As Bamboo Ridge approaches its 30th anniversary, it releases its 90th issue — "An Offering of Rice," a collection of stories and poems by longtime Bamboo Ridge contributor and volunteer Mavis Hara. She will read from her book at a launch party tonight at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.

Hara, 58, takes to heart the writer's chestnut "write what you know." Her mini-bio at the back of the book reveals that she was born in Honolulu, and has been "a military wife, a cancer survivor, and an adoptive mother." The stories, which span 25 year's worth of writing, are about all those things.

While it's easy to read these personal, very local stories of three generations of Island Japanese as a memoir, Hara, in her soft, girlish voice, protests, with a laugh, "If I wrote a memoir it would be really boring. The stories had to be fiction because they had to be more interesting than what really happened."

Bamboo Ridge co-editor Darrell Lum says Hara's book is an example of what he looks for in journal submissions — "I just like a good story, and the sense of fulfillment that comes when you read a good story."

Hara, who for 25 years has "carried books to conferences, typed up newsletters, done bulk mailings" for Bamboo Ridge as a volunteer, jokes that the nonprofit published her stories "to get me to do more work."

Stories such as "The Tanuki's Song" disprove that lighthearted theory. About issei Japanese, and the effects that plantation life had on its workers, the work was inspired by a family story of Hara's grandfather disarming a man who threatened to kill himself.

"It's unbelievable, because my grandfather was a really cautious man," she says. "I wanted to find out what would make this cautious man go into a house and take away (a suicidal man's) razor." She did research to get it right, and ruefully notes that "everybody who gave me information on that one has passed away."

While "poignant" is the operative word in Hara's work, humor also peeks through. In a scene between a nissei mother and her sansei daughter, in the story "Carnival Queen," about the long-gone McKinley High School popularity competition, a quietly hilarious battle of generations and passive-aggressive behavior will make thousands of Hawai'i Japanese-Americans chuckle in memory of their mother or grandmother.

But the stories also have a universal appeal, in addressing debilitating illness (breast cancer in this case), funerals and wifely and daughterly duties.

Hara, a reading instructor at Kapi'olani Community College, says she never seriously studied creative writing.

"I just kind of fell in with the Bamboo Ridge writers and I've been reading a lot, especially local literature," she says. "I've taken classes here and there.

In "E David," Hara draws from an experience she had with her part-Hawaiian cousin, when she asked him whether non-Hawaiians should be allowed to vote for Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustees.

Through something he asks her, Hara learned that "to know who you are you gotta know where you come from." Writing that story taught Hara "the value of writing as a way to understand my life more fully."

Reach Lesa Griffith at lgriffith@honoluluadvertiser.com.