October 9th, 2025| 1 min readArts & Humanities

Pulitzer-winning author returns with decade-in-the-making epic

In The Wayfinder, award-winning author and Stanford Professor Adam Johnson draws on the cultures and landscapes of the Polynesian islands to tell a story set 1,000 years in the past – with timely echoes for today.

The new novel from Adam Johnson, the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing and professor of English in the School of Humanities and Sciences, is an epic in every sense of the word. The Wayfinder* *(MCD, 2025) spans more than 700 pages and is his first novel in 13 years, since the publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House, 2012), and his first book in 10, since his National Book Award-winning short story collection, Fortune Smiles (Random House, 2015).

Since those books, much of his time has been spent researching this one, a saga centered on Kōrero, a Tongan island girl destined to become her people’s queen, and set a thousand years in the past. There are fantastic elements (a parrot and a shark narrate some passages) alongside very real concerns – what do we owe one another, and what do we owe the planet? In writing the book, Johnson spent time among Tonga’s 14 islands. He also drew upon his knowledge of oral traditions as a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in his native South Dakota. The end result is hilarious and moving, a page-turner that reads more quickly than its length would suggest.

We spoke with Johnson about his writing process, how Stanford has supported his work, and exchanging fan letters with Stephen King.

This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

“The Wayfinder” | Published Oct. 14, 2025, by MCD, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

How did the university support you in the writing of the book?

I believe that Stanford is a place where, if you can imagine something, Stanford can help make it happen – whether you’re a student, a fellow, a lecturer, or a professor. I’ve had all three of my children here. I’ve written all five of my books here. I’ve had my whole professional world take place in this environment. It’s the hub through which I met many of the writers I admired, through which I got much of my important mentorship. The director of the Creative Writing Program was Eavan Boland for many years, and she was a particularly wonderful mentor to me. I learned so much from her about what it is to bear witness to the writer’s life, about how to navigate higher education, and what it meant to be a teacher.

How do you balance the writing life and the teaching life?

Teaching energizes me. I love my students. I think any group of 15 Stanford students is smarter than their professor, except for maybe in the professor’s small arena of knowledge. I try to think of myself as harnessing their myriad and manifold talents and helping them apply them to something we all share, which is a love of literature. Writing is hard work, and it’s very draining to me. So those two balance pretty well.

What inspired The Wayfinder?

A question I’ve always wondered is: What was America before Western contact? What is the truth of who the Indigenous people were? How did they live their lives?

I began thinking about that with the Pacific islands. They say that if you knew where Easter Island was from the closest land and had a compass but were off with your compass by half a degree, you would never have seen it. So how many people sailed off into the unknown, never to return? What kind of culture puts a value on exploration to that degree?

It was really mind blowing. And these people are *us – *we have this in us, right?

The characters are ultimately pretty resilient. Does that reflect your faith in human resilience?

Well, humans are pretty crafty creatures. It depends on what resilience means. [But] it’s not a historical novel. This kind of exploration was real. The island of ‘Ata is real. The Moriori and Māori people are real. The Fijian wars are real. And yet, I did invent people wholesale – and I did wish that the oral tradition carried more stories forward.

What do you mean by that?

Tonga today is one of the most Christian places in the world. And Tonga is very valuable because it was never colonized, so the people retained their language, a lot of culture. But the missionaries found them early. A lot of this material that I’m writing about has been erased as pagan, as pre-Christian. It’s interesting that only some of the mythology lived, and the stories of regular people did not make it as commonly into the record. The people who recorded the stories were for the most part missionaries who were actively deculturing as they recorded songs and poems and stories.

Kōrero is a very memorable and ingratiating character. Her name means “speaking.” She calls herself a bad storyteller, and yet she narrates much of the book. So two questions: Who or what inspired her? And how did you develop her chatty, confiding, charismatic voice?

Once that voice came, I was like, “Oh, this book might work.” And that voice came pretty early.

I have two daughters. They’re a little older now, but every night at the dinner table their family tradition was having discussions about the natural world, about animals, about oceans and, often, about my research. I would talk about the islands I was researching, and they would ask certain questions: Can you surf on that island? Can you swim from this island to that island? So I will say there was some co-imagination.

I would [also] talk about the poor state of the natural world, the fates of many people in the world, hunger in places we live, in California. Undocumented people are all around us. The homeless are around us. Drugs are around us. We’d have discussions about – what do we owe the people in our neighborhood? How do we help?

Fatherhood helped shape the book – a father’s fear for his children growing up in a world with environmental destruction. What is the book’s message to them?

One of the messages of the book is that although we feel we’re so smart and so technologically advanced, I feel like we actually live in a time of great poverty of human knowledge. Being so detached from the natural world has left us adrift. My grandfather was a farmer in South Dakota. All my grandparents could name every tree, every flower, every fish, just because they walked around and looked at trees, and they knew every bird song because they listened to the birds. They appreciated them just by noticing. I have one gift I have always tried to give my children: living in the moment and appreciating the moments and just saying, “Oh, my God, look at the light go through those leaves.” “Look at the quality of those clouds going by.” To personally leave the modern world behind for a decade in my imagination, and to travel to an untrampled world, was deeply restorative for me and, I hope, for a reader. I wanted my children to know that this world existed and can still exist.

One of my great moments as a father is when I took my children to the Tongan island of ‘Eua. It’s a huge, commanding, cliff-laden island with dramatic wave crashes down into a battering sea. And my son had an experience looking at the ocean – he was just at the right age, 16 or 17 – and he was like, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life, and I will never forget the cliffs of ‘Eua, and that this is in the world, and that the world needed to be seen.” That’s a gift I could give to myself and that I could give to my children – and, I would like to think, to readers.

The writer EO Wilson says we need to restore 30% of the earth to just natural preserve and that’s the only way. And I see the value of that.

It seems like a good choice to write a novel set in the South Pacific for research purposes. Did anybody give you a hard time about that? You know, you didn’t set it in …

Chechnya [laughing].

Right. Siberia.

Well, if you go to Hawai’i or Fiji, it is tourist friendly. But also they were occupied or colonized, and all these institutions were left behind. Tonga is not quite like that. When you visit Tonga, people are like, “What are you doing here?” The only reason to go is to encounter Tongan-ness. I found it to be a very special place, a place that was deeply in communion with thousands of years of history – even if people walk past the graves of kings on their way to church and don’t look at them twice. Even though a lot of paradigms have changed and young people wear tank tops with Western bands on them and flip-flops. Culturally, it felt very rich to me.

One of the messages of the book is that although we feel we’re so smart and so technologically advanced, I feel like we actually live in a time of great poverty of human knowledge.

The book is an epic. I take it you’re a fan of big, sweeping books?

Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah. If you have survived as a literary reader in these times, big books probably speak to you. Lonesome Dove mattered to me. Shōgun mattered to me. Stephen King’s The Stand was a book I revered. They gave me early permissions and modeled what storytelling could be. I wrote Stephen King a fan letter earlier this year, and I just told him, “The Stand made me want to write a big book, and thank you, and I don’t know if I would have done it without you.” And he wrote me the kindest note back.

So the book involves a pendant that Kōrero is wearing. You wear something around your neck, too.

Yeah, it is a piece of pounamu, which is Māori jade, on a parrot leash. The Māori believe you can charge this jade with mana, with strong energy. I was like, “I’m gonna write every day for 10 years with this on, and I’m gonna charge it with energy. And then if I give it to one of my daughters or something, we’ll have 10 years of my creative force in it.” I really came to believe in that. In Aotearoa (the Indigenous name for New Zealand), the Māori have green stone clubs that they would kill people with, and the more people they killed with them, the more power the clubs had. And maybe I’m imagining it, but you can feel the power of a club that has killed 100 people.

When and where did you get that necklace?

Māori art and artifacts aren’t allowed to leave New Zealand for good reason. But I found an old antiquities owner in the Netherlands who had this piece of jade. He said he didn’t know if it was real or not. He thought it was, but there was no way of knowing. I was OK with that indeterminacy.

**Was there anything I didn’t ask about? **

Writing this book was one of my great artistic joys. I can’t remember a single scene in which I didn’t go in with fear and uncertainty. But then the Tamaha [a character in the book] would waft her fan and bring a character back to life, and I would know enough to write the next scene. That kind of discovery is why I’m a writer.

For more information

This story was originally published by Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.

Writer

Paul L. Underwood