Author Graham Salisbury

Posted by: Allison on: April 9, 2012

• In: Adventure | Current (After 1999) | Grades 9-11 | Nature | Realistic | Romance | Teasers | Western United States
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Welcome to my third week of reviewing multicultural Golden Sowers!

Today’s featured author is Graham Salisbury, who grew up on the islands of Oahu and Hawaii, where he and his mother traveled because his father was a navy pilot. Unlike most authors, he didn’t grow up liking to read. Instead he did spend most of his time outside, doing most everything but cracking open a book. Some of those outdoor adventures include riding his goose-necked bike, fishing in a swamp with a bamboo pole, roaming the rainforest on the Big Island, running cross-country, surfing waves, and having a blast being a kid. Oh, he also tried to get the attention of girls, listened to love songs, and taught himself to play guitar.

Unlike most authors, he also didn’t have any dreams of becoming a writer. In fact, it was the last thing that he expected to do. He flunked English twice in college. On his third attempt, he got an A. After college, he experimented with many jobs, trying to find something that interested him. He found a few that he liked: graphic design, music, and teaching. He has produced four CDs and had a number one song–in the Philippines.

According to the bio on his website, other important things to know about Salisbury are: He worked as the skipper of a glass-bottom boat, a deckhand on a deep-sea charter fishing boat, and a Montessori elementary school teacher. Oh, he also once surfed with a shark, got stung by a Portuguese man-of-war, and swam for his life from a moray eel. Can you tell he likes the adventurous life?

Graham Salisbury now lives with his family in Portland, Oregon. Because he sets his stories in Hawaii, in his interview with Cynthia Leitich Smith, Salisbury says that it is probably good for him to be living somewhere else. If he still lived in Hawaii he might feel too close to his material. He’d see all the little things that he was getting wrong or missing altogether. Worse, if he were there, he wouldn’t need to write about Hawaii, because he’d be living right there. Having distance from the island makes Hawaii more enticing, giving him more of a need to set his stories there. In his head and heart, he is still in Hawaii. Given that I feel drawn to setting my longer stories in Newfoundland, but am currently living in the Midwest, I understand how Salisbury feels.

Unlike Salisbury, I have however yet to attempt to replicate the accent of my home province. In his profile at Random House, Salisbury says that, “I hope what gives my books their sense of authenticity, other than the natural inculcation of the island’s physical and cultural landscape, which ends up in my sentences by osmosis, is my use of language. In Hawaii we often speak what we call pidgin English, a kind of tropical patois. For example, in standard English, one would say, ‘I am going home.’ In Hawaiian pidgin, it would be, ‘I going home.’ A simple thing, but over the course of a novel, it becomes a bigger thing, a part of a character’s being. It resonates. Syntax, too, creates that feeling of authenticity. It comes to me naturally, thank heaven. I don’t have to work at it because I simply hear it. If I had to fake, it I’d be laughed off the face of the earth. So, growing up in the islands was my gift.”

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Tags: Allison's Book Bag, Golden Sowers, Graham Salisbury, Hawaiin authors, Lord of the Deep, multicultural books for young people, reviews of books for young people