Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is author Kawai Strong Washburn. In his debut novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, he tells the story of the Flores family and pressures they face from each other and the outside world, set against the backdrop of Hawai’ian myth. The book has received rave reviews from the New York Times, the L.A. Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and a slew of other top publications. And on a personal note, in a year where I have loved almost everything I’ve read, I just want to say that Sharks stands out as one of my favorites.


Kawai Strong Washburn, welcome to Story Behind the Story.


Kawai Strong Washburn (KSW):  Hi, thank you so much for having me.


(CSA): Thank you for being here! So, I wanted to start—I read a lot of descriptions of this book as I was prepping this interview, and while there's a lot of similarities between them, the focus is a little bit different in each. It made me want to know how you would describe your book. What is it about in your mind?


(KSW):  (He laughs playfully). Every time I get this question, I have a hard time answering it; I think I'm going to get better at it, but I never do. At it's core, I would say that this is about a family from Hawaii that is struggling with ideas of who they are and what they are in the world; Both in terms of how they feel economically, and within their culture. And also what it means to believe in things bigger than yourself. It's a struggle to try and find some reconciliation between the economic realities of living in the United States, and in living in Hawaii, and the heritage, and the history, and the mythology of the place and where those things intersect.


(CSA): So, like your characters, you were born and raised in Hawaii but you're not native Hawaiian in the same sense that they are, as I understand it.


(KSW): Yes, that's correct.


(CSA): What was the Hawaii of your youth like, and how do your personal experiences there compare to the Flores families?


(KSW): The chronology of the book roughly lines up with some of the ages… I think one of the characters, in each part, is roughly the age I was at that date and time. The islands, as they're portrayed in the early parts of the book, are very much like the islands were when I was growing up. I grew up in Honoka‘a, which is where the book starts, and initially it was a sugarcane plantation town. It was largely built up around the sugarcane plantation that was on the Honoka’a coast. Over the time that I was living there, the plantation shut down and so there was certainly a huge economic shift in the way the town found itself, and how people there made money; and where they had to go to make that money; and what everybody was capable of doing and not doing. But it was a small town, and the thing that's nice is when I go back now, there's still some parts of it that are the same as they were back when I was a kid. The main street is still mostly the same, and it's the same buildings that have been there for all this time. It's just… Honoka’a is a small town that is a place that I feel like is very friendly and relaxed, and although some things about it change, some other parts of it have remained untouched by some of the bigger changes that have happened in the world.


(CSA): So you alluded to some of the ways that the socioeconomic situation changed during your upbringing, and during the arc of the book, as well, since they kind of intersect.


(KSW): Mmhmm.


(CSA):  Can you tell me a little bit about how that change affects your characters and informs their choices?


(KSW): The family is in, basically, in a constant state of upheaval as a result of being on the very knife’s edge of poverty after the collapse of the sugarcane industry. So that drives them to have to make decisions, in some cases, that are driven by economics more than anything. There are these moments where there are some miraculous events that occur early on, that the family ends up using… the parents recognize, ‘Oh, there might be a potential for us to make some money off of this,’ right?


(CSA): Right. 


(KSW):  And that's something that I think when you read the events happening, and that these are the parents of the child that these events are happening to, I think some people would be like, ‘Well that seems like they're exploiting their child,’ or ‘They're taking advantage of the child.’ And yet if you're in a position in which money is constantly something you're worried about, then you're going to make decisions that are very practical with regards to that; Which is, ’How can I make money at any given time that’s going to help me further the stability of my family?’ A lot of the upheaval that happens, a lot of the places where people go – those things are driven by the need to make more money. Certainly when all of the children scatter to their locations in the mainland United States, they're doing that knowing that there's both a burden of the work and the effort it took their parents to get them to the mainland, and the necessity, therefore, of them trying to make the most of that opportunity from an economic standpoint; Balanced against their desire to have some level of self-determination, to do whatever they want, and not be beholden to this debt that has been… that they didn't necessarily ask for. You certainly see that in Kaui’s character, when she's struggling with the friction with her mother, a lot of that comes down to that problem, where her parents are like, ‘Well don't forget everything it took to get you where you are.’ And she wrestles with that a lot because she feels like she's being defined in a way that she doesn't want to be, as a result of the economic struggles. I think Dean, as well, as a character – He's another sibling. His entire goal is to make as much money as possible. He is ultimately, he's like, ‘I'm going to make so much money that we never have to be scared again. We never have to be worried again.’ And  there's other things tied up with that: he wants a certain amount of prestige, he wants to get out from under his brother's shadow. But  part of it I think, for his character, is driven by a very… he understands the terms of capitalism and economics to the extent that the more money you have, the more you can do with it; the safer you are. He just embraces that, and is like, ‘I'm going to make so much money, we will be safe.’ So they have those different… the different ways that those socioeconomic elements come out. 
And certainly later on in the book, there are times when they’re feeling drawn back to Hawaii, and yet they're living in the mainland United States. It’s not easy for them to get back, so there's situations where the kids are like, ‘Well, I want to come home,’ and their parents are like, ‘No, you can't. You have to stay where you are.’ There are times where that's happening as well, because it's such a huge sacrifice for the family to be able to get people to come back and forth. They go into further debt, and a lot of the strife throughout the book is driven by the fact that the family is relatively impoverished. There are times where they have more money, and there are times when they have less money, but it's always… it's never something they get out from under for the entire book.


(CSA): Well, and this is a story that, in addition to the economic situation, is very rooted in a sense of place; In that physical environment that the characters are living in, in Hawaii. And in some other places, too, later in the book. But there’s a lot of physical description in Hawaii itself. What did you want to capture in those descriptions, and how did you approach that in your writing?


(KSW):  I’ve been to a lot of different places in the world, and I've lived in a lot of different places in the world, as well. There is never a place that I've lived that has really felt as…. majestic is not the right word, and imposing sounds very masculine, but I’ve never found a place that has a presence — a natural presence — the way Hawaii does. All of the islands have their own physical characteristics that just become a part of your experience, the entire time you're there, in a very different way on each island. So atone level, I was just trying to capture that feeling — the feeling of being in this place of of incredible natural beauty, but I also wanted to capture the feelings I've had personally when I have interacted with those spaces. Both in the islands as well as in other places in the world, where I've been able… I've been fortunate enough to do things like mountaineer, or to surf, or to rock climb, or things like that. To capture the way that feels at a visceral level, to interact with the natural world, in these moments of transcendence. I was trying to find a way to both capture the specificity of the physical presence of the islands, but also the  transcendent experience one has interacting with the natural world. And I wanted to put those things together in a way that almost made the islands feel like a person in the novel; And that's because as the novel goes on, there are some things that end up that makes more sense why that's something that I was working on. I was trying to capture all of those things at the same time.


(CSA): As you're writing a novel that very much is about the physical environment, in a moment where climate change, at least until a couple months ago, is on top of everyone's mind. How does that play into it? How did that play into your writing and into your thought process?


(KSW):  I've been working on climate change issues for years now. I've worked with several non-profits: here, in the twin cities where I’m living now, as well as other places on climate change issues, a lot of both local and national policy. Trying to figure out the best ways to make policy changes that can help the country move in the direction of restructuring the economy around the realities of climate change, in both what's already happening and what's going to be happening down the line. That's something that's always on my mind, even now in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. There's still, for me, work I'm trying to do on the issue of climate change, because we don't really have time to waste. I also see some of the things that are happening now with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the way we see that it's hitting populations with different levels of severity depending on their exposure to toxins and things like that. These things are all related. So that was on my mind the entire time when I was writing this. One of the things that I hope people will see it in the novel is the way in which the characters come to understand that part of what they're being called to do is to redefine the relationship with the natural world, and to get a better understanding of the intersection of their heritage and the future of the islands in a way that asks them to change the way that they live, and to think ‘new’ about how they can interact with the natural world. And I think that's really one way you can talk about climate change; It's an opportunity to redefine the relationship between humans and the natural world.


(CSA): As I understand it, you spent about 10 years working on this before it was published. Did your understanding and your feelings about a relationship with the natural world change over that time?


(KSW): Yeah, I think that it's just become… it's become stronger, particularly as I've had children.  My older daughter is now 6 years old, my younger daughter is 2 years old, and I really want them to find a way to enjoy and value the natural world the way that I do. Passing on those values is really important to me, and that also drives me to continually ask, ‘Well how can I make that happen?’ My wife and I are always looking for opportunities to just help our children enjoy the natural world and to feel wonder; Whether it's observing a caterpillar crawling on the sidewalk, or if we're  running along a trail that's on a cliff overlooking an ocean, or  all the different ways that you can interact with natural world. We're always thinking about how we can help our children learn to just love and be in a state of wonder in the natural world. I think some of that has become stronger as I realized — and I've always had a deep value for the natural world, but it's only more accelerated and more pronounced when you have children. As well as issues like climate change; they just feel that much more urgent. There's what we have now, and it's what's going to be there in the future, and I already feel a sense of loss for what what's coming in the future. I also know that there's that much more I'm invested in trying to make the future as best a place as it can be. I don't know how much that leaked into the story or not, but… (He giggles, Clara does too.) 


(CSA): So there's one thing I think it's impossible to not notice reading this book: is the depth of the mythology and folklore that is presented in it. How did you learn the stories, the  legends and stories that you present in this book and what did your research process look like as you were developing that out?


(KSW): It's interesting. There are a lot of parts of this that the mythology was just a part of my childhood. We would — my friends and I would tell each other the ghost stories, or somebody would come back from a weekend camping trip and they’d tell us a story about how this Spirit showed up at the camping trip or whatever. I think some of that is just kids big kids and trying to scare each other, and making up stories to try and make the world even more exciting than it might otherwise be. But then there's also the mythology that I was familiar with just from growing up in Hawaii and having that be part of our curriculum in school. We learned about ancient Hawaii, and part of that was learning about the mythology and legends of the ancient Hawaiians.  There is that part of it that was just part of my upbringing. I hadn’t interacted with those things consciously for years, and so when I started writing this, I wa  operating… there is… it was unconscious at first. I knew that there were some myths and legends that would fit in with what was there, but I didn't know what they were exactly, and so I didn't start with necessarily a specific legend or myth in mind. As I was starting to work on different parts of it, I got a sense that… I was like, ‘okay, well this this is becoming significant enough in this section that I should figure out whether this lines up with the actual mythology or not.’ And then I would go and research.  I have a bunch of books on ancient Hawaiian mythology and legends, and I would go cross check it. And there were these times when the things that I’m writing lined up perfectly with what was in the myths and legends! I think most of that was that I had just subconsciously still internalized these things, but I didn't know that. So there were these moments of this really fun serendipity and resonance when I would go look something up, and I was like, ‘I didn't know when I was writing it that I was writing an actual myth or legend that had already existed, and then to go and see that that was something that I had internalized at some level previously (or maybe I just got lucky in some cases, I don't know). But it was really fun, and that was one of the things that kept me going. I could feel these moments of resonance where there were things that I was either unearthing or encountering for the first time that, for whatever reason, were already a part of me, that made me feel like, ‘Oh, there’s something here. There's something more than just me writing things on a page.’


(CSA): One of the things that I find fascinating about this book, in reading about it, there are a lot of comparisons to other works of magical realism, which I always find to be such an interesting genre for someone to come up with, because it's basically saying that you can't really have magic and realism in the same place unless you create your own whole new thing that is just about the blend. But— right, of course these are based in, to some extent, in real myths, real  legends, real  spiritual traditions and practice. How do you think about that as you're  blending it and writing it in your own work, and what do you make of the  genre trappings that you've ended up in?


(KSW): There's so many great works of literature that cross those boundaries, whether it's been Okri’s The Famished Road, which I don't remember how long ago that came out — that won the Booker. Or I think people are familiar with, like, Salman Rushdie or even Toni Morrison, or some of the authors that I pointed out in the acknowledgments who are influential on me as well. Whether it's Kiana Davenport, who has done work that has some elements of magical realism in it. I think that's great! I think, for me, it's fine,  especially because I came from a background… the first books I remember reading and loving when I was younger are books that would be called fantasy or science fiction. And I think in children's books they have less of those genres, right? 


(CSA): Yah.


(KSW): There's a children's book. It doesn't matter what the quote-unquote “genre” in; Some of them are mysteries, some of them are ghost stories, some of them are in a totally fantasy world, like Peter Pan. What is Peter Pan? Is Peter Pan fantasy? Is it science fiction? I don't know. And so I don't really mind being classified in whatever genre people do. I don't think it weakens the work. It only weakens it to the extent that that people use genres to disparage works of literature, or trying categorize them in a way that makes me feel comfortable that they can just  devalue those types of writing, or things like that. And that's not the case for me, so I  people can call it whatever they want cuz I love things from all different genres and you can have a great piece of writing that can say really important things about the world that is a quote unquote “genre.” But look at Octavia Butler and Parable of the Sower. You can read some things in there now, and you're like, ‘That is happening right… now…’ Like, the government she describes and some of the things that happen, and you’re like, ‘She saw this coming. On some level she realized this could be a version of the United States.’ That’s a science fiction book, but are we suddenly going to say that it's not an important work of literature because it's science fiction? So, it’s fine. I love that… and I also think that, to me, that's part of a place like Hawaii — as much as it has been exoticized and turned into the  like packaged fantasy vacation for a lot of people, there are still aspects of Hawaii and the culture that feels to me, and this is just my own experience, that there is still a level of engagement with that mythology and folklore in a very real way. People will still talk about volcanic activity on the big island; they'll talk about Pele, the goddess of fire and volcanoes. And they don't mean that in a silly way; they're actually talking about that life force of volcanoes, and they’re deifying it in a very real way. And people talk about other parts of the island that way. At least they did in Honoka’a and in the other parts of the islands that I was familiar with. This isn't a fantasy, this is just the way that people can engage these things.  I also tried to make it a point, when there are the moments of hyperrealism or supernatural moments that happen in the book, I tried to write them in a way that felt like it rendered as closely as it could to that, in a sense of: this thing is happening that I can't quite explain. But I don't want them to be a bunch of fireworks and psychedelic colors and laser beams shooting from somebody's fingers. But is there a way I can talk about things that might feel miraculous? That it's ambiguous to the reader, and even maybe to the characters, how much of it is their interpretation? How much of it is a feeling that they're putting a name to, that they think maybe is magic, but maybe it's not quote unquote “magic”;  and then how much of it is still, at some level, might be that bit of magic. I tried to make it ambiguous enough that different readers can interpret it the way they see fit, but in a way that also feels like it felt to me growing up in the islands.


(CSA): So I think that  takes us back. As I mentioned before, you grew up in why but you're not native Hawaiian in the same way that your characters are. These are not wholly your traditions. Did you have any concerns going into this about telling a story from the perspective of people who practice and live in these traditions, and how did you approach it?


(KSW): Yeah, I definitely did from the start. But the thing that I struggled with was… so, I'm born and raised the first 18 years of my life, and probably some of the most formative years of my life, were in Hawaii, growing up in communities that were composed of people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Most people I knew had — and I hate to use race terms and things like that — but there were like, two or three different ethnicities, two or three different races (however you want to refer to it), or more. There's a lot of that. All over the islands there are people that have multiple ethnic backgrounds, and that was the way it was for the community I grew up in. 
When I was starting this out, I knew that I wanted it to be a book that represented as truthfully as possible the community I grew up in, I started to try and figure out well, to the extent that the story is going to be about the islands, and because I want to include these elements of mythology and try and find a way to express what feels to my core… the core existence of the islands, and also to talk about some of the issues of colonialism that come up in the book — to talk about all those things, and to have the characters not be native Hawaiian felt to me like it would… it didn’t feel like that would be right. It would be like taking something from the islands, or at some level appropriating parts of the culture that, although they are, I would say, they’re across racial lines at this point, but there's a very specific culture of Hawaii, and a lot of those parts of the culture extend among all the different ethnic groups in a way that I wouldn't necessarily consider them native Hawaiian only cultural elements. And yet, the source of those things are still ultimately  native Hawaiian. In dealing with that and recognizing that was there, it just didn't feel right to have the characters be detached from that in some small way. I feel like it would be claiming that those characters, that the things that they were experiencing or that they were going through were theirs at the expense of native Hawaiians. It just felt to me that at some level it would be ... I feel like sometimes books, at least for me — I'm mixed race. I'm black and white (again, I hate using those terms) but my mother's African American and my father is European American, or whatever term we want to use. I know for myself the experiences I've had in the world in which I felt a lack of representation or understanding, and I've experienced a lot of that in the mainland after I left Hawaii. I never really experienced that in Hawaii, but once I left, I experienced it all the time. When people don't talk about… when people choose not to talk about race, they're talking about it. Just as much as if they were actually talking about it. And in the same way, when I was writing this, I felt like if I didn't have native Hawaiians as part of the central cast of characters, then I would essentially be devaluing their place in the islands, and that felt… it just felt like there was no way around that. To say, ‘Oh, this novel is about the islands and it has elements of ancient Hawaiian mythology, but none of the characters are native Hawaiian.’ All I’ve got is this family, there’s just the one family. S if one of them is native Hawaiian, all of them have to be. That was something that I just knew, going in, was it was going to be a struggle. But I think for me, ultimately, there are so many great works of literature and so many great works of art that have been created by artists that deal with issues of ethnicity or identity that are not that artists actual identity; Because it's even happening with gender,  right? So does that mean a writer shouldn't talk about… shouldn't have a female character, or that a writer of one race shouldn't have a character of another race? I think that most people would say that, no. An artist should be able to do that to the extent they're able to recognize any power imbalances that might exist, and address those; and also make it a point to do the work to express the truest version of those identities that they can; and to recognize the part that identity is going to play in the art; and to not ignore it or to devalue it. That was really what I did; just engage with it the way I could, as the most true representation of the community I grew up in that I could, and that was as truthful to the material as it could be, without excluding that core element of native Hawaii that I think is really important to have in the story. I struggled with it for a while, but I ultimately realized that a lot of the artists I admire have, at different points in their career, written beyond their identity and have done it very effectively, I think, in a way that is very powerful. I just hoped, more than anything, that I would be able when I was doing this, to do that, to accomplish that. Cuz it felt to me like the most true expression of the place I grew up. and so that's where I went with it.


>> AD BREAK << 24:51


(CSA): If you’re just joining me, my guest today is author Kawai Strong Washburn, whose debut novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors, came out this past March.
Every chapter in Sharks in the Time of Saviors  is told in the first person, and each one is told from the perspective of one of the five members of the Flores family, on a… let’s say an uneven rotation. What made you decide to include all of their perspectives?


(KSW): The types of novels I've loved the most are… the ones that I refer to, that I come back to, more often than not, have the first person perspective because I think that there's a level of intimacy in the way that you're inhabiting this consciousness, this other consciousness, as closely as is possible through the medium of writing. For me, when that has worked well and I've enjoyed the story and I have believed wholly in that consciousness, when I'm done with the book, if it's one that I really care about or one that is powerful, that consciousness never really completely leaves me. It's always still there. I feel like I've expanded my understanding of what it means to be human, and my experience of what it means to be a human. So that's a point of view for literature that I've always loved, and it's one that I think is also enriched when you have people that, seeing their interactions from both sides or seeing them from all the different sides – from inside each person – is that much more enriching when they have all of these strong relationships with each other. As opposed to if you have a rotating cast of characters that are marginally interacting directly with each other, and maybe there's some central thing that happens later on or early in the story that's related to them. You could do things that way, but for me, I think that when the characters have a strong link in a way that they keep coming back to each other and interacting with each other, and you get to see it from different angles, it gives the reader the ability to like... You get a chance to really engage with each character, and form your opinions and reactions to both what they think of themselves and the stories they're telling themselves, and what other people think of them and what they look like to other people.  I settled on that mostly because when I was writing this, I had no idea if this would be… if I would be able to write after this, or if this would be a complete failure and I'd be done. I wanted to at least try to write a book that I think spoke to the types of art that I've really enjoyed, and be like, ‘Well I really like first person perspective, and I really like that rotating first perspective; This book seems like it would work with that perspective, and I might not have another chance.’ (Clara laughs) Let me do that and see where it goes.


(CSA): I love that, I love that! It's something that you enjoy in books, and it was like, ‘Why not try it while I got a chance?!’


(KSW): Yeah (Kawai laughs)


(CSA): So, now seems like a good time to have you read a little bit of the book, and before you do can you set up what you're going to read for us? What are we going to hear?


(KSW): Yeah, so the section I’m going to read is from the final chapter... The book is split into four parts, and this is the last chapter of the first part. This is from the perspective of the family's mother; her name is Malia. She and her husband Augie, they've realized that their son, Ninoa (who was saved from the ocean by sharks earlier, and who they believe is, at some level, blessed; is going to be some miraculous figure), they’ve started to realize that there's something to him. He has these abilities, it seems. This chapter, at the tail end of it in the scene, they're going out to find him because he's not at home. They know he's outside somewhere, and they’re concerned. They think that he's…that something's happening. They want to know; He's left the house, they haven't seen him… it seems like something mysterious is happening, that he's keeping very private. They've gone out to find him, and they find him at a makeshift graveyard that he's created for animals. This is the tail end of the scene in which they've seen him quietly, privately, receive an animal that's dying. It's an owl, in this case, and he's trying to revive it. He's trying to save this owl that's sick and dying. This is them seeing him right after that moment has passed, that he's tried to save an owl.
(KSW reads)
My mind was catching up with what we felt, what we'd seen. Augie! My God, how long has he been seeing things like that? Doing things like that? I wanted to count the graves, to consider how many animals you'd lived their last breaths with; How many times you tried, and failed, to make a difference? How many other things you might be seeing, and feeling, without us? All of it like running into a wall over and over. The thought that we be able to help you through this, to guide you to what you were supposed to become, was total stupidity. Along with what we've been asking you to perform for us, in our home, with the desperate neighbors we'd subjected you, the stories we told about what we thought you were. It came unspooling for me as we stood there.


“I use whatever I can find,” you said, “when there aren't enough stones.” You’d come up behind us while we were doing our own thinking. You had more to say, and if we'd asked –  if we hadn't, it didn't matter. You kept talking. Waved the trowel at the grave we were considering. “This was a dog,” you said, “some Poi dog, like, I couldn't tell what kind.” You said you found it down there when you were out messing around along the canal, skipping stones and taking a break from everything. The dog had been hit by a car. Probably one of the shipping trucks or construction monsters that were always grinding and shuddering along the canal. After it had been hit, the dog dragged itself, all its broken parts, to the clearing. I can only imagine the jammy trail of its insides it must have left along the ground. You said that you tried to fix it, that when you laid hands on it for the first time, you felt something important. All the broken places in its body. It was like a puzzle, you said, and all you had to do was put the pieces back together. But you worked in one place, and another would start to die. Then you’d turn to that place, and the part that you fixed before would be unraveling itself, and on and on, until finally you lost. 
“I was the dog at the end,” you said, and started shivering. “I was running on this bright road, paws sticking into the mud. My body this bouncing knot of muscles. It was like I was done with happiness, I don't know. I ran and ran and ran, but everything got weaker and weaker until I was just… floating into darkness.” You buried the dog here, and sometimes you came back to visit. You said it always made you feel better, lighter, as if you were, again, the dog. Running. And standing there was exactly like that. Later the field would be fenced off, and the fence would become a wall, and the wall would become another building storing and manufacturing cement, and the graveyard was gone, somewhere under the foundation. But I remember it as it was then. You explained that other animals have come after the dog. Flocks and strays, poisoned from antifreeze and wrecked from car strikes and being chewed up by cancer, crawling on their last to arrive here, waiting for you. To give up their last sparks.
“I'm sorry,” I said. I don't know what to do with it, you said, I keep messing up. 
Augie put his hand on your shoulder. “No you don't,” he said. What do you mean, you asked. “Feels way happy, doesn’t it?” Augie asked, “Right at the end.  Feels that way to me, anyway.” But you shook your head. I have to start fixing things. I have to fix everything, you corrected. 
Whole nights after the sharks your father and I had been wondering what would happen, what you would be. I believe that graveyard day was the first time we truly understood the scale of you. If you are more of the gods than us, if you were something new, if you were supposed to remake the islands, i you are all the old Kings moving through the body of one small boy, then of course I could not be the one to guide you to your full potential. My time as a mother was the same as those gasping breaths of the owl, and soon enough you'd have to gently set down my love, fold it up into the soil of your childhood, and move beyond.
I remember laying back against your father's chest as we sat in the grass. Shadows had moved over the water in the canal, but far beyond that the lights in Honolulu were winking on. The golden feeling of the hours last flight stayed with me, even if the vision had long since coasted into the dark.


(CSA):  Thank you. Most of the magical elements in the novel center on Nainoa and his abilities, and yet it's often unclear, as you mentioned before, whether those abilities are real, and if they are, how much control he actually has over them. Why was it important to you to keep those things ambiguous?


(KSW): Ultimately, we find out that his interpretation of what he's feeling and these abilities he has are wrong. At some level, you figure out that what he thought he was it turns out that isn't exactly what he was. And the same for the family; They have this idea of who he is, and it turns out that that's not what it ended up being at all. I think if he had a full understanding of what he was capable of – first of all, it would remove some of the mystery, right? Cuz as a reader, you're getting to… you keep wanting to know what's happening as well. You keep wanting to know, ‘Wwhat is he doing? What's happening?’ So you get to experience that level of mystery along with him, but I think having it not ultimately resolve early and in a straightforward way allowed it to become a bigger part of the story than it was when I wrote the first draft. Cuz when I wrote the first draft of this, it was a little bit more straightforward. It was less ambiguous. And I felt like, as I'd come up on the end, and I kind of knew how it was going to end, and I had some of the pieces worked out and I was getting into the late stages of it… it just didn't feel right. And some of the earlier… some of the later issues that are now in the novel, they just collapsed. They just didn't work with everything being more-well understood. I found that leaving that as a mystery, it gave me more room to play with other explanations for what was happening, and to expand it in a way that ended up being really important. What the novel ultimately ended up becoming and the things that it speaks to that really came about as a result of introducing that level of ambiguity. It allowed the story, I think, to have a much more important conclusion than it would have otherwise had, if things had been so… so well determined and well defined.


(CSA): There’s a tension, too, between Augie, Malia, and Nainoa, and the rest of the family, in that Augie and Malia share a very strong belief in their son's abilities, and the conception of what he might be. While their other children, Dean and Kaui, are less sure. Where does that come from, to your mind? Is it just a matter of experience, or are there other forces at play?


(KSW): Yeah, that's a good question, and I think that at one level, their rejection of that is their rejection of the… it really ends up being, they think that they have to reject that interpretation that the parents give, because otherwise the implications are that they are somehow worth less than their brother. And so at one level, their defense mechanism is, ‘Well that can't possibly be true, because if it's true, then what does that mean I am? It means I'm not as good as he is; I'm not as worth I'm not worth as much as he is.’ So at one level, there is that sense of self-defense that's at play. But at another level, something else that actually, while I was working through the revisions, ended up being an interesting thread that I started to tug on, was something we had spoken to a lot earlier, and the socioeconomic aspect of it.  Dean, really, to me, his rejection is one that is also because… I think that he's embraced the power of money above all else. To him, it's he's, even if you are some special magical person, that's not that's not going to save us. That's not going to… our family is still going to struggle cuz you certainly haven't…  you're not the one putting food on the table. And so for him, I think at one level it's also his personal feeling that money is the most important thing for this family. I started to think of that, also, as a way to have him be that alpha male of capitalism, for somebody that's in another world with another set of… I don't know what I want to say. Like, if he was living a different life, if his family had grown up a different circumstances, he's a kind of person that would have been like, I don't know, a day trader or something. (Both laugh) “I’m going to make as much money as possible, and I'm totally okay with that.” His character to me same to represent that if you were to push capitalism to its most logical conclusion outside of any consideration of humanity, then… it's just literally “I'm going to make money however I need to, and what justifies that is the money itself. The money justifies whatever else  comes along with that.” And so his rejection of the parents interpretation is really more that he's just like, ‘Even if you think that's what he is, you're wrong in giving him the level of prestige you do because he's actually less useful than I am. He's worth less than I am, because I'm making money; he's not.’ There's also that side of it.


(CSA): An element of sibling rivalry, almost.


(KSW):  Yeah, that's all in there too, right? Those things are definitely mixed up in sibling rivalry; it’s just different interpretations of the reality of their economic circumstances.


(CSA): There’s a line in the part that you read which is part of an exchange between Augie and Nainoa, where Nainoa says, “I have to fix everything.” And that really struck me as a sentiment that's probably shared by a lot of children who have an inheritance of intergenerational trauma the way that Nainoa and his siblings do. That immense feeling of responsibility for things that are really beyond your control: to make things right, to heal wounds that were inflicted before you were born. Can you speak to that? Is it something that you were thinking about as you were writing?


(KSW): It was. At some level it’s probably something that…sorry, this is the first time that someone has asked me that question, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about it, cuz some of it is very personal; But I think some of those feelings are feelings I've had, and I've certainly encountered them among friends of mine who have tried to engage the world in a way in which they recognize how awful things can be. Like, how do you make that better, right? And I think the more you expose yourself to the way the world hurts, I think that one reaction, which is a totally logical and normal one, is to become numb to it and very cynical, and just say, “A lot of this is just bad luck, and people end up suffering because of bad luck, and there's nothing I can do about luck.” But I think if you look at things differently and you start to recognize what drives inequality, and certainly a lot of the experiences I've had both growing up in the islands and in the continental United States, one of the frictions that I constantly deal with that is so hard is, again, having grown up from in a mixed race family and knowing the things that my mother’s African American family has had to go through over the years. Whenever I am in a space in which I can feel the institutional violence that remains, the legacy of the founding of the country, I think it's impossible not to engage with that directly and not feel at some level like… I have to do something! I can't just live in the world as it is and shrug my shoulders and say, “Well here's the world as it is, and all I can do is navigate it in a way that keeps me as safe and comfortable as possible.” I have reacted in a way where it's like, “What do you… how do you fix this? Where do you start? What can I do to try and fix the things that I see that are injustices?” I have a lot of friends that have had to deal with those same issues as well; a lot of us have, at different times in our life, taken on work in which we try as directly as possible to engage with those issues. It’s  just an unanswerable question; it always haunts you, and I think it's very easy to be overwhelmed by it, and it’s certainly something that ended up being a part of Nainoa’s character: this  burden of expectation, and the recognition of all these huge problems and this hurt in the world, and having some set of tools that might fix it, if he can just figure out how to do it, right?


(CSA): Yeah.


(KSW): …and so that was something that his character in particular (although you see it in the other characters as well – they're all struggling with that and trying to figure it out). 


(CSA): Do you think Nainoa’s parents are capable of seeing that part of him, and seeing the way he's struggling and contending with those things, or are they too wrapped up in their own problems to see him as anything more than their child who has the capacity to save them? 


(KSW): So there’s a little bit, late in the story, where I think Malia has a recognition of that, where she starts to realize in the later portion of the story, where there's this recognition of how lonely that must make Nainoa. And she realizes that pretty late, but I do think for the majority of the story I kind of had the parents living in this world in which they believe that the things that they're seeing that are hard, at some level he's going to be able to fix those. They're certain that he's going to be something important, and capable of large-scale change. I'm trying to figure out how to talk about it without ruining anything – (Clara laughs, he continues) In the later sections, that changes. At the very end of it, they have a different understanding of who he is, and also who their other children are as a result.


>>>Ad break<<<


If you’re just joining me, my author today is Kawai Strong Washburn, whose debut novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors, came out this past March.
So one other thing I wanted to ask you to do was to unpack the title for us, cuz it is easy to connect certain parts of it to plot points, but as I read, as I got further and further in the book, I was just realizing how layered it is. So what can you tell us without spoiling too much?


(KSW): Yeah, yeah, so first of all, the thing that's always funny about the title is I had settled on it as something that I thought spoke to some, as you mentioned, these different layers of it. I wanted to have… I think that the juxtaposition of Savior and shark is an interesting thing. Early on, because I knew that the Aumakua, the guardian spirit if you will (though that’s not the perfect interpretation of what what an Aumakua is, but we'll use that for the purposes of this); That idea of a shark in that role, and also having this idea of a savior and a shark at the same time is very intriguing to the mind. It makes you want to puzzle out what a story is about by having it in the title. I had also thought that the sharks could come to mean a lot of different things in that, as well as well as the saviors. One level, when we talk about economics, we talk about, say, the idea of like, brute force capitalism. I could also see that at some levels, being a type of shark – you can think of that as a shark. It could be like a double-edged sword; On one level you have the sharks operating in the story as a guardian spirit, but if you think of a shark and it’s potential aggression and being an apex predator, as being something that could speak to the more brutal elements of market driven economics, then that's an interesting duality. But for a while, I kept talking to my editor and stuff I was like, ‘listen, if you've got a better idea for a title…’ (Clara laughs) Cuz I finally arrived at the title, and I was like, this feels like it speaks to some of themes, and it feels like it's got these different layers, but I don't know if it's the best title; and it's kind of long, and it's kind of weird. So I kept asking my editor. I would send them emails to be like, ‘If you have a better idea for the title please tell me cuz I don't…it doesn’t have to be this title.’ And then it just went ignored. (Clara laughs) Nobody ever brought it up, so I was finally just like, ‘Well, here’s the title!’ I think that the savior part of it, for me, it gets at the mythology. The story the family is telling itself, and what the characters aspire to for each other at some level, and just the concept of being saved; The way that it kind of removes your agency in the sense that you… it removes your responsibility for yourself, and it allows you to, if you're expecting a savior or you think of a person as a savior or a thing as a savior, then it allows you to remove yourself from getting to the place that you want to be. So there's that side of it, and then there's that being played against some of these other elements of sharks and the marketplace and things like that, and what the sharks come to represent as an answer to that idea. It's a very bad explanation of the title. (Both laugh)


(CSA): That's okay! Another part I was curious about… the structure of the title. I was thinking about this because I kept seeing comparisons to Garcia Marquez in the reviews that I was reading; I was like, how much that is coming from the title? (both laugh) But I was kind of curious about the choice to talk about the time of Saviors, which is maybe something you haven't gotten to yet. Is there anything in there that's…


(KSW): Yeah! I think that it was…so, when I was writing this novel, somewhere in the middle of it (and I think I spoke to this one other interview),  I started to notice more and more: One of the things that I've always had to struggle with in the stories America tells itself about itself is the “Big Man” theory of history, and how a lot of the changes that have happened in the United States history will later on collapse those to a single individual. Like, if you talk about the civil rights movement, without fail people will try and collapse that into Martin Luther King, Jr., when the reality is there were so many people as important and significant as he was. There were all of these people in communities throughout the country that were silently doing hard, important work, that were a part of of the whole movement that occurred – in which he was a part of, and became the figurehead of at some level, but he was just one person among many that were doing things. That's an example of an idea of this “big man” theory of history, where you take this large, complex thing and you ascribe it to one person, and everything that I read about in standard history will try and do that. I had started noticing that happening with other things around me, even over the course of the time I was working on this novel, when there would be an important thing happening, and as quickly as possible people want the most simplistic version of that as possible. So they try and collapse it to one individual. You can even look at that now with climate change, right? A lot of people will point to Greta Thunberg: That's the climate movement. Like nothing started until Greta was the one. When I think most people that have been doing that work for a while know that, and she says this just as well as anybody else does, that she was just one person among many that were struggling through these issues, and she just happened to get the attention for it. So when I talk about “in the time of Saviors,” part of what I'm talking about is that, what feels to me a very modern historical tendency to try and simplify and compress these complex changes into one specific individual. That’s the “in the time of Saviors” part of it, and again, the shark says, at some level, the way they show up and what they cause (in terms of flipping that narrative), cuz the narrative starts that way for Nainoa. He’s the one that’s… They ascribe this “big man” theory, a history of ideas to him, and that’s because of the sharks, and what he ends up being and what the story ends up being are very much different than that. 


(CSA): Yeah. So, for readers who are interested in learning more about Hawaii and its history, or reading other books by Hawaiian authors, what would you recommend?


(KSW):There are a lot. One that I want to mention upfront because it's a recent publication and I think it's a great one; This is nonfiction, it's called Detours and it is written in the format of... it roughly resembles a guidebook, almost, like what you pick up if you were going to go to the islands as a tourist. It kind of looks like that in its visual layout and things like that, but it's a collection of essays. There is some poetry and things like that in there, and different oral traditions are brought in as well, but it is largely a book that is very critical of the current understanding of Hawaii in the islands, of what people think the islands are versus what they really are, of what's happening right now in the islands – which is really this continually evolving and strengthening of native Hawaiian culture and its political power, and what it is starting to do to is redefine the islands in the terms of the native Hawaiian people, and the people that were there first, before colonization and annexation took place. It’s a great volume because it allows you to get a sense for what all the current issues are politically in the islands that people are grappling with, and it's something that I had never seen a guide like that, put together quite that way. It's called Detours: a decolonized guide to Hawaii (I think that's the subtitle). That's a great one. 
There are several great books of Hawaiian mythology. There's one that's written by David Kalakaua, who was actually one of the kings who's part of the Hawaiian monarchy, so there's a book of mythology that he wrote. There's one by Martha Beckwith that's just called Hawaiian Mythology; those are a couple of really great mythological books.
There's also, Kristiana Kahakauwila came out with – I want to say it was maybe four years ago? – she came out with a short story collection called This is Paradise, and that's a great collection. Again, that's one that set in contemporary Hawaii, and it's got a wide range of stories that deal with all these different aspects of Hawaii. That's a great collection. I mentioned Kiana Davenport previously; she has a trilogy that starts with a book called Shark Dialogues, and I find her to be, in my opinion – and I don't want to say this to minimize her work, as much as try and find a good comparison – she feels like a Marquez to me, in terms of, she is this brilliant… the scope is massive and brilliant. You get the sweep of the islands, and their change over time, and her books are also written from a native Hawaiian perspective, and I think that's a great collection of stories. I always mention Lois-Ann Yamanaka as well, and she's an author who has written a bunch of different books about the islands, and that she wrote two books that I remember encountering that were the first books I found that felt like they were written about Hawaii from the perspective of people local to the islands. They use all the slang and the pigeon, and it's about… some of them are about very rural parts of Hawaii, and they have nothing to do with tourism or anything like that, but literally just people living in the islands, struggling with issues that have nothing to do with people that are not of the islands. They're very they're very localized in a way that I felt like, oh she's writing for…  she wants the reality of the islands to be there, and people will recognize that that are from the islands, and people that have never experienced before, if they want to come along for the ride, they'll get there. But first and foremost, it feels like she's writing for the islands. She was the first author I encountered; that was the work that I encountered. Obviously there are many other writers who have done that but Lois-Ann Yamanaka as well. I could keep going (both laugh), but those are a few that I would suggest to readers.


(CSA): Thank you. I think we're just about out of time but before we end, what's next for you? What are you working on now?


(KSW): I am working on another novel. It's been a bit of a struggle, obviously; my wife and I having two children at home and trying to work and take care of our children because of the pandemic – that has completely demolished any real productivity I have with writing. I haven't gotten as much done recently so I would have liked, but I have a novel and it spans a really large period of time. It deals with the islands, although the scope and exactly which islands and those parts of it have changed dramatically, so I don't know exactly what the setting will be totally right now. But it spans about 200 years and has elements of, there's like, reincarnation, and there's a climate change future, and a pre-colonial past, and so it spans these two time periods, and there's some ideas about reincarnation and climate change. It's still in its infancy, but it's… I'm excited about it, if I can get some time to write, to keep writing it.


(CSA): Well it gives us something to look forward to! Kawai Washburn, thank you so much for joining me today!


(KSW): Thank you!


(CSA): To learn more about Kauai or to order a copy of Sharks in the Time of Saviors, go to KawaiStrongWashburn.com. Catch Story Behind the Story on the first Friday of every month from 5 to 6 p.m. during the second hour of Talk of the Bay, right here on KSQB 90.7 FM. To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at Clara@ksqd.org. Next month I will be talking to writer Kawai Strong Washburn about his highly acclaimed baby novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors. Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme.