This weekend I signed a book contract with Rootstock Publishing, a small, independent press in Montpelier, Vermont. I had heard good things about them from one of their authors and liked their model of a writer-publisher partnership which is different from the norm. I submitted the first 30 pages of Hawai‘i Calls. It’s been 6 months since publisher Stephen McArthur first called to express interest after reading those pages, and we’ve since enjoyed long, amiable conversations that convinced me he is someone I’d enjoy working with.
Stephen made sure this would be a good fit for us both. Rootstock curates its list carefully, and he wanted to establish a shared understanding of what our roles would be before he passed the full manuscript on for an editor to read. Thanks to the editorial review that followed, he extended an enthusiastic invitation that I was delighted to accept.
Six months was a long stretch, but nothing like the time it took to complete the novel. I began work on it in the early winter of 2012, when I picked up a scrapbook of my grandmother’s social gossip columns for Sodus, New York’s The Record and The Honolulu Star-Bulletin. I recognized the wealth of descriptive information in them, especially about Hawai‘i during its 1930s heyday as playground to the rich and famous. I was struggling with another novel at the time, frustrated by my inability to find its narrative arc. I realized that in the basic outline of my grandmother’s life, I had a potentially engaging story, so I set aside the first novel and began the new project.
Of course, the story I thought I would write with a central character based on my grandmother evolved into something profoundly different. The novel’s short synopsis—small town journalist with two sons and an alcoholic husband moves her family from upstate New York to Hawai‘i in 1936—echoes my father’s family narrative, but the similarity ends there. Very quickly, characters and plot events emerged that bore little resemblance to my family’s story, and while I drew from my grandmother’s columns and my father’s memories to provide a vivid sense of the time and place, the final story and its people were born in the writing process. That process required nearly a decade of writing, attending workshops, and exchanging work with other writers. The more I worked on the book, the more I learned about the craft of writing fiction, and the more I understood how much I had yet to learn and master.
After reading a draft of the novel, dear friend and poet Cynthia Huntington gently and wisely counseled me that Hawai‘i Calls would never be perfect, no matter how hard or how long I worked on it. If anything, she warned, too much rethinking and revision can damage rather than improve a piece. At some point, I had to declare the work done, hand it off to a publisher’s editor, and move on to the next project. Rootstock’s assessment that Hawai‘i Calls is compelling and worthy of publication provided the needed additional assurance that it was time for me to let it go.
No matter how the novel is received—loved, hated, or ignored—I am grateful my life circumstances allowed me the luxury of creating it and for all that I learned in the process. I can’t imagine a better way to spend a decade.