Kavai Strong Washburn

And she wrote a collection called This is Paradise.

And that was another one that you would, if you were walking into bookstores in different parts of the United States, you would see that when it first came out, you'd see that on the shelves and you could see it in airports and stuff too.

So it certainly got an external audience.

Yeah, you know, there are a variety of influences.

Certainly the authors I listed previously, both the poets and the novelists that I listed from the islands are all writers who operated and operate in that mode when they're writing, right?

They will write things in the patois, which is called pigeon in the islands, we call it pigeon.

That is used heavily by all of those writers.

So certainly all of them and the ways that they wrote and sort of rendered it on the page influenced me.

But then there are writers from the South,

that have done different forms, the Southern United States that have done that, whether it's somebody like William Faulkner or Jesmyn Ward.

There's also...

some of the old writers that had been around in the south even previous to that and kind of like what's called the southern gothic tradition then there have also been writers that have from other parts of the world that have done similar things as well one of the ones that pops into my head now is and i might mispronounce her name and i apologize for that is carrie holm i think oh carrie who wrote the bone people see i knew i was i'm sorry i mispronounced her name yeah the bone people right and so some things that she was doing with language in there as well was something that

I had read previously that I kind of kept in mind and pulled off the shelf and looked through a little bit as well.

So there's a variety of writers, you know, from a whole different different places in the world that had done similar work with language.

And I kind of wanted to figure out what they had done and what I thought I could do that would be the same or different.

And that would ultimately be in conversation with the same sort of writing.

Yeah, that was really, I think, of all of the events and readings that were scheduled.

I was really looking forward to that.

And for that specific reason that you're describing, I really wanted to...

be introduced to writers from the sort of Western end of the Pacific Rim, writers from New Zealand and from Australia that are from different communities that I haven't heard from before and have a chance to be exposed to their literature and to hear them read live and to hear their perspectives on art.