IN THE BEGINNING
At a reading years ago for my novella Miss Gone-overseas, a member of the audience asked how I started a piece. With the story or with a character? Actually, I answered, I start with landscape and then I people the landscape and the story comes from that. Yet, when I reflect a bit more, I have to add that landscape cannot be divorced from time.
Both my novella and a small collection of short stories called Overseas are set on the island of Pohnpei in the East Caroline Islands of Micronesia. If one has a globe, it’s about 7 degrees north of the equator in the Western Pacific. I lived on the island during most of the 1980s. My memory of that landscape led to my novella set in the 1940s, and my short story collection set in the 1980s. Even today the physical landscape has not changed, except in the main town and the capital.
The 1940s were the war years, and by then the island had been a Japanese colony for 20 years. In 1947 the U.N. handed the Japanese mandate over to the victorious Americans, and by the 1980s the U.S influence had been in effect for nearly 40 years. But, as a character in Miss Gone-overseas comments, before the Japanese were the Germans, and before that the Spanish. Through all the foreign administrations, it’s amazing to see how much of their own culture the indigenous people have protected.
Youtube is a great source for the history of the island, especially the videos by Fran Hezel’s Micronesia Seminar. Fran, now based on Guam, is a Jesuit and a scholar who lovingly made the islands his special mission. A google will also bring up videos for the tourist trade, showing the beauty of the place. Other videos show how much the town of Kolonia has changed. The traffic snarls and multistory buildings makes it nearly unrecognizable to me. There wasn’t a single traffic light in the 1980s and only the main thoroughfares were paved.
Still, landscape is the beginning, a lesson learned when I was given a copy of Justine, the first book of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. I was 19 and had barely flirted with the idea of becoming a writer. In the author’s note for Justine -- after the usual b.s. of everything being an invention and bearing no resemblance to living persons -- Durrell writes: “Only the city is real.” But Alexandria, like everywhere, has also changed. The house where Durrell lived and was the novel’s primary setting was demolished in 2017. And the house where I lived on Pohnpei is long gone.
Note: no photo. Photobucket no longer hosts and I'm too computer challenged figure out a different host.
Both my novella and a small collection of short stories called Overseas are set on the island of Pohnpei in the East Caroline Islands of Micronesia. If one has a globe, it’s about 7 degrees north of the equator in the Western Pacific. I lived on the island during most of the 1980s. My memory of that landscape led to my novella set in the 1940s, and my short story collection set in the 1980s. Even today the physical landscape has not changed, except in the main town and the capital.
The 1940s were the war years, and by then the island had been a Japanese colony for 20 years. In 1947 the U.N. handed the Japanese mandate over to the victorious Americans, and by the 1980s the U.S influence had been in effect for nearly 40 years. But, as a character in Miss Gone-overseas comments, before the Japanese were the Germans, and before that the Spanish. Through all the foreign administrations, it’s amazing to see how much of their own culture the indigenous people have protected.
Youtube is a great source for the history of the island, especially the videos by Fran Hezel’s Micronesia Seminar. Fran, now based on Guam, is a Jesuit and a scholar who lovingly made the islands his special mission. A google will also bring up videos for the tourist trade, showing the beauty of the place. Other videos show how much the town of Kolonia has changed. The traffic snarls and multistory buildings makes it nearly unrecognizable to me. There wasn’t a single traffic light in the 1980s and only the main thoroughfares were paved.
Still, landscape is the beginning, a lesson learned when I was given a copy of Justine, the first book of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. I was 19 and had barely flirted with the idea of becoming a writer. In the author’s note for Justine -- after the usual b.s. of everything being an invention and bearing no resemblance to living persons -- Durrell writes: “Only the city is real.” But Alexandria, like everywhere, has also changed. The house where Durrell lived and was the novel’s primary setting was demolished in 2017. And the house where I lived on Pohnpei is long gone.
Note: no photo. Photobucket no longer hosts and I'm too computer challenged figure out a different host.
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