Another former student, another first book

This book is gorgeous and nails every one of the characters it centers on the page. You can find it here.

This the seventh installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

Around the time I was finishing up the edits on Black Was Not a Label, I received a cryptic message from Heidi, another student who was in the same Master’s cohort as Kathryn. It went something like this: 

I have some news to tell you soon. It’s very exciting.

Heidi is another of those former students who I worked with both as an undergraduate and as a grad student. She is, also, a walking idea factory with interests in everything from music (check out her EP here) to podcasting (two different going concerns you can sample here and here) to youth and musical theater (look no further than her musical version of C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces that’s in the works) to poetry (which she doles out on her socials) to academic writing.

And, of course, there’s the fiction I’ve worked on with her for several years now, culminating in serving as her committee chair for her creative capstone at the end of the Masters process.

That project was a collection of four short stories that showed astonishing breadth without losing connection with each other. The pieces, all set against the backdrop of coming of age in Maui in the early 21st century, ranged from the grittiest of realities to unflinching questions of the what lies just beyond our human understanding of reality on the spiritual plane.

The complexity of these stories is only increased by the fact that all are told by characters who exist in a truly narrow liminal space in Hawaiian culture: the white island resident who isn’t a tourist but will also never be a native of the place. Walking that razor’s edge as a writer—where one wrong step could lead to further erasure or co-opting of the Hawaiian—is a delicate balance and one that a younger writer might, understandably, have struggled with.

Heidi, on the other hand, devoted herself to the work and to rendering full characters who live, grow, and change in the light of all those same cultural pressures. The result was a four-story cycle that went on to be published in each of its parts.

After finishing her degree, she kept working, looking for a place that would give a home to her collection. And then her follow up message: the manuscript won the Heritage Prize: the Great Story Project contest and with it publication. 

Now working under the title of The Sacred Art of Trespassing Barefoot, Heidi’s book is in the hands of an audience who have no idea how challenging and moving and powerful what they’re about to read truly is. Oh, and she’s gearing up to move all the way across the country for the next step in her development, and MFA.

I can’t wait to get my copy signed and talk shop with the author herself next time she’s in town.