she calls "a literature of peace."

The point, the acclaimed author says, is to explore the possibility of writing a nonviolent world through stories that don't rely on conflict.

"It's clear to those who work in novels why this is problematic," says Hong Kingston, who has drawn inspiration from the writings of Amitav Ghosh and others. "How do you create drama and excitement without action?

She also ponders a larger question: "The opposite of creation is destruction, and we live in a very destructive world," she says. "How do you create at a time like this?"

Hong Kingston will share her insights on the challenge in her keynote address this Friday and Saturday at the 2006 Biennial Writers' Conference, sponsored by the National League of American Pen Women, Honolulu branch.

Hong Kingston, best known for her seminal 1976 novel "The Woman Warrior," will also appear at the Celebrate Reading festival, April 8, and the Hawaii Book & Music Festival, April 22 and 23 (see below).

RISING FROM THE ASHES

According to Chinese legend, there were once three books that contained the secrets to peace. Their existence so threatened the established system that those in power had them burned.

By October 1991, Hong Kingston had invested two years drafting what was to be a fourth Book of Peace, her own examination of what it would take to achieve peace in the world. But this, too, would be lost to fire.

Hong Kingston was on her way home from her father's funeral when she spotted the firestorm that had engulfed the Oakland and Berkeley hills where she lived. The California fire left 25 people dead and destroyed nearly 3,000 homes. Hong Kingston lost her house, generations of family heirlooms and her novel in progress.

The devastating event became the impetus for "The Fifth Book of Peace, a project that found Hong Kingston reaching out to veterans of the Vietnam War and other conflicts. Hong Kingston and her circle of veterans have explored the implications of violence, destruction and, more important, loss — and the processes of recovery and reconciliation.

Hong Kingston says her long history of protest — she and her husband, actor Earll Kingston, demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and in 2003 she was arrested (along with author Alice Walker) during a protest against the Iraq war outside the White House — has never been an issue with her group. What matters is their commitment to peace.

Along the way, Hong Kingston's interaction with her fellow writers has sharpened her sense of what a literature of peace could be — and what it is not.

"There are some movies like 'Saving Private Ryan' and 'Apocalypse Now' that are considered great anti-war movies, but they don't look that way to me," Hong Kingston says. "If they are saying, 'This is how awful ... (war) looks so let's not have any,' it doesn't really solve the problem.' "

To Hong Kingston, a work of peace might start from a place of violence but what is important, she says, "is what comes next."

In "The Fifth Book of Peace," Hong Kingston says the point is not the experience of war necessarily, but "how long it takes people to come home."

"One idea is that you can work your way home," she says. "You can write a peaceful world."

HAWAI'I YEARS

Hong Kingston grew up in Stockton, Calif., and her reflections on a childhood divided between the reality of life in America and an alternate Chinese consciousness — a world of legends, cultural lessons and secondhand remembrances her immigrant parents created — were captured in "The Woman Warrior."

The novel itself was born in the 10-room Hotel Lanai in 1973.

"My husband and I were going to go to a movie, but the projector was broken," she recalls. "There was nothing to do, so I just sat there in the hotel, facing the wall, and I started writing."

Six years earlier, Hong Kingston and her husband had moved to Honolulu, and Hong Kingston taught English at Mid- Pacific Institute. By the end of the Lana'i getaway, Hong Kingston had drafted a two-page outline of the book that would define her literary career.

Sold before her manuscript was even completed, "The Woman Warrior" was an immediate success, a lyrical blending of legend, folk tale and autobiography that gave mainstream American readers new insight into the Asian-American experience.

In the 30 years since, the novel has become a mainstay of college curriculums, taught in modern-literature classes and ethnic- and cultural-studies programs.

"I would be disturbed if it was pigeonholed in just one category," Hong Kingston says. "But I've seen it categorized as fiction, nonfiction, women's literature, ethnic literature, American literature ... It hasn't been ghettoized."

While Hong Kingston is often credited with opening the market for Asian-American literature, she is quick to position herself as just one of a line of writers that includes Jade Snow Wong, John Okada and Pearl Buck, as well as other minority writers like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.

Hong Kingston, who later taught English at the University of Hawai'i, says the mix of Asian and Western languages and accents that surrounded her in Hawai'i "was so important for the music I wanted in my work."

Hong Kingston followed up her initial success with "China Men." That book, like its predecessor, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1987, Hong Kingston published "Hawaii One Summer," essays she wrote before she and Earll returned to California.

Hong Kingston and her husband return to Hawai'i regularly to visit their son, local swing musician Joe Kingston.

DON QUIXOTE

Typically drawing on first-hand experiences or stories passed to her by others — the heart of her work "comes from talking story" — Hong Kingston says her books often start with material better suited for poetry.

"It's usually just a sound, or a picture, or a line," she says. "I fondle it until it gets longer and longer, and I don't know where it's going. I just follow a path and build as I make it. I end up with a lot of incoherent material. It's like a mass of clay that I start to shape" — a process that can take two years or longer.

Pencil notations become computer documents as Hong Kingston feels her way through 10, 15 or 20 drafts of a story — she made so many zero-hour tweaks to "China Men" that her publisher charged her $1,000 to change the page proofs.

"I have a terrible time recognizing the end of a book," she says, chuckling. "Publishers have had to ... take the book away from me."

Hong Kingston will walk book store aisles, pluck her novels for a few corrections and return them to the shelves.

Hong Kingston says her next project will come when it comes. For now, she's re-reading a book she first picked up 40 years ago: Cervantes' "Don Quixote."

At 65, she's thinking about the "quest of an older person. A quest is usually something we associate with young people — their bildungsromans. What happens at the end of one's life?"

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.