For the spring book season, da Shop, a Kaimuki bookstore, had scheduled community events to launch Big Island native Kawai Strong Washburn’s first novel, “Sharks in the Time of Saviors”and Honolulu resident Vicky Heldreich Durand’s memoir of her late mother,“Wave Woman: The Life and Struggles of a Surfing Pioneer.”
But when the coronavirus stay-at-home order was issued for Honolulu on March 23, da Shop closed its doors and canceled its events. While Amazon de-prioritized shipping books in favor of essential goods, book festivals and author tours were canceled worldwide and U.S. book sales fell 10%.
“I’m sad I can’t come out,” said Washburn, 40, who lives in Minneapolis with his wife and daughters. “My dad, a music teacher at Honokaa High School (Washburn’s alma mater), was (also) going to be onOahu with his student jazz band trip.”
But the good news, he added, is he’ll be able to show up by videoconference.
“Virtual author book presentation events will be happening — Kawai and Vicky are at the top of the list,” said David DeLuca, director of publishing at Bess Press, which owns da Shop.
“Our internal joke logo is ‘Buy local … no need go Amazon, brah!’” said company president Buddy Bess, noting that both these debut books are intensely local and rooted in places of deep historical and cultural significance, from Durand’s Makaha Valley to Washburn’s Waipio Valley.
They are also by writers with a cause: Washburn explores the dispossession, impoverishment and prospects for healing of Native Hawaiians, while Durand chronicles how her mother furthered women’s independence in athletics, the workplace and at home.
Surfing, which she began at age 40 in Waikiki, liberated Betty Pembroke Heldreich Winstedt: She divorced her domineering, unfaithful husband and moved to Makaha, where she rode big waves alongside George Downing, Buffalo Keaulana and Peter Cole, who became lifelong family friends.
She placed second in the first women’s competition at the Makaha International Surfing Championships, won the first women’s world title in Peru, worked full time, raised two daughters, remarried and, after her husband’s death, lived alone in her seaside cottage, making pottery and writing haiku, until she died in 2011 at age 98.
In the late 1950s, Winstedt also befriended 7-year-old Rell Sunn, the future surf champion and “Queen of Makaha” who, 40 years later, as she was dying from breast cancer, paid a farewell visit to Winstedt’s home.
“Women’s surfing has gotten so big and come so far; it’s wonderful Carissa Moore is going to represent Hawaii in the Olympics,” Durand said in an interview at Waikiki, where in 1952 she, her sister and mother shared a first surf lesson, as she swam in the clear, clean waters of a Queen’s Beach emptied by coronavirus park closure rules.
“When we surfed, there was no money in it,” added Durand, 79, who at age 17 beat both her mother and reigning champ Ethel Kukea to win the 1957 Makaha contest, “and today there’s no mention of Mother, Ethel or me; we’ve been forgotten by the history of surfing.”
Not anymore: “Wave Woman” is a timely wake-up call.
SPEAKING by phone from Minnesota, Washburn, who hasn’t lived in Hawaii since he left for college in Portland, Ore., said writing “Sharks in the Time of Saviors” was a journey of self-discovery.
“I never really felt at home on the mainland,” he said. “And I (finally) realized how much that came with being from the islands, how attached to the islands I was.”
When he returned to visit family, “it stirred up all these emotions and a bigger understanding of how special, what an incredible place the islands are,” Washburn said. “I recognized their power and majesty.”
Although he is of African American-Caucasian descent, he chose to write in the point of view of Native Hawaiian-Filipino characters because, “I wanted it to be a novel about a family and the mythology and unfortunate history of colonization in the islands,” he said.
That required him to “get down into the Kanaka Maoli part of that experience, talking from (their) perspective,” he added.
Washburn’s novel is dedicated to his grandmother, who once a month would drive him 40 miles from Honokaa, which had no bookstore, to Hilo to buy a book.
Honokaa did, however, have a library, whose librarian remembered him when he stopped by years later with his daughter.
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DA SHOP VIRTUAL EVENTS
The first da Shop virtual event will be Saturday at 3 p.m. and feature “Sharks in the Time of Saviors”; the “Wave Woman” session is scheduled for May 10. Both books can be ordered for home delivery from da Shop; at a time when Hawaii state libraries are also closed (though cardholders can still check out e-books), it’s a way to get books with real, turnable pages in hands and support the local economy. For more information or to register for a virtual event, visit dashophnl.com.
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