"You can't go very far in New Zealand without coming to water," said writer Patricia Grace.

She knows what Hawai'i residents know about life in the Pacific: The ocean is inevitable, simultaneously connecting and distinguishing land and people.

As the pioneering Maori author of novels such as "Dogside Story" and the recent "Tu: A Novel," Grace's work is also part of a growing current of Pacific literature. Hosted this week by the University of Hawai'i-Manoa Department of English, Grace will read from one of her novels tomorrow, and join a panel discussion on Thursday.

While she first garnered attention during the politically charged 1970s Maori renaissance — in 1975, Grace published "Waiariki," the first short storiy collection by a Maori woman — she never considered herself political.

"I wasn't really aware of the renaissance at first, although I knew I was part of something," she said. "What I wanted to do was write about ordinary people and ordinary lives." Considering the near-absence of Maori voices in New Zealand literature at the time, her aspirations had profound implications.

"Patricia was telling stories with Maoris at the center, and telling them from our point of view," said Reina Whaitiri, also a Maori writer and now a visiting professor here from the University of Auckland.

At the same time, Whaitiri added, Maori people were in the middle of a struggle for sovereign rights that had been promised a century earlier by Britain. A movement toward decolonization had begun, and with it, a rebuilding of Maori culture from the inside. Grace's stories about "ordinary people" fit right in.

"Through other perspectives, Maoris had been portrayed as uneducated, poor and as the criminal element," Whaitiri said. "It was just such a relief to know that there was a place to go to read stories from our point of view."

The language of that viewpoint has been English, because Grace and her Pac-lit contemporaries, such as Albert Wendt, were raised on Western literature.

"I was well out of school before I started looking at New Zealand writers and discovering that not all of them wrote in the same voice," Grace said. "I came to the conclusion that I had my own voice, too, and I wanted to try this voice out."

One book, in particular, opened up a new world of possibilities for her.

"I was so inspired by 'No Ordinary Sun,' by Hone Tuwhare," she said. "To my knowledge, this was the first book by a Maori writer in English, and he was a bulldozer driver working in the outback. It was so inspiring that a person who'd not had a lot of experience and perhaps not a lot of education was writing."

According to Wendt, the Samoan New Zealand writer who also is a visiting professor at UH, the stage was set for a fresh take on English-language literature. "Probably the greatest contribution of Pacific literature has been the indigenizing of the novel," he said.

Distinct as they are from one another, Pacific cultures share certain traits that are unabashedly present in the literature they produce.

"For instance, the main character in a Pacific writer's novel is not one person like in Western novels," said Wendt. "It's the community a character lives in, or their family or extended family. I find the Western concept of family to be inadequate compared to ours."

Then there are the sociological scars of colonization. Wendt said Pacific literature tends to exude a distinct sense of loss that is ingrained in indigenous cultures across the Pacific, because of their shared experiences with Western domination. "Of course, we still have a huge love for the land and the sea. And loss of the land is like the loss of your mother to us. So really, the novels of Pacific writers have much to do with exploring what we've lost and why we lost it."

To Grace, it's also important to keep finding new voices for this shared experience. Having begun her writer's journey in relative isolation — she admits to having lived quite a distance from even her fellow Maori writers for years — she appreciates the synergy that has happened among Pacific writers.

"For the few of us who were writing at the beginning, it concerns us that unless you have a whole range of people writing, the culture isn't shown in its fullness," she said. "Writing can break down stereotypes, but there's always a danger of new stereotypes emerging."

So it excites her to see students pay attention to her work. With trademark humility, she jokes about her experiences in events such as this week's talks.

"I have to really lift myself to foot it with the academics," she said, chuckling. "I never set out to change the world. Really, what I was doing was exploring myself and my culture, and finding new ways to talk about what I was exploring."

Somewhere along the way, she bumped into the water.

Charles Gary grew up in Hale'iwa and is now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.