The first book he published under Deuxmers (French for “two seas”) sprung out of a photography exhibition he had at Thirtyninehotel, a den of creativity in Honolulu’s Chinatown district in the early 2000s. This show, a collection titled Over the Pali, 2:00 AM, No Pork, featured six candid photographs he had taken in Chinatown between 2006 and 2011. Next was Peggy & The Roadrunners, a collection of found images of the late Peggy Ferris, one of the first female journalists to arrive in Honolulu after World War II, followed by Young Turks, which features portraits Kursat took of friends in the Turkish cities of Ankara and Izmir in the mid-1970s.
Kursat’s photography and publishing pursuits are the natural results of being the son of a journalist. Ege Ekspres (“Aegean Express” in English) was the name of Kursat’s father’s newspaper, which he started in a dangerous time. Originally from Crete, the Kursat family was forced to move to Turkey in the early 1920s as a result of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey during the Turkish War of Independence. The partitioning of the Ottoman Empire forced emigration between the two evolving nations via staggering violence. “My father was a very free-thinking, liberal person. It even landed him in jail for six months for writing a column that criticized the political party that was in power at the time,” Kursat reflects. “He is the reason I am the way I am. His influence shaped my perspective in life.”

Kursat’s father passed away in 1988, and it has been years since Kursat has returned to his hometown of Izmir, yet his father’s influence continues to fuel his interest in collaborating with authors and producing books. His relationships and chosen works have all been a result of coincidence encounters. “I really do not want to know or analyze why I do what I do—it’s sort of giving my consciousness a secondary role in awareness of the decisions that I make,” Kursat explains. “With this in mind, I have no explicit criteria in selecting what to publish, most of it is due to coincidences that come about in an organic manner in the course of social interactions. … Obviously, I have to like the content.”

Kursat’s recent releases include The Evil That Men Do, a collection of contemporary fairy tales for adults by Michael Sanders, and The Swans of Pergusa, a reinterpretation by Peter Shaindlin of Ted Hughes’ Tales From Ovid. Deuxmers’ works in progress include a second volume of Peggy Ferris photographs, and a collaboration with Shaindlin to translate a collection of poems by The Second New, an avant-garde Turkish literature collective from the 1950s. Shaindlin, who is Halekulani’s chief operating officer, has grown to be one of Deuxmers’ premier literary talents, authoring three works of poetry and fiction. “Peter’s immense knowledge of literature is amazing,” Kursat says. “He can quote from Proust, or John Clare, or Baudelaire—in French!—on a whim, so his own work becomes so important to me, knowing that it carries with it the knowledge of hundreds of years of literature, compounded by contemporary works.”

Even with the rise of e-books and blogs, Deuxmers has managed to remain relevant and in demand. For Kursat, its driving force is that wonderful human experience of browsing stacks of books at a college or city library for the perfect read. “I think poetry and books were meant to trigger thought processes,” he says, “for us to reflect on our understanding and comprehension of the world.”