For more than twenty years, I supported myself as a professional writer. I learned to research unfamiliar subjects, meet deadlines, listen closely, and write in voices and forms that served someone else’s purpose. What I rarely got to do was write exactly what I wanted.
Living in Hawaiʻi changed that. The astonishing landscape was part of it, but so was the culture—the stories, humor, contradictions, strong sense of community, and the awareness that the past is never very far from the present. Somewhere along the way, Hawaiʻi gave me permission to stop writing what other people wanted me to write and begin telling the stories that had been waiting for me. It set me free to become a novelist.