Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

Image Credit: Van Wishingrad

First, I’d love to know more about your experience of being a debut author? And could you also share a little bit about how your book came into being? Did you always know it was going to take the form of a short story collection?

So, my experience of being a debut author has been very surreal and I feel a flood of gratitude when I see these stories into the world. I’ve been writing for a very long time! Throughout my childhood, I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a novelist, but after college, I worked in PR for many years, and it was a very gruelling experience, so I used a lot of that time trying to carve out writing time and to try to make writing a priority and take it seriously. So, a lot of the years while I was trying to become a writer and practice my writing were very difficult, but I felt that, as long as I was took it seriously and gave it the time it deserved, it would be okay because I was working towards something. 

And with this collection, although I had been writing these stories for about four years, once I started an MFA in 2020 at the Michener Centre in Austin, everything started to accelerate. And I got my agent, and we worked on the stories very closely for about six months, and then the collection sold and suddenly, a year goes by and they’re out in the world! I think I say surreal because it’s always been this dream of mine to be a published writer, but it was hard to imagine what it would look like in reality.  

And I gravitated towards short stories because, even though people say it’s a bit harder for story collections to be published as some readers are put off by them, which I don’t understand.

I don’t understand that either! I love short story collections.

 Ah, I love hearing that, and I have always had such a love for short stories as well. I think that the idea that short story collections don’t sell is almost self-fulfilling prophecy, and I just find it so hard to believe. Short stories have just always been the form I’ve loved to read as a reader, so I studied them, and tried to learn as much as I could, but when the time came to write, I wasn’t really thinking of the stories as a book yet. In the initial drafting phase, I was just concerned with writing the stories that I felt like had been inside of me for a very long time. A lot of these were ancestral stories that I feel that were passed on from my grams, my mum’s mum, from the Hawaiian side of my family. I felt like, in the short story form, I was able to explore each of these stories as a sort of microcosm, in their own contained universe, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t bleed into each other, right? I guess I just wanted to play with the form. I wanted to experiment. I was still trying to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be, and the short story form just felt the most natural to me, so I felt comfortable exploring it in that way.

In one of your stories, ‘Aiko, The Writer’, you talk about the experience of publishing a book and writing for a wider audience. The advice the character of tutu gives the protagonist include:

‘There are ways to tell Hawaiian stories and ways to make Hawaiian stories vulnerable to the white hand. You’ll need to be extremely careful with your choices. Don’t bother with accessibility. Even when you write white, the readers won’t make sense of it.’

I’d love to know whether the narrator’s experiences correspond to your own. And perhaps you could tell us more about the pressure and fears you felt about writing Hawaiian myths ‘responsibly’ and ‘correctly’ - if there is such a thing!

Definitely. That’s a great question. I think in terms of Aiko as a character, I feel like she sort of embodies all of my anxieties and fears around writing indigenous stories. And yes, I think that any writers writing from a marginalised experience can be expected to ‘write white’ or write to accommodate a wide range of audiences, which can often lead to the work being flattened or just made smaller in order to appeal to a wider audience. That was always something that I was really, really terrified of, so I tried really hard not to think about it when I was first writing the stories. It was really important for me not to think about readership or audience because of that pressure. But then when the time came to revise the stories and collaborate editorially with my agent, all the anxieties sort of came back up again, so I feel like it’s almost a bit of a cyclical process where I have to remind myself that I can only tell my truth; I can only tell the truest version of an ancestral story in the way it was told to me. My story will not be everyone else’s story and I don’t think that that’s what stories are meant to be anyway. I think one of the things I love most about writing ancestral stories and writing into myth is that there’s such joy in the space of myth because they are so capacious and there are so many iterations and different versions and retellings, and they can accommodate so many different voices – they can accommodate different iterations. And I think I was really excited about that because I have a passion for mythology, but I also wanted to incorporate a lot of different passions, like womanhood, the female body, and the wounds and effects of colonisation. And I feel like mythology can absorb these other obsessions and create something new.

On the subject of ‘writing white’, I wanted to ask about your decision to integrate many Hawaiian words into your work. Did you have different thoughts and fears about how readers would take to that decision?

With these stories I there’s so there’s two different ways that Hawaiian language is working in them. There’s ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, which is Hawaiian language, and there’s also pidgin, which is kind of a dialect – a more casual way of speaking. And I think that, because I was invested in telling the most authentic stories, I knew it would incorporate ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and pidgin because that’s the way I grew up, so I felt like it was really important for these stories to reflect that. I did think about providing a glossary or italicising words that weren’t familiar, but at the end of the day, I was very conscious that I was envisioning a Hawaiian reading audience – and that didn’t mean I wanted to cast aside any other readership – but there are so few indigenous Hawaiian books written by indigenous Hawaiian writers, so I felt like it would be offering a gesture to our people.

You’ve mentioned a little bit about this already, but I’d just like to go back to the theme of mythology. If I’m honest, I am interested in mythology, but I hadn’t really taken enough time to think about it more deeply as a theme until I began researching for this issue. And, as you said, it’s quite hard to describe mythology because it’s such an all-encompassing theme, and there’s also a contradiction within the term because myths can be widely held beliefs, but on the other hand, they’re also generally acknowledged as not being ‘real’. I thought you wrote so beautifully about that when you said that Hawaiian stories are: ‘Not simply the stuff of lore but grounded in the truth of myth.’

I love this quote and so much, and I wanted to ask you how you feel about this contradiction between truth and fiction, and – this is probably an unanswerable question – but what does the word ‘myth’ mean to you?

In that line, I was writing about myth exclusively from a Hawaiian perspective and the way that we treat our own mythology. All our myths fall under the category of a word called moʻolelo, which is a Hawaiian word that is a sweeping word that incorporates our ancestral stories, mythology, legends, and even superstitions. We have such a rich historical mythology that’s grounded in Hawaiian history, and it’s rooted in so many historical stories of our gods and our goddesses, who Hawaiians believed were like the original creators of Hawaii. And a lot of our myths point to these different characters and, because we take them really seriously, we believe that they were real, so we want to honour and respect them as such.

Right, and that feels like such a different perspective from the way we think of mythology perhaps from a Western perspective because, even the phrase ‘it’s a myth’, implies that it’s false.

Exactly! So, it was hard to explain the different approach that we take to our myths and our mythology, but I feel like it was really important because I was interested in the way that these inherited myths can be such a gift but also an incredible burden. And I wanted to explore the ways these myths and superstitions impress themselves onto the lives of the characters and force the women into various predicaments. I was also just really interested in seeing our Hawaiian mythology taking up space on the page because – to refer to something I’ve heard a lot of writers say – this was the book I really wanted to read and had never encountered before, so it became the book I wanted to write. 

In terms of the definition of myth, I think it’s hard because, as you said, myths take up so many different iterations and people bring their own experiences to the term mythology. For me, at their core, myths are our cultural stories, and the way we interact with these cultural stories, and they demand to be passed down to the next generation because they permeate all aspects of what it means to be Hawaiian and what that Hawaiian experience looks like.

Totally. And even though your collection is centred around inherited stories, you have done an incredible job at integrating them into a contemporary gaze and narratives that encompass themes like female sexuality, women’s bodies, motherhood, relationships, isolation, and the lasting damage of colonisation. How did you approach that task? And did you always know the kind of topics and ideas you wanted to build into your work?

Yes, I feel like I always had these themes and topics on my mind, but I didn’t necessarily go into writing a story thinking, ‘okay, I want this story to explore female sexuality’ or ‘I want this story to explore colonisation’. And actually, what I’ve noticed about my writing practise has been about letting go of control and being able to follow a single character or a set of characters as they move through the world and make decisions as they’re in their bodies and also in their minds.

And when I did give up control, that was when the story really opened up for me and, in doing so, I noticed the way that these themes would creep up into their actions and their interactions. And then I wrote into those, and the thematic interests started to appear in the stories. The revision aspect is also a really important part of my process. I do a lot of rewriting. I write various versions of a single story, and that’s where I feel like I’m able to really refine the stories in terms of thematic interests, and paying real attention to the ways they communicate with myth in a character’s life.

Many of your stories also incorporate surrealism and horror, and of course many works of mythology involve elements of the supernatural, so I’d love to know what other works have informed your writing.

Yes, absolutely. One of my first literary loves was Kelly Link’s fiction. A lot of her fiction veers into the speculative or lives in the speculative, and I have always been such a fan. Also, Karen Russell. I love how both of their writing feels fearless; it feels as though they aren’t worried about how their work is going to be received. There’s so much confidence that bounces off the page in their fiction, which has always inspired me because, at least personally, I had a lot of fear writing speculative stories and stories that lean into horror.

And then I’ll also mention the writer Kristiana Kahakauwila, who wrote a collection called This Is Paradise. She’s native Hawaiian as well, and I love how she really embraced her experience of being native Hawaiian in the form of short stories. She was a really important influence for me. And then looking as well at writers like Kali Fajardo-Anstine who wrote Sabrina and Corina, which is a collection of indigenous Latinx stories of womanhood and growing up in the American West. I think I was just inspired by all the women who I feel have written so fearlessly about womanhood, about existing in contemporary times, and about existing in a really fraught and difficult world and being really honest on the page. Those are the books that have always stuck with me and that I would love the idea of my book being in conversation with them.

And lastly, a question we ask all our authors – do you judge a book by its cover?

I love that question. I think a part of me does. Perhaps I do put a little too much weight into covers because I’m often delighted when I’m surprised by a book that speaks to me so deeply if it has a cover that maybe didn’t at first. So, I just it comes down to the fact that a cover won’t stop me from picking up a book because I like it when books surprise me in that way.

And sometimes the opposite happens…

Yes! I did think, I hope the stories in my collection live up to that beautiful cover because it truly is so beautiful, I’m so thrilled with it.

Don’t worry at all, they definitely do!