And that is also just to say that we’ve been back here for a lot of the winters. She’s from Stillwater.Īh! It wasn’t just a throw-a-dart-at-a-map thing, then.
So, you sought refuge in the land of ice and snow. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but clearly they’re wrong. Within a couple days, we were wearing respiratory masks all around. But I thought that the forest around us was on fire, because I smelled it so strongly. We were hundreds of miles away from it in San Carlos, on the peninsula.
I was working on revisions of the novel and up really early in the morning when the Camp Fire hit. And it just felt like that state was going under. The three and a half years we were living in the Bay Area, the fires got worse. Why would a San Fran-by-way-of-Hawaii guy think moving to Minneapolis was a good idea? Back on equal footing-that is, the rubbery ground-we talk about stuff like the ingredients of the great Hawaiian novel.īut first, I have to find out more about the Big Island native’s move to a state whose own Big Island is altogether less worthy of a book. When it’s my turn, I fumble just to make it halfway up walls that might as well be stepladders. I watch the novelist as he easily glides through advanced climbs-fingertips deftly supporting his weight as his body moves from one nubbin of a hold to the seemingly impossible next nubbin. It’s a fact you’d know even if you saw him at the grocery store: His lean, strong frame carries technical Patagonia threads as though they were tailored just for him. I suggested Vertical Endeavors, where, as fate would have it, Washburn holds a membership. And the climber’s descriptions are vivid enough that I have a hunch Washburn probably knows the difference between a triple-lock and straight-gate carabiner. A handful of different voices narrate the story, a blue-collar family epic with a dose of magical realism, set in Hawaii. One of the central characters in his debut novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, climbs as a form of spiritual release. While doing this interview Thursday was Washburn’s idea, meeting at the climbing gym was mine. It might not be snowing, but it sure ain’t Hawaii. And while he’s lived lots of other places since coming to the mainland after high school-Portland, D.C., and San Fran among them-the frozen tundra was something else.Īnd yet, here he is, inside a climbing gym that used to be an actual ice warehouse (Vertical Endeavors on Minneapolis’s Eat Street) on a midwinter Thursday, with temps well below zero.
Washburn, 39, is a native of the Big Island of Hawaii. “But given there’s heavy snow in the forecast, traffic could be bad. “Friday could work as a meeting time,” he’d conceded over email. The author won’t admit it, but I think he’s scared… of snow. Kawai Strong Washburn does not want to do this interview on Friday, even though it makes more sense planning-wise. Novelist Kawai Strong Washburn at Vertical Endeavors
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