MATT PORTER: The JFK35 podcast is produced by the JFK Library Foundation and made possible with the help of a generous grant from the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: Moreover, as a great Democratic society, we have a special responsibility to the arts. For art is the great democrat, calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race, or religion, or wealth, or color.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: President Kennedy spoke of the universality of artistic expression and its ability to transcend national borders in a broadcast for the National Cultural Center, what would later become the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In the White House, both he and Mrs. Kennedy were lovers of the arts, supporting writers and artists during the administration. The JFK Library has carried on this literary tradition for the past 35 years in collaboration with PEN America and Ernest Hemingway's family with the PEN Hemingway Award. Learn more about this tradition and meet this year's honoree in this episode of JFK35.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
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JAMIE RICHARDSON: Hello. I'm Jamie Richardson. And welcome to JFK35. For nearly four decades, the JFK Library and the JFK Library Foundation have supported in part the PEN Hemingway Award. This award, named for Ernest Hemingway, who you've heard us talk about earlier in the season, honors a distinguished first book of fiction. Doctor Hilary Justice, the JFK Library Foundation's Hemingway scholar and residence, describes the origins of the PEN Hemingway Award.
HILARY JUSTICE: The PEN Hemingway award is one of several literary awards administered by a writers organization called PEN America. They're out of New York City. And initially, Hemingway's widow, Mary Hemingway, was a member of PEN America. She was a journalist, and she also wrote an autobiography. And she wanted to establish an award for the best first work of fiction, best novel in her husband's memory.
She was looking to establish several things early on to and sort of steward his legacy and ensure that his impact on culture wouldn't just be limited to what he wrote, although that's significant. She wanted to give other writers a boost, the opportunity that he had sort of accidentally earning most of his early money with journalism. So the PEN Hemingway award is now given for the best first novel in every year, according to a panel of judges, all of whom are established novelists and fiction writers.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The award was established in 1976, but it wouldn't be until 10 years later that the JFK Library entered the picture.
HILARY JUSTICE: The Kennedy library's involvement started about 10 years after the first PEN Hemingway Award was given. So for the 10th anniversary of the PEN Hemingway Award, they arranged to have a gala event at the John F. Kennedy Library. And the guest of honor for that one was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
And there was a dinner in the pavilion. And while she was sitting at dinner, Mrs. Onassis looked around and said, this is great. We should do the PEN Hemingway Award here every year. And that basically landed on everyone at the table as a command, and they made it happen. So the PEN Hemingway Award has been celebrated at the JFK Library in Boston every spring, ever since.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: So every spring since the mid-80s, the JFK Library has presented the PEN Hemingway Award, celebrating the author of a first work of fiction, except for last year, when the ceremony was postponed because of the pandemic. This year, a virtual celebration was held to honor the winners and finalists from 2020 and 2021.
Kawai Strong Washburn won the 2021 PEN Hemingway award for his novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors. He joins other notable winners, including Teju Cole, Joshua Ferris, [? Hodgen, ?] Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ottessa Moshfegh, Tommy Orange, and Marilynne Robinson. Earlier this spring, I spoke with Kawai about his writing and winning the award.
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: So you are this year's PEN Hemingway Award recipient. So, actually, just to start off the bat, how long have you been writing?
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: It's hard to say exactly. So this novel took me about 10 years, although I think, at this point, it's now coming up on 11 years since I first started it. And it was probably several years before that that I started trying to seriously have published writing. So we could say maybe 15 years if I round up a little.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Mhm. And I did see that it took you about 10 years to write the book. So why was the process so long? Or at what point did you realize that the book was finished and ready to be let out into the world?
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: Yeah, so the point at which I could tell that it was ready-- the point that I could tell that I was done with it was when I had come back to it after taking about four or five months away from it, which I did multiple times. Every time I finished a draft, I would go away from it for several months and then come back to it with fresh eyes, with all of the last work cleared out of my head and read it again, and then start another draft, revising all the things that I could see that needed to be fixed.
And I did that cycle probably-- I don't know-- maybe four times. Something like that. And after I had done it enough, it would contract, it would expand. It would contract, it would expand. Things would change, but the core of it was just there, and all the changes I made never really felt like it shifted the novel in a totally different direction. And that was the point at which I was like, I think I've done everything I can with this on my own. And so I need somebody else to read it and see if it's any good or anything like that.
And ultimately, what I settled on was I was just like, I'm just going to try and send it out to agents and see what they think about it. And that part of it, the whole several drafts in which it contracted and expanded and all that, that took several years because I would give myself like five or six months. And it took several years before that to write it because I'm a parent, I'm married. Those things all happened over the course of the time that I was writing. I have other jobs and volunteer work I do.
I never had the opportunity for writing to be my primary or only work in the world, so that slows it down significantly. And also, I had written one other novel that I shelved-- it's not very good-- that I used to learn about writing, but I still was having to learn a lot about writing and what I wanted to be as a writer while I was writing this. And I think that slowed the process down as well.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: That's fascinating. So I've also read that Sharks in the Time of Saviors has been called one of the most richly imagined and evocative debuts. And I started to read it myself, and I'm fascinated and can't wait to get back to it once I get off this with you. But what inspired your novel?
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: I don't know. It's really hard to say. It was a combination of probably several different things. I think one was having been born and raised in the islands and then having left them for the Continental United States. There were a lot of things I had sort of experienced just in seeing the way that people talked about the United States and talked about the history of America, and the way that they imagined or talked about the islands, about Hawaii, about how it's sort of occupied most people's imaginations that I encountered, which was largely as sort of a destination, a sort of packaged exotic paradise for them to visit and then leave. Or it was the backdrop for stories about people that weren't from the islands.
And seeing all of those things I think was part of it. That was part of what made me start writing about Hawaii, because I didn't at the start. When I first started writing, I wasn't really focused on the islands. And I think I came back to them more and more as I kept rubbing up against experiences that bothered me in terms of people's understanding or artistic imagination of the islands. So that was part of it.
I think another thing was that I got that image, the image of the shark being-- the shark saving a child from drowning, it showed up in my head one day. And I don't like to attribute any sort of like serendipity or divine intervention to the artistic life because I think it's largely just like anything else. It's just a product of work. Like, you just work and then you produce something.
But I did have that vision, the image just showed up in my head. And I, for a while, just questioned it and was like, well, what is this about. And the more that I questioned it and felt like there were richer and richer answers coming back that made me delve into it more as a story. And then as I built out just the story, starting with just the family, I didn't really know what the bigger themes were going to be.
Then, I think some of those things I talked about previously, the experiences I've had coming from the islands and living in the United States or the continental United States, those things started to inform it, and other things I care about started to inform the novel. And then I guess that's how it became the bigger thing than it became.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And you've mentioned in the past that previous PEN Hemingway winner, Tommy Orange's book, There There shares elements with Sharks in the Time of Saviors. Are there other new or recently debuted authors that you identify with that are sort of in this cohort of exploring the different themes?
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: Yeah, I think there are a lot of authors whose work has touched on different aspects of them. One of these books-- and it's always tricky to compare because I don't want to take anything away from another author or suggest that we are some way equivalent or anything like that. And so in saying this, I'm not necessarily equating myself to any of these authors or anything like that.
One of the ones that comes to my mind first is C Pam Zhang. And I might be mispronouncing her last name. And if C Pam listens to this, I apologize for mispronouncing her last name, if that's the case. She wrote a book that just came out as the same time as mine called How Much of These Hills is Gold.
And that book is, in some ways, feels like it does very similar things in the sense that it is pushing back against the standard narrative of the United States. And it offers this totally alternative vision for what things might have been like in the American West, and probably were for a variety of different people. In this case, it's following a group of Chinese-Americans.
At the beginning, they're sort of prospectors and they change into a lot of other things over the course of the novel. But that book, I think in the same way as mine is, is pushing back against kind of the standard American narrative and uses a family that, I think, at its center, it's still a story about a family, but it's also a family that is-- their story is one that recasts the standard mythology of America. So that's one that pops into my head immediately.
There's also Maisy Card's, These Ghosts Are Family. I might be getting the name of that one wrong because I don't have it sitting right here on my desk, and so I'm forgetting the title or messing up the title perhaps a little bit. But she also has one that sort of traces the history of a family over a course of several generations.
And it has aspects-- it's dealing with like the African diaspora, and slavery, and things like that. And so in that case, it's also a debut novel that came out at the same time as mine that touches on similar elements of looking at the legacy of the United States passed down across generations with elements of mythology-- and some people refer to it as magical realism-- or things like that are also in there. Those are a couple. I could keep going, but I feel that was a really long answer, so I'll stop.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: A good way to get a great reading list going. And going back to the idea of pushing back against narratives, could you explain a little bit how your book does that with the idea of Hawaii being this destination or sort of a place for white people from the mainland to come and enjoy it and then leave?
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: Yeah, so first of all, the book centers itself very squarely on a family that is of the islands, that is born and raised there, that have blood ties to the island in the sense that they're native Hawaiian. They're part Native Hawaiian and part Filipino, but they're from and of the islands largely. And they live in a rural part of the big island of Hawaii, which is Hamakua, which is where I was born and raised.
And so you're automatically-- like right away, you're off the beaten path. Like, this is a place that's a town-- it's like a real town, but it's a place that I think a lot of readers that are not from the islands will not be familiar with. It has nothing to do with the standard tourist mind-- the imagination in a tourist mind of the islands is just sort of like this endless beach paradise, or maybe there's like some lush tropical rainforest that's still terminates in a beach, or something like that. And it's not at all like that in Hamakua.
And so you've got this family that's of and from the islands, that's living in a rural part of Hawaii. And we see pretty quickly that the life they live is not some sort of idyllic paradise. It's very much the same sort of issues and challenges that you would see. And a lot of other parts of rural America are very similar to what you would encounter in rural parts of Hawaii.
But then on top of that, there are additional elements of the legacy of annexation, colonization, and how that has driven a wedge between the people and the land and has required a lot of work to kind of redefine and return to a more symbiotic relationship with the land and things like that. And so in looking at all of those things, I think it just-- it has nothing to do with the standard imagination of the islands as like a paradise that is of and for consumption and pleasure, and sort of starts and ends with the plane touching down and lifting off of the islands.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And getting to the award that you recently won, were you surprised to learn that you had been nominated, and then that you won, and then you were at the ceremony a few weeks ago on Sunday virtually?
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: Yeah, I-- yes. [LAUGHS] I mean, all of it, I would be very impressed if there's a debut author out there that even I would say even a mid-career, late-career author that is like, I am going to be nominated for this award, and I'm going to win it, and I deserve to. I think there are probably not that many authors that would think of things in those terms. Maybe there are more. I don't know. I can only speak anecdotally from the authors I've known and from my own experience.
And I just don't really think in those terms. I always think it's nice. And I think as time went on, that the novel-- it came out, and it got good reviews from the, like, highly regarded institutions that are part of the publishing industry. And over the course of the time that it was published, you could see occasionally there would be events I would have that would pair me with some of these authors that I've already talked about previously.
And so you start to get a sense for sort of where you sit, whether it's a book that's kind of a little bit under the radar and might be something people are only going to discover later on or discover at the paperback, or whether it's the kind of thing that a lot of people are talking about or looking at or reading. And so it was certainly very clear as the year went on that it was something that had gained about as much attention as any debut novel could during the pandemic and the lockdown.
So that part was definitely clear, but after that, I think it's just-- there's so many good novels that come out in a year. And there were a lot of awards, some of the previous major awards, my book wasn't on the list, or it was on the long list, and then it was on the short list or things like that. And there are just a lot of good books out there.
And so I try to think about that part of it because I think that that's-- I would only be setting myself up, I think, for a certain amount of frustration and sadness if I was like, I'm going to win XYZ award, because I think it's such a subjective process. And I don't think it really is a good thing to stake your feelings of success on because you have no control over that. And so I didn't think about it too much, so it was very much a surprise and, obviously, a very positive one. I was delighted to have won the award. It felt really good.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Yeah, that's probably a healthy outset to have this. Just release it and then to see what happens with it. And you mentioned-- of course, I don't know how I could forget this, but, of course, 2020 was the year we were all in lockdown in home and sheltering in place, and figuring out how to live in this new way. So what was it like to release a book during a pandemic and then see-- normally, you'd probably go to a book tour or do in-person events. How did that change or how was that different for you?
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: It was all wiped away. I had a schedule set up that was completely-- it just was obliterated. Like, we had already lined up things that were happening at bookstores and things like that, and they all just evaporated. And everybody was scrambling to try and figure out what they were going to do.
But it was such a-- even if we look now at what's happening in India, it remains such a cataclysmic event, this illness just sort of sweeping across the country that there were always bigger things that were happening that just sort of kept it in perspective. I don't know. I guess I didn't get to-- it was sad and disappointing at times, and there were some incredible events that I was going to be part of that I was really excited to be part of.
I got invited to the Sydney Writers' Festival, and there were all these incredible people in the lineup that I was very excited to meet in person, people that are in like the Pacific region that I've never gotten a chance to meet whose writing I have read before and really enjoyed. And there were a few events like that I was really sad to have taken away.
But by and large, I mean, I was working really long hours. I was having to get up really early and take away all of my writing time to start doing my desk job so that I could swap with my wife halfway through the day and take over child care. We were splitting child care and working full time, so there wasn't much room for anything else.
And, of course, we were as scared as everybody else about what was going to happen and things like that. So, so much of that occupied so much of my time. And then there was the scramble with all of these different events. Everything was just being completely redone that I didn't really have time to slow down and feel any sense of loss until much later in the year.
And that was hard. There were a lot of other really talented authors and books that have come out that have had to struggle similarly. So it's been hard. I think it's been hard for all of us. But I think on the other hand, it keeps it in really good perspective to realize that publishing a book is wonderful and having it gain a certain amount of critical acclaim is wonderful.
And you obviously make art and hope that it's going to interact-- people are going to come to it and it's going to resonate with them and they're going to take something away from it. And having all those things happen is lovely, but it kind of pales in comparison to these sorts of really big things that help remind us how tenuous life is, how quickly everything about our daily lives can just totally change.
And I think more than anything, it just made me think about people. It's been so long since something like this has happened in the United States. And it's not the same way for people in a lot of other countries. There are people in countries that-- if you think about countries that have had to suffer through really long civil wars, or famines, or other ecological disasters and have had to do those things in multiple cycles and really short periods of time, you come to realize how incredibly privileged and lucky we are. And so I think keeping all those things in perspective as well just sort of softens the blow.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Yeah, I find it's been an odd year. And everything is sort of adapting constantly, so just take it as it goes, I guess, as long as everyone's healthy.
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: Yeah.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: That's good. And getting back to the award, so it is named for Ernest Hemingway. The JFK Library has the Ernest Hemingway collection. We recently had-- Ernest Hemingway PBS documentary just came out. So it's been a big year for Hemingway. And lots of folks learned about him in high school or in English classes there. Do you have a significant Hemingway story that you love, or kind of connection from your own writing, or literary history?
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: Yeah, so there are a few that I can think of. So just to kind of out myself so that I don't seem like I'm more sophisticated than I am, I actually didn't even read anything by Hemingway, I think, until I was in college. There might have been Hemingway in some of the English literature classes at my high school, but I think it just sort of happened cyclically. Like some years, you ended up reading The Great Gatsby or whatever, and another year, you might end up reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, or whatever.
And for whatever reason, the cycle of the years that I was into literature at the late stages of my high school career, we didn't read Hemingway. So I hadn't touched Hemingway until I got to college. And then it was-- I can't remember what the first short story was. But the first time I can remember having a-- oh, wait! No, I know what it was. I'm glad we're talking about this right now. It was A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. I remember reading that in college.
And I actually don't even think it was assigned. I think I was leafing through the anthology that they had given us. And I read it. And it took me a long time to really understand what was happening, but I can still remember the sense I don't think I'd ever read a story that had quite captured this sort of unnameable sense of loneliness that haunts that story. I feel like there's very much this-- like a loneliness that can't be named, or dealt, with or processed directly that's kind of at the center of the story.
And I think it was one of the first short stories. I remember reading where it sort of evoked this nameless emotion in me, and I couldn't figure out what the story had done to me when I finished reading it. Like, I finished reading it and I was like, what just happened?
And later on, I was living in Namibia as a volunteer teacher. And I was working for an organization called WorldTeach. And so I was there for a little over a year as a teacher of English, math, and even computer studies at this little boarding school in a really remote part of Namibia. And so when I got there-- and this is pre, like, a lot of the digital devices that we have now. There weren't really any e-book readers, so to speak. Even like a laptop was pretty expensive at the time. I didn't have either one of those things.
So I carried a few books with me. And then when I got there, in the corner of the closet in the house I was staying in, there were a few old paperbacks. And one of them was the collection of Ernest Hemingway short stories. And I read that over and over, because I didn't have that many books while I was there. So I read through it pretty quickly. So I read that collection over and over.
And one of the stories that really stuck out with me that I still keep with me in my mind is a story that I believe is called An African Story or An Africa Story. And in it, there's like a father, and a son, and their guide and they go on this hunt in-- I don't know, maybe it's Kenya. They go on an elephant hunt. And then there's a moment where the child is exposed to the blood of an elephant. And he keeps a flake of it, and there's this line where he kind of says he kept the flake of it hoping it would mean something someday, and it never did.
And it was one of those ones where I could just see-- like, he just yanks you across this character's entire life in one sentence. And so you know that no matter what happens later on in that person's life, there's going to be this thing about mortality, death failure, whatever it is. They keep hoping they're going to understand that over the course of their life, and they never do. So there's that. There's a couple other stories. Again, I feel like I might be talking too long. There's like, I can think of one or two other times in my life where one of those stories was kind of intersected with my life in a meaningful way.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: That's a really amazing image to have and to keep with you for that character, and then as readers later on to have that wallop. So I have two questions for you to wrap up. One was brought up by something you said earlier is that you do have a previous novel that you had worked on. Is there any chance that you would ever go back to that and-- no. I see you shaking your head.
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: No. Yeah, no, there's not a chance, and that's OK. I think one of the things that was really good about that novel is-- so it was when I first sat down and I was like, well, I want to write a novel. And so I started writing it. And I spent a long time working on it and revising it. And it was an opportunity for me to really sit down and learn craft. I don't have any classic formal teaching.
As a writer, I didn't go to an MFA program. I didn't even take any creative writing classes in high school or college. Well, I took some in high school. They're just part of the curriculum. But once I got to college and everything thereafter, I never took any sort of formal writing program or anything like that. And so I had to learn all those things while I was writing this first novel.
I had to go and find books about it, and read essays and articles, and really reread things that I loved and really try to unlock them from a craft perspective and understand what it means to write, and how you do it, and what all the components are that you need to consider. And those were all things that I was working out while I was writing this novel. So from the start, it's probably going to be pretty flawed just because I'm having to learn how to write as I'm doing it.
And then I spent a bunch of time revising and revising. And I finally, just one day-- again, I spent a bunch of time away from it. I put it in the desk for like six months or maybe a little bit more, and I wrote some short stories and did other writing. And then I came back to it and read it with fresh eyes, having read a bunch of other stuff and written a bunch of other stuff.
And I was like, this is just not that good. I just ask myself the question. I was like, if somebody were to give me this book and read it and it wasn't me, would I keep reading it? Would I want to keep reading it? And I was like, well, no, I mean, it's fine. It's well-written. It's not badly written, but it's just missing that-- it's not suffused with enough of, I think, my own-- it didn't touch the third rail of my life in a way that sort of coursed the novel with this essence that you can't fake as a writer, that has to be there or else the work is dead. It wasn't there.
And I was like, I think for a long time I've been really scared of just being like, all right, well, this is done, and so I finally was. I was like, why should I write this anymore? And I think for just a brief moment, I was scared that I wasn't going to be able to write another novel. But I think the very next day, I sat down and started working on other things. I worked on short stories after that for a little bit.
But it was like, oh, I can write. I'll be able to write whatever I want. I can always write another thing. And it's so funny because it's not any different than anything else in terms of a craft of learning how to do something, whether we're talking about sewing, or singing, or repairing a bicycle. Any of these sorts of things, you have to learn and you have to fail as part of that learning process.
And so the novel was a learning-- it was an excellent way to learn how to write. And that's all it was. As the best version of that story that it could have been, it was a failure. But in terms of it helping me become a writer, it was a success. I learned from it, but it was not something that should ever be published. The story doesn't compel me enough to be like, oh, let me go back to it and try and remake it.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Yeah, I do so in myself. And there are definitely things where I'm like, oh, that was a learning-- that's OK. And that's OK to learn, or fail and then you pick yourself up and go on from there. That's great. And so Sharks in the Time of Saviors is your first novel, but if folks, after reading this, they want to read anything else you've written, where else can people find your work?
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: There's a few short stories that are published in disparate literary magazines, and those particular issues might be out of publication or out of print at this point in time. There is one that was published in Barrelhouse called "Departures Arrival." I can't remember the issue of Barrelhouse, but this is a literary magazine.
I published something in Mid-American Review, which was-- I can't remember the name of it. And I published something in McSweeney's which was then-- it got added. It got anthologized in the Best American Nonrequired Reading. And I think this was in 2015. And that story is called What the Ocean Eats, I think. And that was my first major-- it was published in like-- I was like, oh, this is a literary magazine I read. I got published. It's super exciting. That came out in 2015. So there's a smattering of short stories that are around in a few places. But other than that, I don't have a huge publishing CV before this novel came out.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Well, it's excellent. We hope to read more from you soon, if you are so inclined to write more. But we want to congratulate you again, and thank you so much for speaking with us, Kawai, today.
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN: Yeah, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Thank you.
[THemE MUSIC]
Thank you for listening to this episode of JFK, a podcast from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Visit our podcast page at jfklibrary.org/JFK, where we'll have more information on topics mentioned in this episode, including this year's PEN Hemingway celebration and more information about the award.
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