{"id":8632,"date":"2014-01-07T17:28:18","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T22:28:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=8632"},"modified":"2014-01-08T13:51:09","modified_gmt":"2014-01-08T18:51:09","slug":"messages-in-bottles-francesca-forrests-pen-pal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=8632","title":{"rendered":"Messages in Bottles: Francesca Forrest’s Pen Pal"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Francesca Forrest<\/strong><\/p>\n

Athena’s note:<\/strong> Francesca<\/a> is a storyteller in the oldest, very best sense of the term \u2013 everything she tells looks like a hand-blown glass flower with smoky edges that leaves a whiff of warm amber in its wake. After a bouquet of stories, Francesca just published her first novel, Pen Pal<\/em>, an epistolary exchange between two people from contexts that are rarely trodden in Anglophone fiction. I invited her to share the tale of its genesis with us.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center>Like Athena, I love tales of other worlds and their cultures. Many of hers take place in the vast ocean of deep space. Mine unfolds across the wide seas of our home planet, in the present day. One world in Pen Pal<\/i> is an unknown, overlooked, floating community off the US Gulf Coast, home to twelve-year-old Em; the other is a temple-prison, in the crater of a volcano in a fictional Southeast Asian country, whose sole resident is twenty-four-year-old Kaya. Em loves her home but is curious about what lies beyond the horizon: she tosses a message in a bottle into the Gulf of Mexico, and the message ends up in Kaya\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n

What does it mean to become friends with a stranger, across great geographic and cultural distance? As anyone with experience of blogging knows, it\u2019s sometimes easier to be intimate and honest with strangers than with those close to us, perhaps because we\u2019re less bound by prescribed roles and expectations. These friendships can be a lifeline; they can sustain us; they can even transform us\u2014and, through us, the wider world. In Pen Pal<\/i>, I wanted to show this happening.<\/p>\n

Athena asked me about the cultures involved. Em\u2019s community is called Mermaid\u2019s Hands. It\u2019s a collection of house boats that rise and fall with the tide. Seen from the shore, it\u2019s peripheral\u2014marginal\u2014but seen from within the community it\u2019s whole, rich, and dynamic. It\u2019s always irked me that \u201calien\u201d or \u201cother\u201d cultures are so often treated as basically unchanging until the intrusion of some stimulus, when actually all societies are changing all the time. So that was something I wanted to do differently: I wanted Mermaid\u2019s Hands to be a living, changing community, with internal tensions, strengths, and weaknesses quite apart from plot happenings.<\/p>\n

In Kaya\u2019s country, I wanted to show the competing narratives of the majority people and the minority people, and beyond that, to show that neither group is monolithic. It\u2019s not enough to say, \u201cHere are the oppressed and here are the oppressors.\u201d Even when that pernicious dynamic is at work, it\u2019s always worth taking a more fine-grained look at the situation.<\/p>\n

I was continually surprised and humbled, as I did research to correct and strengthen the story, by how pale my imagination was, compared with the reality of actual human experience. I envisioned Mermaid\u2019s Hands as having its origins among \u201crunaways and other slippery folk who were happier on the sea than the land\u201d\u2014only to discover a real-life secret bayou community that came to light some 130 years ago, after a century\u2019s hidden existence: The Manila Men of St. Malo, Louisiana, were Filipino escapees from Spanish galleons who managed to remain hidden from the mainland for a hundred years, only coming to the attention of the American public when the journalist Lafcadio Hearn (better known for taking up Japanese citizenship and sharing Japanese ghost stories) wrote an article about them for Harper\u2019s Weekly<\/em> in 1883. He wrote, \u201cThe world in general ignored until a few days ago the bare fact of [the community\u2019s] existence. Even the United States mail service has never found its way hither.\u201d<\/i>1<\/sup><\/p>\n

With events and situations in Kaya\u2019s country, I was guided in advance of my writing, much more than for Mermaid\u2019s Hands, by real-life accounts and histories. I was particularly grateful, for example, for an autobiographical account by a political prisoner in Singapore. Although no happening in Pen Pal<\/i> is directly modeled on anything in the memoir, the account was hugely enlightening and affected how I fine-tuned Kaya\u2019s attitudes and behavior (though Kaya\u2019s circumstances and motivations are very different). As with Mermaid\u2019s Hands, the particulars of Kaya\u2019s country are nothing compared with true-life human experience: there\u2019s no exercise of power, act of suppression, or form of resistance that happens in Kaya\u2019s country that hasn\u2019t happened in more extreme form somewhere in the world.<\/p>\n

I should add that there are some aspects of the story that might be called magical, or magical realist. Dreams, visions, mythical ancestors\u2014these are integral to both Em\u2019s and Kaya\u2019s experience, and to their conversations with each other.<\/p>\n

More important to me than anything else in the story, though, are Kaya and Em themselves, and what their relationship represents: the possibility of friendship despite huge actual and metaphorical differences, and the strengthening, empowering, beneficial effect of that friendship. I think that\u2019s why I wrote the story. Zadie Smith said that when you write, you\u2019re saying, \u201cI saw this thing\u2014can I make you see it?\u201d That\u2019s what I\u2019m asking. I saw this thing\u2014can I make you see it?<\/p>\n

1<\/sup>Lafcadio Hearn, Lafcadio Hearn\u2019s America<\/i> (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), 54.<\/p>\n

Pen Pal<\/em> is available as a paperback from Amazon<\/a> and Barnes & Noble<\/a>, or as an ebook from Amazon<\/a>, Barnes & Noble<\/a>, Kobo<\/a>, and Apple<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Francesca Forrest Athena’s note: Francesca is a storyteller in the oldest, very best sense of the term \u2013 everything she tells looks like a hand-blown glass flower with smoky edges that leaves a whiff of warm amber in its wake. After a bouquet of stories, Francesca just published her first novel, Pen Pal, an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-science-fiction","category-writing-and-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}