Linda Collison's Blog, page 4
November 20, 2022
Sea Witch Chronicles, Voyage #6
Behind every great man is a woman, I’ve heard it said, and behind every good pirate is a witch. A good witch, I might add. Gallows Wake, number six in Helen Hollick’s Sea Witch Chronicles, is a gutsy adventure/romance rooted in historical fact but not limited by it. A touch of fantasy, or shall we say witchery, is very believable, even in this 21st century.
Gallows Wake continues the adventures of Jesamiah Acorne, that fallible former pirate and his lover, Tiola, who happens to be a woman of the Craft. That Tiola’s supernatural abilities are so believable, practical magic of the old world and a real plus for this series. These two protagonists are indeed a match for each other, even when they’re arguing or at odds. Without giving any spoilers, Tiola, separated from Jesamiah, faces the crisis of her life.
Helen Hollick knows her way around a ship and grounds the series in real historical events, yet she is never completely bound by them. That’s the magic of her writing. What I like best are her well-drawn characters who complement and antagonize each other in surprising ways. Jesamiah, an anti-hero worthy of a Johnny Depp portrayal, is contrasted with his sidekick, Maha’dun, a unique and perplexing creature the author describes in delightful verbal brushstrokes — very cinematic.
Gallows Wake, the Sixth Voyage of Captain Jesamiah Acorne is “Pirate Fiction” in tone, a lively adventurous romp on land and sea. The romance of a pirate and a witch is a new twist in nautical fiction and I found it perfectly natural. After all, the story is set during an age when many people still believed in witchcraft — and witchcraft was punishable by death in the British Isles up until the early 18th century. (The National Library of Scotland lists Janet Horne as the last person in Britain to be tried and executed for witchcraft, in 1727.) That is the dark reality underlying Hollick’s entertaining Sea Witch Chronicles. Pirates were hung and witches were burned.
I can’t wait to see what Hollick brews up in Jamaica Gold — Voyage 7 — in progress. She hints of bringing the historical pirate Anne Bonny into the narrative. Bonny was pregnant when tried with the pirate Calico Jack Rackham in 1720. Anne was pregnant when captured and tried. That much is known. But what became of her? I am on board to find out what truthful fiction Helen Hollick is in the process of conjuring up.
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October 22, 2022
Aboard a haunted house
Do you dream about houses? I do, quite often. When we dream about a dwelling it might represent our Being, our Self, our Soul, according to Jungian psychology. Which might be the underlying reason for our collective fascination with haunted houses.
Yet as actor and comedian Eddie Murphy quipped on Saturday Night Live: “Why don’t the people just get the hell out of the house?” (John Podhoretz; Washington Examiner; Mar. 23, 2017)
GET OUT OF THE HOUSE! Very practical advice. But what if you’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean? It’s a haunted boat and you’re floating, adrift in the doldrums and the boat has no engine. The radio has been commandeered by the ghosts and one by one the crew goes missing. Is the narrator reliable? Can your own senses be trusted? What would Carl Jung and Eddie Murphy say?
Hallucinations at sea are not unknown – generally due to fatigue and sensory deprivation. And water ghosts, of course!
Computer generated 3D illustration with a Chinese Junk at sunset
If you don’t believe in ghosts, there is still the matter of survival at sea. Physical and psychological survival. A High Wind in Jamaica, Life of Pi, Heart of Darkness are three novels that deal with this theme in unique ways. All are told by unreliable narrators.
For The Best Books on Sea Voyages Gone Badly, and many other “Best Books” recommended by authors on a variety of topics, visit the Book Shepherd
Happy Halloween, Delightful Day of the Dead, and a Merry Night of the Hungry Ghost to all!
Water Ghosts is available in trade paperback, e-reader and audiobook format from independent booksellers, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com
Storms were the least of their worries
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October 20, 2022
On the Road in the 21st Century
The best road trips aren’t planned, they just happen. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road seems to just happen; he writes in an episodic, stream-of-consciousness burst of life. Kerouac is a young male in America not long after the Second World War.
Road trips are different now, in the 21st century. You don’t see many hitchhikers anymore, nor do you see hobos hopping rail cars, but in Kerouac’s Denver you see plenty of tramp camps and hobo jungles, as they were called by some during the Great Depression. Colfax Avenue runs right through the heart of the city, then and now, and the ghosts of Jack and his friends can been felt all over the city.
Jack Kerouac’s story is not so much a road trip as a road life — searching, moving, exploring — and it’s a story about connection and male bonding. The plot is episodic, the story rambles, characters come and go, and reappear. On the Road is a creative memoir worth reading, experiencing, and reliving. It is the mother of all 20th century American Road Stories.
With cell phones, GPS, and Siri to navigate, is it still possible to take an authentic road trip?
Looking for Redfeather is a coming-of-age on the road in 21st century America, published in 2013. It ain’t Jack Kerouac’s road trip!
For a wealth of book suggestions by your favorite authors, check out Shepherd.com. This website is not owned by Amazon or any of the big publishing houses and it’s fun to explore. Almost as fun as a road trip…
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September 23, 2022
Ghost Ships
Maybe we all exist at the same time
a palimpsest
our lives, patterns of light
a watery pastiche of sensations and perceptions
i can’t see you but i feel you like the wind on my left cheek
and your memory, stowed in my heart’s hold
Godspeed
-lsc
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April 25, 2022
Best Bios about 18th & 19th century crossdressers
As the author of the historical novel Star-Crossed, a title that plays on the practice of cross-dressing, I was asked by Ben Fox, founder of Shepherd.com to share my five favorite books related to it.
It was so difficult to choose only five! I read so many books while researching the history of cross-dressing — not to mention all the nautical and social history that went into it. The books I decided on for Shepherd.com are those which I felt are very readable — not overly academic — and ones that I discovered and read early on in my writing process. They are books I have on my shelf and have lent out on occasion. They are old friends.
Star-Crossed was republished as Barbados Bound; Book one of the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventures in 2010 by Fireship Press, with a few changes, none of which are substantive to the narrative.
Star-Crossed was a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age – 2007. It’s been sixteen years since Knopf published the title in the fall of 2006. The book went out of print and is currently only available as a used book in hardback, library, and mass market paperback formats.
A reprint of the original Star-Crossed is forthcoming…
To see my five recommended books about 18th and 19th century cross-dressers, here’s the link:
https://shepherd.com/best-books/18th-and-19th-century-crossdressers
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March 12, 2022
Books that guided and inspired Patricia MacPherson
Thanks to Lisa Goodwin, the Women who Sail New England and the Between the Lines Book Club for inviting me to your discussion of The Surgeon’s Mate! As promised, here are a few of the most readable nonfiction books that inspired my research and writing of Star-Crossed, and the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventures. I am a true historical nerd and nautical geek, but I think these might appeal to some of you.
Female Tars; Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail by Suzanne J. Stark. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 1996.
The Lady Tars: The Autobiographies of Hannah Snell, Mary Lacy and Mary Anne Talbot. Edited, with foreword by Tom Grundner. 2008, Fireship Press.
The Wooden World; An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy by N.A.M. Rodger. 1986.
Jack Tar; The extraordinary lives of ordinary seamen in Nelson’s navy by Roy & Lesley Adkins. 2008.
The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner. Edited and with an Introduction by Tim Flannery. 1997.
The Wynne Diaries; The Adventures of Two Sisters in Napoleonic Europe edited by Anne Fremantle with an introduction by Christopher Hibbett. Oxford University Press, 1982.
There are so very many more…
Fair winds, following seas, and happy reading!
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March 11, 2022
Women Who Sail New England
This evening I’ve been invited to join Lisa Goodwin and Women Who Sail New England who will be discussing Surgeon’s Mate; the second novel in Patricia MacPherson’s Nautical Adventures.
Looking back on the historical nautical trilogy, it feels like a past life I lived — a life that first made itself known to me during the fall of 1999, in the middle of the North Pacific aboard H.M. Bark Endeavour. This Endeavour is the seaworthy Australian-built replica of the 18th century, three masted former collier commanded by James Cook. Signing on as voyage crew, my husband Bob and I found ourselves among forty-some newbies, counted on to learn the ropes. We were to hand, reef, steer — and more — on our three week passage from Vancouver to Hawaii, part of HM Bark Endeavour‘s circumnavigation that year.
The shipboard experience launched me on a personal, interior voyage back into time to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to deeply imagine a particular life. Since that passage on Endeavour, I have sailed many thousands of nautical miles with my husband, aboard a 36-foot sailboat, I read dozens of books, went back to college and got a degree in history, and wrote four novels set at sea, and several articles.
These days I’m ashore, still reading and writing about history,not always nautical. Currently, I’m working on a documentary film project about the evolution of sport skydiving in America, and beyond. Like water, the air connects us all.
Original cover of Surgeon’s Mate
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March 8, 2022
Close Encounters of the Whale Kind
Continued:
The area known as Penguin Bank, south of Molokai is known for its abundance of visiting humpbacks –the very place on the earth where we were, at that very moment, stranded.
In Hawaiian waters it is illegal to chase or harass the humpbacks in any way. Boaters are forbidden to approach closer than 100 yards. But whales aren’t held to the same standards as humans. They came as close to us as they wanted. Over the next few hours we counted dozens of whales, adults and babies, until we grew tired of counting. Breaching, slapping, blowing whales. Deep-diving whales, their tail flukes in the air, then gone. We ate our dinner in the cockpit, enjoying the show, our lack of power momentarily forgotten. All Hawaiian sunsets are rich, but this one was particularly memorable –not so much for the color of the sky as for the whale spouts, shimmering in the brief tropical twilight.
After dark the sea seemed to turn to obsidian. There would be no moon that night. Gradually even the stars were blotted out as haze and volcanic mist settled like a curtain around us. There was still no breeze. The blowing and breathing of humpbacks seemed to grow closer as the night deepened. Great rushing exhales. Deep moist sighs so close I felt that if I reached thought the lifelines, I might touch one.
As the night progressed we could hear a new whale sound, down below where the fiberglass hull amplified it. A ghost-like humming — moans, groans, squeaks, and rubs that gave us chicken skin all over again. We were eavesdropping on whale song.
These songs are believed to be part of the mating process, or perhaps a territorial proclamation. To Bob and me that night, adrift among the whales, it was the sound of extraterrestrials trying to make contact, only our ship had landed in their realm. We were the aliens. And they both outweighed and outnumbered us.
An average adult humpback is 35 to 45 feet in length; Topaz measures 36 feet on deck. But a humpback weighs many times what our full-keeled sloop weighs. What if one surfaced beneath us? What if one rammed into us? What if they resented our intrusion into their boudoir, their nursery, their own Club Med? What if they wanted a reckoning for all the humpbacks slaughtered by our ancestors and for the whales that continue to be harvested by humans in other parts of the world? We were at their mercy.
Bob and I took turns maintaining a deck watch through the night. We saw signs of only two vessels — the familiar running lights of an inter-island barge and the working lights of a local fisherman off Molokai. Occasionally the VHF would squawk and a brief transmission would follow, but for the most part the night was thick with the above-decks sounds of whales breathing and the eerie tunes of whales singing below. The GPS indicated we were drifting in a slow circular pattern. In spite of my excitement-tinged-with-anxiety, I eventually drifted off to sleep.
The sun rose on a silky, rose-colored sea. To starboard a cetaceous sentry raised its tubercled head above the water as if to have a better look at us. (Biologists call this behavior “spy hopping.” Whales are believed to be able to see well both above and below water — a sort of bifocal vision, due to the irregular shape of their corneas.)
Bob and I stared back, spellbound. To look a whale in the eye, what a rare opportunity! Then the whale dove down beneath our boat, its gray bulk directly beneath us. We waited and watched for it to resurface. Long minutes passed, but we didn’t see it again.
“Hey, feel that?” Bob said, finger in the air.
“What, my pounding heart?”
He laughed. “No, the wind. We’ve got wind, mate. Let’s make some sail!”
Diamond Head’s distinctive shape grew larger as we approached Oahu and the Ko’olau mountains became more vivid. Waikiki came into view, a crescent of dazzling white sand and high-rises. By the time we had the channel markers in sight we noticed the whales were no longer with us. We had reentered our own world. And had other worries on our minds, for our breeze had died. Luckily, we got a tow from a friendly yachtie who heard our request on the radio and a temporary slip at the very accommodating Hawaii Yacht Club. With Topaz safely moored it was time to crack a cold one before we tackled our engine problems.
Sometimes you just get lucky.
***
— copyright Linda Collison, 2005. Reprinted from Sail Magazine; September 2005
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January 31, 2022
Sea Voyages Gone Badly
The Bounty, Essex, Pequod, Titanic, Andrea Gail, Sea Wind, Lucky Dragon — these are names of doomed ships, the epitome of sea voyages gone badly. Only Lucky Dragon and Pequod are fictional ships, but Melville drew from his experience working aboard whaling ships (and sometimes deserting them!) Can you match the doomed ship names with their book authors?
Vincent Bugliosi
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Philbrick
Owen Chase
Walter Lord
Gareth Russell
Sebastian Junger
Linda Greenlaw
Linda Collison
In writing Water Ghosts, I explored a different sort of sea voyage gone badly. Instead of a storm at sea, there were the terrifying calms to endure, along with confrontation between humans, death by natural causes, and psychological drama. And ghosts.
Recently, I was asked to recommend five books that inspired my own novel. These books — three are literary novels, one is a first person memoir, and one is a true historical crime investigation — all influenced me in writing Water Ghosts. For these recommendations, and many other suggestions given by authors on other subjects, please visit Shepherd’s Discover the best books website.
Out of many books, both fiction and historical accounts that are about survival at sea, I chose five that emphasize psychological drama as much as physical endurance. My picks might surprise you.
At Shepherd.com you can discover — or rediscover — good books according to your interests. If you’re looking for a book club selection, go beyond what the publishers are hyping, and see what books writers suggest. And if you’re an author, Shepherd gives you the opportunity to showcase your work while sharing your personal recommendations.
Storms were the least of their worries. All aboard the Lucky Dragon for a twenty-first century sea voyage gone wrong.
Vincent Bugliosi And the Sea Shall Tell: Murder on the South Seas (true crime)
Herman Melville Moby Dick; or The Whale (literary fiction)
Nathaniel Phibrick In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (history)
Owen Chase The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex (memoir)
Walter Lord A Night to Remember: The Classic Account of the Final Hours of the Titanic. (history)
Gareth Russell The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era. (history)
Sebastian Junger The Perfect Storm (nonfiction account)
Linda Greenlaw The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain’s Journey (memoir)
Linda Collison Water Ghosts (contemporary fiction with historical elements)
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January 4, 2022
In Utero
New moon over the ocean
embryo low
deep in the belly of the sky
i feel your heartbeat in the tide
i will soon die but you
my ancient orb
will be born
and reborn
a billion trillion times
lsc 1/4/2022
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