Interview with Native Hawaiian Author Malia Maunakea

Malia Maunkea is Native Hawai­ian author of mid­dle grade and non-fic­tion. Her new nov­el, LEI AND THE FIRE GODDESS, a rol­lick­ing sto­ry about an adven­tur­ous Native Hawai­ian twelve-year-old, is a rar­i­ty in chil­drenʻs lit­er­a­ture: a sto­ry for mid­dle grade kids writ­ten by an ʻōi­wi author that fea­tures an ʻōi­wi char­ac­ter. We are proud to fea­ture Malia in todayʻs talk-story.

Hoʻo­maikaʻiʻana on your new nov­el! For those who haven’t met you yet, please tell us a lit­tle about yourself.

Sure! My name’s Malia, named for the Olo­mana song O Malia since my par­ents’ first date was to an Olo­mana con­cert. My mom is from upstate New York and is pure Pol­ish. My dad is from Māʻili (West Side) on Oʻahu. I’ve been mar­ried to my awe­some part­ner for near­ly two decades, and we have two kids who are teens at the time of this inter­view. I love hik­ing and back­pack­ing and trav­el­ing around the con­ti­nent in our tiny campervan.

Where did you grow up? What high school did you grad from?

I grew up on Hawaiʻi Island ’til 7th grade and Oʻahu thru high school. I got accept­ed into Kame­hame­ha Schools in 7th grade. I was a board­er for one year, then my fam­i­ly moved over to Oʻahu and, much to my dis­may, I had to move back in with them. I grad­u­at­ed from Kame­hame­ha Schools in 1999. My dad is class of ʻ72. My great-grand­pa is class of ʻ17.

I mua! Go War­riors! Can you share a bit of your upcom­ing debut nov­el, LEI AND THE FIRE GODDESS? With­out giv­ing too much away, what is it about? 

LEI is about a girl who is raised in Col­orado but goes to stay with her tūtū in Vol­cano, Hawaiʻi every sum­mer for three weeks. She’s part Hawai­ian but doesn’t feel like she’s Hawai­ian enough to fit in there, and she also strug­gles fit­ting in back home in Col­orado where no one believes the things her grand­ma tells her.

This sum­mer she decides she doesn’t believe them either, and all she wants to do is go do touristy things so she can have fun sto­ries to tell her friends when she gets home. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Lei ends up insult­ing Pele, the fire god­dess, who sends her giant hawk to kid­nap her best friend. When Lei goes to res­cue him, she real­izes just how real Tūtū’s moʻole­lo are as she teams up with demigods and talk­ing bats to bat­tle myth­i­cal crea­tures and evade the traps Pele hurls her way. For if Lei hopes to get her friend back, she has to dig deep into her Hawai­ian roots and embrace all of who she is.

That’s an excit­ing idea! What inspired you to choose that top­ic for your debut novel? 

My son was big into Greek mythol­o­gy for a while, and I tried explain­ing to him that we Hawai­ians have our own amaz­ing gods and leg­ends, but he sor­ta brushed me off. I decid­ed the only way I could get him to lis­ten was maybe if I put it in a book that could be on a shelf that his class­mates might pick up and read, like a Per­cy Jack­son type sto­ry. So I came up with this sto­ry to try share a lot of the myths and moʻole­lo I learned grow­ing up in Hawaii with a new gen­er­a­tion of read­ers who may or may not be famil­iar with our stories.

What was your favorite part of writ­ing your nov­el? What was most challenging? 

My favorite part was going back through my mem­o­ries and pic­tures from liv­ing in Vol­cano and vis­it­ing Hawaiʻi Vol­ca­noes Nation­al Park and remem­ber­ing all the icon­ic art and songs that I was able to thread through­out the sto­ry. The most chal­leng­ing was bring­ing it up to speed. Things have changed since I moved from the island, and I want­ed to make sure I was still on point with var­i­ous land­marks and understandings.

What char­ac­ter­is­tics do you love best about your pro­tag­o­nist, Anna Leilani Kamaʻe­hu? Is she mod­eled after some­one specific? 

I love that she’s sort of a jump-right-in-and-fig­ure-it-out-as-we-go kind of a per­son. I pulled a lot of my own strug­gles of not feel­ing Hawai­ian enough and dif­fi­cul­ties mak­ing and keep­ing friends as mate­r­i­al for Anna.

What was the jour­ney to get­ting your nov­el pub­lished like? How long did it take to write your book?

I draft­ed this book from April to August of 2020 then spent two years in revi­sions. My jour­ney was super fast com­pared to some folks, and not as fast as others.

In the fall of 2020 I applied for a num­ber of men­tor­ships and end­ed up being select­ed for both We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) and my region­al Soci­ety of Children’s Book Writ­ers and Illus­tra­tors (SCBWI) pro­grams. I worked inten­sive­ly with Alan Gratz and Andrea Wang to rewrite, revise, and improve my sto­ry from Jan­u­ary to May of 2021, then sub­mit­ted it to #APIP­it (a pitch event on Twit­ter) in May of 2021. I received inter­est from a num­ber of agents, so I sent out my queries and inter­viewed dif­fer­ent agents, select­ed an agent, did more revi­sions, sent the book out on sub­mis­sion to pub­lish­ers in June, end­ed up hav­ing mul­ti­ple pub­lish­ing hous­es inter­est­ed and went to auc­tion in August.

We sold in Sep­tem­ber 2021 in a two book deal and start­ed work­ing with my fab­u­lous edi­tor Eliz­a­beth Lee at Pen­guin Work­shop (an imprint of Pen­guin Ran­dom House). So since then it has been many more rounds of revi­sions, and now work­ing on book two!

Why did you become author? Have you always want­ed to be an author? 

I loved writ­ing when I was young but was advised by teach­ers that it wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly my strong suit and that I was bet­ter at the maths and sci­ences. I also loved read­ing but abhorred book reports and most of the required read­ing from my class­es. It wasn’t until I was an adult with a cou­ple of careers under my belt when I popped my head up from the grind and won­dered if it was pos­si­ble for me to try writ­ing again.

We are so glad you did. What do you enjoy most about writ­ing, espe­cial­ly for kids? What are some of your great­est challenges? 

I love writ­ing excit­ing, fast-paced action scenes—showing kids how clever and strong and brave they can be. My great­est chal­lenge is to get the char­ac­ters to have an arc, to have them change over the course of the sto­ry. A men­tor told me once that peo­ple don’t fall in love with plot; they fall in love with char­ac­ters. The char­ac­ter needs to be three dimen­sion­al and flawed, so read­ers can root for them and under­stand why they’re going through what they’re going through. That is chal­leng­ing for me as I usu­al­ly come up with fun cir­cum­stances that I want to have hap­pen to my char­ac­ter, but they usu­al­ly don’t tie in to a theme or deep­er mean­ing (which prob­a­bly ties into why I strug­gled with Lan­guage Arts and book reports in school.)

You also wrote anoth­er book, BACKPACKING WITH CHILDREN book, which is on a very dif­fer­ent top­ic. What made you decide to write this book?

I actu­al­ly start­ed that one before LEI AND THE FIRE GODDESS. A friend of mine pub­lished a book for begin­ner back­pack­ers, and I thought that if he could do it, I could do it. They say to “write what you know,” so I wrote about my expe­ri­ences back­pack­ing with our kids over the past ten years and 600+ miles. While that book was on sub­mis­sion, I had a lot of time to wait, and so I decid­ed to write the next thing, and the next thing, and then anoth­er thing. And that last thing end­ed up becom­ing LEI!

What are your hopes and dreams for the year and beyond in terms of your pub­lish­ing career and what you would like to see pub­lished in the future? 

I have so many ideas and not enough time! I’m work­ing on revis­ing the sequel for LEI right now and work­ing on a young adult con­tem­po­rary nov­el that I describe as Pride and Prej­u­dice meets WILD. I’d love to do well enough that I’m able to get back to Hawaiʻi and spend time with kei­ki in the schools there.

Hopes and dreams? How big you want to know? Heck, if we go big time, I’d love for some­one like Dwayne John­son or Jason Momoa or Barack Oba­ma to pick it up (they all have daugh­ters and prob­a­bly oth­er kids that they could gift it to after they’re pau read­ing) and talk about it so that it gets on the radar of Tai­ka Wait­i­ti and scooped up into a movie. Then some mys­te­ri­ous bene­fac­tor who is look­ing to give back to kāna­ka in Hawaiʻi offers to give a copy to every kid in Hawaiʻi (so many times grow­ing up I nev­er had mon­ey to get a book at those book fairs) and rents out the movie the­aters so all the kids and their fam­i­lies can go see it for free. 

Clear­ly I’m not real­is­tic when it comes down to the fact that this is a busi­ness since I want to just give it all away. I’d absolute­ly love to have a long, steady career in writ­ing, but even if LEI is the only fic­tion book I ever sell, it’ll have been an incred­i­ble expe­ri­ence.

I love your big dreams, Malia. What beliefs are your work challenging?

I’m not sure if this is chal­leng­ing beliefs, nec­es­sar­i­ly, but I’m try­ing to do a cou­ple things with this story:

1. Help kids who might not feel like they are rep­re­sen­ta­tive of their own cul­tures or eth­nic­i­ties under­stand that they are enough and
2. Help increase aware­ness of some of the issues Hawai­ians are fac­ing in an age appro­pri­ate way that doesn’t feel over­ly teachy/preachy— men­tion­ing the day the Hawai­ian flag was tak­en down from ‘Iolani Palace, by men­tion­ing the tele­scopes on Mau­nakea and pro­tec­tion efforts there, hav­ing Anna face dis­crim­i­na­tion by a local girl when she doesn’t pick the right sticky rice at the gro­cery store.

Do you have any expe­ri­ences as a Native Hawai­ian writer that you might share with our read­ers? What would you like to see change in the indus­try regard­ing the accep­tance of BIPOC creators? 

Our voic­es are so impor­tant! The way we view the world, inter­act with nature and our fam­i­lies, process trau­ma, and per­haps come from a more col­lec­tivist cul­ture (pri­or­i­tiz­ing the group above the indi­vid­ual) are all so dif­fer­ent than expe­ri­ences tra­di­tion­al­ly por­trayed in stories.

Some of us don’t fol­low tra­di­tion­al west­ern sto­ry­telling pat­terns, and that’s okay! I’m real­ly excit­ed about some new up and com­ing Kana­ka authors, like Makana Yamamoto’s Ham­ma­jang Luck and Megan Kakimoto’s Every Drop Is A Man’s Night­mare and your own Kahoʻo­lawe! All of our sto­ries are impor­tant, and it’s nec­es­sary for a pletho­ra of us to have our voic­es out there so none of us is bur­dened with rep­re­sent­ing the entire lāhui, the entire Native Hawai­ian pop­u­la­tion. We are each so unique with­in our shared expe­ri­ences, it is crit­i­cal that read­ers are able to see Hawai­ians as indi­vid­ual fla­vors, not just all coconut all the time.

What advice would you give an aspir­ing writer? 

Find oth­er writ­ers to learn with, prac­tice with, and com­mis­er­ate with! If you love it, it isn’t a waste of time. If your strengths lie else­where, you can do both! Keep this as a hob­by as you explore oth­er things as well.

Is there a fun fact youʻd like to share about your­self with young readers? 

Hmm, one of my ear­lobes is attached, and the oth­er isn’t. Oh, and I have a preau­ric­u­lar pit on one ear. And I get ran­dom songs stuck in my head a lot of times and end up mak­ing epic mash ups of songs but can nev­er remem­ber any of them. Oth­er­wise, I’d have been an awe­some DJ.

What kinds of books do you enjoy read­ing? Any favorites? 

As a kid I loved Garfield and The Far Side (I prob­a­bly would have devoured graph­ic nov­els if they’d been around!). Then I got into creepi­er things, RL Stine to Christo­pher Pike to Stephen King (it was quite the jump, but there weren’t many young adult options that I knew of way back in the 1900s). Now I love read­ing fun­ny, action-packed mid­dle grade sto­ries and young adult or adult rom-coms with strong female leads and lots of wit­ty ban­ter. I go through them too quick­ly to remem­ber a favorite!

Do you have an online pres­ence? Do your read­ers con­tact you? What do they say? 

My web­site is MaliaMaunakea.com, and on social media I’m on Twit­ter, Insta­gram, and Face­book. My book was­n’t out then, but I did some vir­tu­al class­room vis­its in Feb­ru­ary and read a cou­ple chap­ters of my book to kids, and a num­ber of the class­es sent me thank you notes. Oh, my good­ness, my heart was not pre­pared for the sweet­ness and love­li­ness of their expres­sions. They are why writ­ing for kids is the best thing ever. 

It was so much fun talk­ing sto­ry with you, Malia! Maha­lo nui loa for shar­ing your man­a’o with us! E pili mau nā pōmaikaʻi me ʻoe (best wishes!)

To read more about Malia, includ­ing her cool list of fun facts, vis­it her web­site, MaliaMaunakea.com. Pho­to cred­it: Kahi­ki Photography