reprinted with permission from workinprogressinprogress.com
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
After my sister, Shelby, is killed in a car crash while serving in the Peace Corps, I travel to Mozambique to locate her boyfriend, Idasse, who survived the crash. Together we retrace Shelby’s steps across a landscape of memory and loss. Part memoir, part investigative journey, The Island of Ghost Ships navigates the wreckage of grief through a series of short essays and a central haunting narrative.
Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why?
Writing about grief is very cathartic for me; it’s a way of processing emotional pain, so I guess I felt that kind of enjoyment while writing every essay in this collection. “Your Broken Hands,” however, was the most difficult to write. It is a letter to my sister’s friend who fell asleep at the wheel. The car accident didn’t just kill my sister, it killed his father, too, and gravely injured his sister. I‘ve felt every emotion toward him from rage to compassion to forgiveness. I know it was devastating for him, and I often wonder how he carried on and where he is today. In that essay, I had to take all of these emotions and funnel them into just a few poignant words. That is the beauty and the challenge of the short form: how to convey enormous things through a single image, sentence, phrase, or word.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
Oh gosh, where to start. I began this book about 20 years ago when I was awarded a Fulbright scholar grant to spend a year in Mozambique researching and writing about my sister’s death. Based on just a handful of pages, I ‘d signed with an agent, and she had a high-level editor at Knopf interested in the book. It was a lot of pressure. On top of the pressure, I was still drowning in grief over losing my sister and learning new details every day about the crash that killed her. Every sentence I wrote was painful. When I completed a page I’d get up and jump rope 100 times. I was in excellent shape by the end of it! The Knopf editor passed on the book. My agent sent it to dozens and dozens of publishing houses and they all passed. We’d get glowing letters about how wonderful the writing is, how moving the story, but in the end it was “too hard to sell.” I was devastated. I put the manuscript away for a long time. Then I pulled it out and started cutting huge chunks and reshaping what was left. I asked the amazing Meg Pokrass to help me expand it again, because I was still in this mindset that it had to be longer, but she said, “I think it’s beautiful as it is, just submit it,” So I did and a few months later Finishing Line Press accepted it.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
It comes from Richard Bausch. Read your work out loud. It’s the single most important thing I’ve ever learned about writing. I do it a gazillion times with everything I write. It trains your ear to hear where even the smallest edit (a word, a comma, a period) will improve the clarity, refine the prose, and perfect the lyrical rhythm of your sentences. I do it so much that I can almost recite every one of my pieces from memory.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
There’s one piece, “Shipwrecked,” where time is compressed into a kaleidoscopic reality. I was surprised by how effective this technique can be at capturing both the feeling of my sister being gone forever, and the feeling I often have that she’s come back to me in form of my daughter. Time, of course, is a construct, and emotions know nothing about its passing, especially in the case of grief. Still, the details of an experience can blur and change and give way to new definitions: Here I am walking through a game park in South Africa with my sister, and here I am walking through a field of bluebells in Virginia with my daughter. There are 25 years between those two experiences and yet, they are happening simultaneously.
How did you find the title of your book?
The book’s title, The Island of Ghost Ships, comes from something my sister said to me when we were visiting Catembe, which is an island in Maputo Bay off the coast of Mozambique. This was before they had built the suspension bridge that now connects the island to Maputo and we had to take a ferry to get there. As we pulled in to dock, we saw the wreckage of a ship and a few small boats in the sand. It was strange to see these abandoned pieces of history glistening there in the bright sun. We invented stories about where these boats had started their journey, who they carried, why they were left there to rot. And my sister said, “Welcome to the Island of Ghost Ships where even decay can be beautiful.”