Comps

In the thick of the 2019 pandemic, I broke lock down protocol to go hiking at Tagachang beach for some “field work” for the book. On my way down, I passed a cop car on patrol, chickened out, and did a u-turn back to Chalan Pago. So when I wasn’t teaching in 2019, I was holed up in my room reading anything I could get my hands on. I enrolled in Jerry Jenkins writer’s guild (Jenkins Writer's Guild) in the hopes of writing a book that doesn’t completely suck- character development, dialogue, plot, etc. He’s the guy who wrote the Left Behind series.

Jenkins talked about the different types of writers: plotters (outlines, charting plotlines, worldmapping, etc.) and pantsers (flies by the seat of their pants/shorts, no roadmap, starts with a concept). I learned that I fall into the category of throwing everything on a page and editing later (pantser). Anyone else?

Jenkins also said it’s good to read comparable books or “comps” to have something to strive towards and to help identify your audience. Because I just finished Delia Owen’s Where the Crawdads Sing and loved it, I looked at Amazon recommendations. I read 25+ books that year mainly by US authors apart from Orange and Hijuelos (list below).

Some of my favorites were The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Richardson, The Island of Sea Women by See, and The History of Wolves by Fridlund but each book taught me something.

Where the Crawdads Sing follows the life of Kya, a 6 year old girl abandoned by her mother and father in the marshes of North Carolina. It’s about how isolation affects human behavior, and the deep impact that rejection can have on our lives. Owens made the audience feel every feather, be stifled by the marsh air, and walk through forests with Kya which is what I tried to incorporate in my Micronesian island hopping scenes. She’s a master of showing not telling, which is why I was surprised when I read the following review on Goodreads: “Soooo boring. Skimmed the second half. Couldn’t wait to be done with it.” lol Even though the story line was not plausible (a 6 year old surviving alone in the marsh wilderness ), I thought it was a lyrical and evocative novel and it stayed with me for many days, particularly because COVID was so isolating.

I also read The Year of Magical Thinking hoping I could learn how to write the scene when grandma loses grandpa to pancreatic cancer. The book is an account of Joan Didion’s year after losing her husband and her daughter. What I ended up learning was how to incorporate internal dialogue. And I still think its odd that by the end of the book, I didn’t know anything about what her husband and daughter (who both passed) were like.

2020 -The following year, I revisited Oceania texts and found that these books always include the land or sea as another character, something that was missing in western texts. Certainly, there were rich details of the land and sea in books like Sisters of the Earth, but it was always surface material. Here I think is where US and Micronesian writers diverge. Micronesian writers fill in what the land and sea went through in a way Western writers cannot. Perhaps this comes from an aversion to acknowledge a mining and colonizing of land. The roots of Oceania run deeper than just visual observations and I saw that in a lot of Micronesian work. History is also inescapable in literary work because is has shaped a lot of what Micronesian writers bring attention to.

I would love to hear your thoughts if you’ve read some of these books! And if you have any recommendations, please drop a comment!

Pacific

*Aguon, Julian. The Properties of Perpetual Light. Contains Guam’s beauty and complexities in an interwoven package of personal experience and history so the world can hear. I like More Right, The Ocean Within, and We Have No Need For Scientists.

Beaty, Janice J. Discovering Guam.

*Carmen, Aniceto Ibanex del. Chronicle of the Mariana Islands is a collection of diary entires by Father Ibanex who arrived on Guam in 1857. I’m afraid Father Ibanex suffered from what now is the Guam Daily Post disorder in that most of what he wrote is CRIME in VIVID detail. “In spite of this, Luis told him that he did not want to fight but Vicente warned, ‘Watch out..” The young man grabbed his machete and slashed him under the left floating rib, severing one of his small intestines.(35)” How this priest knew all these details of every crime is beyond me, but it reminded me of the Post’s need to include dialogue in the news. Why?? He documented a lot on war, disease, and natural disasters. Pretty interesting, though grim. “On the 2nd of January of this year (1849), a terrible epidemic broke out in this city. It was traced to a whaling vessel which had come from Hawaii.” Epidemic= smallpox.

*dé Ishtar, Zohl. Daughters of the Pacific. This book gives a platform for oral history and covers a wide range of Pacific from Belau to Fiji to Australia. A Nation Divided (Guam and the Marianas) starts on pg. 67.

*Flores, Evelyn and Kihleng, Emelihter. Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia. Dr. Flores said this took them ten years to put together. I go to this book when I feel mahålang even though it makes me miss Guam more.

*Hau’ofa, Epeli. We Are the Ocean. This book inspires me. “But if we look at the myths, legends, and oral traditions, indeed the cosmologies of the peoples of Oceania, it becomes evident that they did not conceive of their worlds in such microscopic proportions (31).”

*Hezel, Francis X. Making Sense of Micronesia: The Logic of Pacific Island Culture. Now this was a fascinating read because it listed all the things that I thought I knew about Micronesian culture but answered why. Although a lot of this was centered on the FSM (particularly Chuuk), I found some correlations with Guam life.

Hezel, Francis X. Strangers in Their Own Land.

*Kihleng, Emelihter. My Urohs. I like Dreamers, Like the Island, and She Needs an Urohs.

Leon Guerrero, Gilette. A Year on the Island of Guam is a collection from Naturalist William Edwin Safford who recorded history, wrote the first Chamorro-English grammar, and conducted surveys of Guam plants and wildlife. He was a walking encyclopedia and moved to Guam in 1899 with only Darwin’s “Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom,” which is definitely not one of my deserted island picks… Safford’s diary is filled with scientific names of flora and fauna down to common weeds. On his beach walks, he paints Guam as the Garden of Eden with butterflies, silk cotton trees, fruit trees, etc.

Lucier, Makiia. Isle of Blood and Stone.

*Marchie, Antoine-Alfred. The Mariana Islands. An interesting log of an outsider (French explorer) looking in told in first person POV. Includes notes of Guam funerals, novenas, marriage etc. in 1887. He doesn’t suffer from Guam Daily Post disorder so I enjoyed reading this and compared island practices to now. It reminded me of grandma’s earlier letters to her father when she first arrived on island.

Morgan, Sally. My Place.

Murayama, Milton. All I Is Asking For Is My Body.

Murayama, Milton. Plantation Boy.

Neal, TW. Freckled: A Memoir of Growing up Wild in Hawaii. Jarring. Violent account of growing up in a domestic household and being a white island girl in Hawaii.

O’Brien, Patty. The Pacific Muse offers a much needed look at the start of exotic femininity and the Occidental quest to find “untouched” worlds in the Pacific.

*Perez, Teresita L. Chamorro Legends: A Gathering of Stories. A detailed account of the legends we heard growing up and some I’d never heard of like The Scented Woman. I loved the reflection nuggets in between. It fits because Terry is a proponent of encouraging students to do ethnographies in her composition classes at UOG in an effort to get oral histories recorded. She’s also incredibly humble so she’d probably hate me writing about her.

Quinene, Frederick B. An Islander’s Voice.

Souder, Laura M. T. Daughters of the Island: Contemporary Chamorro Women Organizers on Guam.

Ta Tuge’ Mo’na Members, Kinalamten gi Pasifiku: Insights from Oceania. Some funny and some aching poems and stories. It’s cool to read things by people you know.

Environment

Anderson, Lorraine. Sisters of the Earth: Women’s Pose and Poetry About Nature.

Aspen, Jean. Arctic Son: Fulfilling the Dream is about Aspen, her husband, and her son’s survival in the Alaskan wilderness. There’s a bear encounter, 600 mile river passage, and other near death experiences. It made me glad that it doesn’t snow on Guam.

Carson, Rachel and Darling, Louis. Silent Spring.

*Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us.

Carson, Rachel. Under the Sea-Wind.

*Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines.

*Fridlund, Emily. History of Wolves.

House, Freeman. Totem Salmon: Life Lesson From Another Species.

*Kreuger, William K. This Tender Land.

Lynch, Jim. The Highest Tide.

Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories.

*Owens, Delia. Where the Crawdads Sing.

*Richardson, Kim Michele. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

Whipple, ABC. Yankee Whalers in the South Seas.

Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees. Some parts were a bit too scientific for me, but it’s a fascinating look at how trees are all connected underground and how different species like birch and Douglas fir help each other survive. And the “Mother Tree” is actually a thing!

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

For Fun

Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking.

*Gross, Terry. All I Did Was Ask : Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists. Some of Terry’s best interviews of writers, actors, musicians, and artists who she’s interviewed on Fresh Air including my personal faves Jodie Foster, John Updike, Michael Cane, and Conan O’Brien.

*Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: And Asian American Reckoning. This was not a fun book, but I found it in the faculty lounge and thought I’d better read it. I related to her “cringe” of mostly white women listening to her Korean mom’s broken English “frozen in trapped patience, smile widened in condescension” (98).

Kern, Jonathan. Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams.

Lynch, Jim. Before the Wind.

Paulsen, Gary. Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod.

*Ryan, Shawna Y. Green Island.

*See, Lisa. The Island of Sea Women.

*Vance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy. Better than the film.

*Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir.

Freaking Funny

*Green, Graham. Travels With My Aunt.

*Lebowitz, Fran. The Fran Lebowitz Reader. Under Tips for Teens, she writes, “Wearing dark glasses at the breakfast table is socially acceptable only if you are legally blind or partaking of your morning meal out of doors during a total eclipse of the sun.” Mama asked what’s wrong with me because I was laughing so hard while reading this.

*Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Wallace on a cruise ship. Enough said.