Hi! I'm Michele Sullivan. I'm a journalist of 35+ years (ummm you know you're old when you use '+' instead of exact numbers). I'm very happy to be included in this group! My WIP is a historical novel based on a long-hidden manuscript written by the wife of my great great-Uncle Don Robinson. It's a tale that was often told in my family, but with few details. Before he died, my dad discovered that Aunt Ann had written a 500-page memoir of her adventures on Basilan Island and Zamboanga Peninsula during WWII. I retrieved the manuscript from the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History in Austin in June 2019. In January 2020, I quit my job to move there and conduct research on the ground. Unfortunately I had to leave due to COVID, but while there, I made enough progress to gain great confidence in the manuscript's validity - and Im going back in May to stay for the summer, research more, and write. Amazingly I'll be staying in Aunt Ann's house, which still stands on the coconut plantation she and my Uncle Don founded in 1912.
Attached - the house on the former Yakan Plantation, and pics from Aunt Ann's little photo book - when they came out of the jungle and about 8 months later on a visit to the US.
FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement.
Ann Hodges Robinson - the Berlin-educated concertmaster of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra – left her privileged life behind when she married Don Robinson, a footloose young attorney with a distaste for office work and an itch for adventure. Together they move to a remote Philippine island and create an enormous, lucrative coconut plantation on land once owned by the indigenous people of Basilan Island. But WWII forces them to leave everything behind as they flee into the jungles, relying on their wits and the kindness of strangers to survive four years of wartime horror. She loses everything that once defined her - her son and social circle, her home, her wealth, and eventually, her husband – but learns, in the end, who she really is.
The changes wrought by progress, by war, the changes wrought by time itself – all of these are things against which Ann struggles. Inside, she carries the privileged world of her youth, and for 30 years, she has recreated and maintained this on Basilan. Even as she flees her home in the middle of the night, she struggles against change: bringing her violin, her cat, furniture, a stove. But over the next four years, all these things fall away – in the end, all she has left is irrevocably altered self.
Secondary antagonists:
Benson Masaganda: Yakan teen, named after Don, at whose birth Don was present, a boy he always favored, who brings Don news of the death of their son during their flight; 3 years later, when Don reveals this to Ann, it fundamentally alters their relationship. After the war, Don appoints Benson foreman of the plantation. In 1949, Benson murders Don.
Obata: Longtime Japanese friend of Ann, the character who puts the plot into motion by betraying Ann and Don to the invading Japanese forces
Muksin: Bandit who sells the location of their first hiding place to the Japanese, forcing them to flee Basilan Island.
Shigeo Sugio: Japanese Ace pilot, fights Ann’s son, Bill, in several attacks and eventually kills him.
Hassan and Japanese patrol: Another betrayal brings a patrol to their hideout; they flee just in time, and the patrol murders Hasaan in Ann's hearing
Hunger, earthquake, flood, and locust and mice plagues exert their own tolls
THIRD ASSIGNMENT
BREAKOUT TITLE
Heart of the Balete
The ancient balete (strangler fig) tree is a central character in the novel. In nature, these trees use other species as supports while growing, eventually subsuming and killing them as they spread their own offspring through the forest.
Old Balete is the sole survivor of this ancient clan. When Don acquired the land from the Yakan tribe, a balete forest covered much of the riverside acres where he built the house and coconut processing buildings. However, the Yakan who were helping build the plantation held the balete tree in a place of fear and wonder, as home to trickster beings who exert powerful and dangerous forces. The prologue opens with Don cutting all of Old Balete’s children and sending them to the sawmill. This sets up a tension between the Colonialist Robinsons and the last surviving tree of the ancient forest, whose story is woven throughout the novel. He is intimately connected with the fates of Don, Ann, and Benson. The tree is the readers’ link between the ancient primeval Basilan and the modern, encroaching world. He is also the method by which we explore secrets, revenge, and perseverance. Finally, Old Balete is also the metaphor for Yakan family ties – the reason Don never goes home. As the balete subsumes all of the trees around it grow its own family, the Yakan, in Ann’s absence, grow a new family around Don – one that eventually kills him
The Coconut King of Zamboanga
This title focused much more on the concept of being a Colonialist “king” in the small world of Basilan. It’s a great hint about what Don ultimately becomes and why he never goes back to Texas to join Ann, who left in 1946 and never returned to Basilan. It’s actually the headline of a feature article about Don that appeared in the January 1948 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. That article ends with a discussion between the reporter and Don about why he isn’t going back to the US as his wife keeps writing him to do. The final sentence is a highly prophetic quote by Don. “Well, Ann’s the boss, so if she says Come home, I guess I’ll have to. But if it was up to me, I’d die right here and be buried underneath that old balete tree.”
ASSIGNMENT 4
COMPS
My book is a novelized memoir with a strong thread of magical realism, paying homage to the virtually unknown indigenous people of Basilan, the Yakan. I accomplish this by weaving the tribe's history and traditions into the narrative.
COMPS
1) Angels of the Pacific; Tess Hooper, released March 8. Author’s third book.
A novelization of the wartime experiences of a young Army nurse who joins with a Filipina to survive 2 years in St Thomas prison camp, the largest Japanese forces established in the country. It’s based on memoirs and interviews, and includes a 20-page “rest of the story” afterword revealing what happened to the two protagonists after they were evacuated in 1945.
Like mine, it begins a few days before Pearl Harbor. Like mine, it contains a description of the bombing of Clark Air Field and Cavite Naval Base. These are told from an observer’s standpoint. My chapters are told from the viewpoint ofNaval pilotBill Robinson (Ann’s son), who was engaged in the battle. This is the first scene in which he encounters his nemesis, Shigeo Sugio, who will ultimately kill him.
As with virtually all American-written memoirs and novels of this time in the Philippines, it’s written from the American POV. Mine incorporates characters, storylines, and mythology of indigenous people as well as the Americans with whom they are inextricably entangled.
Another key difference – setting is largely Manila and Luzon. Mine has scenes in Manila but largely takes place on Basilan and Zamboanga Peninsula.
2) When the Elephants Dance; Tess Uriza Holthe, 2002, Crown Publishers
Set in the waning days of WWII, this novel follows three Filipino siblings struggling to survive and maintain their family and culture under Japanese occupation in Manila. It’s based on stories the author got from her grandmother, who lived through this time, and those of her father, who was then a small boy. Unusual in that it’s told from a Filipino point of view, the story includes elements of folklore and local mythology, and contains some lovely lyrical passages.
3) My Faraway Home ; Mary MacKay Maynard; 2002
Based on the author’s experiences as the 8-year-old daughter of an American employed as a mining engineer in Mindanao. When the Japanese invaded, Maynard’s family and other Americans fled into the bush to escape capture. Her story tells of two years living in the bush, dependent on local families for news, trading for food and clothing. The book contains all sorts of fascinating details of how these families survived by using locally gathered foods, making soap and sugar, dealing with boredom, sickness and fear. Lots of informative details about Mindanao as well, and some references to a character who appears in my own book, Capt. Frank McCarthy. A former mining engineer, McCarthy became a friend of Don’s and the leader of a guerilla unit on Zamboanga. Maynard’s book is a very interesting read, not a novelization. A good example of the vast majority of literature on this topic: first-person memoir.
It’s tough to find comps for this novel, because very few authors have chosen to explore this part of American and Filipino history. The largest portion of books about this era and place are personal memoirs. These are fascinating and compelling, but typically not very well-written and certainly not novelized.
Something else makes comping tricky. My vision for sales of this book isn’t just the book. Readers will get exclusive access to a library of videos and photography taken during research. Several are already completed (see links). These videos will include:
·Interviews with elders who provided first-hand accounts of the years covered in the book (including people who knew Ann and Don) EXAMPLE: Pangilan’s Pira – story of Yakan warrior who killed a marauding Japanese soldier
·Yakan Plantation’s post WWII history: how after Don’s deathit was stolen from the Yakan people still living there by President Marcos’ military strongman, Ponce Enrile. Enrile sent the Philippine Army to chase Yakan off the land and burn their villages in order to get it for himself, and repopulated it with his Christian constituents, who still work the farm.
·How Basilan became the birthplace of Abu Sayef, the terrorist group that was the object of the American Army’s Special Operation Enduring Freedom.
·The current bandit repatriation program that’s bringing the remaining Abu Sayef into the fold of community with medical assistance, education, jobs and paths to leadership. This also includes re-formatting of madrasacurricula to focus on Islam’s messages of peace and co-existence, rather than a militant interpretation.
·Travelogue-style videos of Basilan’s untapped international tourism potential.
FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: hook line
From 1912-1942, wealthy American planters Ann and Don Robinson cultivated a paradisical home on a seductively beautiful Philippine island.When WWII breaks out, Japanese invaders force them to hide in the jungle they have struggled to control for 30 years.
The coddled daughter of a moneyed Dallas family, Ann was well-educated in the States, and as a young woman, set to Berlin to study violin under the masters at the Stern Conservatory. Returning to Dallas, she took a position as the concertmaster for the primordial Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and was well-positioned to pursure this career. However, she gave it all up when she met the charismatic young attorney Don Robinson, a celebrated football star from the University of Texas, anda footloose wanderer who had already seen the world by age 25. He takes to to the completely undeveloped Basilan Island with a scheme to grow coconuts. Throughout the next 30 years, the spouses are universally pulled in different directions: Ann determindly recreating her upper-crust American life, complete with servants, fancy parties, music, and gardening. Her primary goal is to maintain her status quo despite heat, mosquitos, snakes, crocodiles, and typhoons. Don cossets her and is compeltely devoted to creating this world for her. Nontheless, while her nature is to stay and maintain, his to to relenetlessly pursue life and change. This tension between them - and within themselves- is always visible. Ironically, by the end of the book, the two have swapped places. Don is the one seeking the status quo: he can't leave Basilan, can't face the change he would undergo as a washed up old post-war Colonial in America. He stays firmly planted on Basilan, despite Ann's pleas and the lies he tells her - and himself. Ann, on the other hand, has been through enough hell - losing her home, her son, her friends, her money, and her social status. She is completely focused on going back to Texas and starting a new life - completely committed to moving on, which she does. Don stays, and the Yakan build a new family unit around him - until he is eventually murdered by Benson Masaganda, the young Yakan man named after him, on April 17, 1949.
SECONDARY CONFLICT
Benson loved Don completely, because he bore the big American’s name and carried his special favor. Ann hated Benson deeply, for exactly the same reasons.
Apu Don roBENson, as the Yakan called Don, had been present at baby Benson’s birth, a very unusual situation - a coincidence brought on by an unusually heavy afternoon downpour. Don had been riding in from the far rice fields and, caught in the shower, took shelter beneath Masaganda’s sturdy house. Madeof bamboo, with walls of woven nipa palm, it stood on four tall and sturdy palmwood posts. Masaganda was squatting by a smoky little fire beneath the house, chewing betel nut as his wife labored in the room above. When the baby arrived, Masaganda invited Don to meet the tiny boy. Don’s only son, Billy, was 8 at the time. Ann had borne two other babes who perished shortly after birth. When Don held the squirming newborn, the infant fit right into the hole of sadness that these little lost ones had left behind.
Seeing the instant connection, Masaganda named the baby Benson, after Don’s Yakan name. Thereafter Don took a special interest in the boy, visiting with little gifts and later, taking Benson into the fields, riding in front and gripping the horn of the big stock saddle. This became a common sight around the farm. Don even paid for Benson to attend school in Zamboanga. As he grew Benson developed some unique characteristics that set him apart from other Yakan boys: his eyes were lighter, more of a golden brown with some hints of green, and his hair was not the typical raven’s wing black but sometimes took on rusty highlight in the sun.
Ann, who invested all her love into her one remaining son, was annoyed by the attention and affection Don lavished on the Yakan boy. When his unusual coloring began to show, her annoyance deepened into something darker. She had no obvious reason to doubt Benson’s parentage, but Don’s family history stuck in the back of her mind like a festering thorn. His brother Claude Robinson, had fathered two children by his housemaid. Alma, Claude’s wife, accepted Hazel and Claude Jr and the legal adoptions that placed the children in her care. Secretly, though, Ann always wondered whether Don had followed in his older brother’s footprints.
This distrust surfaces in several places in the novel, and is a key turning point toward the end, when Ann decides to leave Basilan and never return. With Don’s support, Benson becomes a scout for an American Army unit during WWII. He is actually the one who brings Don the news of Billy’s death in action the spring of 1942. Don withholds the news, believing that it would be too stressful for Ann to hear this while they’re running for their lives and hiding in the jungles. She doesn’t find out until they are back at Yakan Plantation in 1945. When she learns that Don knew, and that Benson had carried the news –combined with all the other destruction war had wrought in her life – Ann decided to leave Basilan and never return. We further explore this relationship in the years 1946-1949, until the moment that Benson murders Don in his office on Yakan Plantation.
ASSIGNMENT 7: Setting
The novel is largely set on Basilan Island, one of the most southerly of the Philippines islands. A volcanic island, Basilan in this time period is surrounded by prime reefs full of succulent crustanceans and teeming with fish. The forests are full of deer and wild boar. The air is full of parrots and toucans and the trees are full of chattering monkey tribes. The iron-rich volcanic soil is so ridiculously fertile, the rain so plentiful, the air so warm, that crops sprout and mature in weeks instead of months. The forests are full of virgin timber, including centuries-old wild fruit trees, enormous groves of ancient balete (banyan) trees, impenetrable thickets of nipa palm, which provides both food and material for building. Mangrove forests filter the tidal flats and protect the island against the seas when they rage – though that is infrequent, as Basilan lies below the typhoon belt.
The Yakan have made Basilan home since the 1200s. They are a Muslim people, but retain animist beliefs from pre-Islamic times. They have a strong belief in trickster spirits – kokoks – who inhabit the ancient balete trees. They mark important ceremonies and prayers with the sacrifice of white roosters. Loyal and gentle with friends and family, murderous with enemies, the Yakan are a mountain people who also cultivate the coastal plains. The coastal region is home to a related tribe, the Samal. Called “sea gypsies” this group of people live entirely on boats, which gather and travel in large family groups. The Yakan and Samal trade their produce: vegetables, fruits, and root foods for fish and shellfish. In the early 1900s, Basilan – untouched by industry - is so bountiful that hunger is virtually unknown.
Yet the jungle is full of danger. Crocodiles crowd the rivers and we know from eyewitness accounts that residents regularly harvest them, not only to eat the tail meat but to keep some control on the population. Cobras sighed through the thick grass of the open plains, and pythons draped themselves over thick and mossy branches, waiting to drop onto an unwary passerby. Bandits and sea pirates also make life miserable, and occassionally, someone will "run amok," in the ritualistic killing spree that always ends with the perptrator's suicide by kris - the long and flexible, wavey-bladed Yakan war sword.
OTHER SETTINGS
Yakan Plantation- 1,200 acres of the Lamitan Valley, formerly land of the Yakan tribe, which Don acquires from the clan of Datu Unding in the early 1900s. Over the years, he and Yakan employees built a 6-mile irrigation system and planted 100,000 coconut trees, in addition to cultivating rice, coffee, chocolate, and fruit. Ann's house sites on the banks of the small Bohe Gubawang river in the shade of Old Balete, the only banyan tree left on the land.
Manila - Ann's son Bill Robinson is a Navy pilot stationed at Cavite Naval Base with his young wife Gertrude and his adopted son. We have a brief scene in Manila at their their home, with additional scene of aerial combat and bombing over Manila Bay.
Small unnamed village NW of Manila, near Bataan - Amalia, a secondary character, the pregnant Filipina fiancee of Bill's co-pilot, leaves Manila after the attack on Cavite, returning to her parents' home. She witnesses the Bataan Death March and in fact is killed for trying to give water to some of the American prisoners forced to walk from Manila to the prison camp in Bataan.
USS President Pierce - Gertrude and her little boy leave Manila just days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, after Bill spies Japanese activity on a reconnaissance mission. The ship is bound for San Francisco but takes elaborate evasive action after news of Pearl Harbor, including running with no lights, passengers required to wear life jackets 24/7, no passengers on deck, and course changes every hour. They do stop at Honolulu to pick up some survivors of the PH attack, and arrive in San Francisco on Christmas Day 1941.
Bohe Langgung - the hidden Yakan village where Datu Unding, the Yakan chieftain, hides Don and Ann when rumors of invasion begin to swirl. The village is set around a spring that flows down the mountainside, and has been terraced into 5 levels, each for a different use. The founder of the village is an ancient Yakan man who, with his brother, cleared some of the virgin timber and planted an Eden-like assortment of fruiting trees and bushes. Houses are on stilts, made of bamboo and palm leaves
Zamboanga City - a small and lovely, white-buildinged Spanish Colonial city off the very tip of Zamboanga Peninsula. Home to an American Army base and a stop on Asian tourist cruises. Lovely white beach, Westernized hotels and restaurants, a golf club that has a room set especially aside for plantation owners and other Americans to socialize and drink. A laarge Japanese-owned fish cannery turns out to have been operating as spy headquarters for several years. The city is utterly destroyed - bombed once by Japanese forces in 1942, and pulverized by American strokes in 1945. Many of Ann and Don's friends die in the first bombing. Those who do not are imprisoned.
Tungawan - The Robinsons must flee Bohe Langgung because their whereabouts are discovered by a bandit named Muksin, who threatens to sell them out to the Japanese. Under cover of night, they escape Basilan in their copra transport boat, taking along about 30 others who are similarly fleeing. Ann and Don then go up the coast of Zamboanga to a region called Tungawan. Here they enter into an underground railroad of sorts, protected and hidden over the next 4 years by three different families.
Dallas - We visit Dallas of 1910 at the beginning of the book, and then again, Dallas of 1949 and 1974, when Ann died.
Here’s Ann’s description, as she sees Basilan from the steamer leaving Zamboanga CIty.
Basilan was blue the first time I saw it.
Floating blue on the blue sea, blue in the blue sky, misty and untethered to the earth. The staggered mountains embraced each other in deep blue folds, set off by a ring of pearly beach. The peaks grew ever lighter blue, as if they longed to join the white and pearly clouds all ringed all around by blue blue sky. Basilan could have been a mirage floating in a blue desert. But as we made our way across the blue-glass water of Basilan Strait, the mirage grew larger and more solid instead of dissolving in a misty shimmer. As we neared the shore, broad sunlight fell across the face of Punu Lapurap, the largest mountain, revealing Basilan’s truth: Not blue but green. And not just green. The color of the living world.
To call Basilan a jungle island is a simplistic error. Basilan is riotous, unrestrained, impetuous. It's both impenetrable and vulnerable. Tender and fierce. Passionate and dangerous.
As Don discovered early on, Basilan can seduce.
And as we both discovered later, it can also kill.
Don’s first impressions:
“The island drifts in the sea, so blue you can’t tell if you’re looking at the sea or the sky – all the time getting bigger and bigger as you sail toward it and suddenly, it’s not blue at all. It’s the greenest green you can imagine, with blazing white beaches made of crushed coral and foamy with the waves. Why a man hardly needs to worry about food. You walk the beach or through the jungle and the trees just bend down and drop fruit right in your hand. You put a bent pin on a string and catch fish all day long. Pick up a green coconut, whack it open, and the cool sweet water inside slakes a thirst you never even knew you had.”
That first day exploring, Don wore a white sun hat and a half-buttoned linen shirt tucked into tan riding pants, pants tucked into tall black boots. He was cantering Coronet along a white beach. Palms cast cool gray shadows on the hot white sand. He dismounted and picked up a green coconut, cut the top away with a machete, put it to his mouth and drank. As he lifted the nut, sweet water spilled over his chin and down his chest, soaking the linen. He dropped the nut and stared down the beach, absently wiping his mouth with the back of one sun-browned hand. His face was brown too, and his eyes burned blue like the flat sea, like the bowl of the enormous arching sky.
New York Pitch and Algonkian Pre-event Assignments - 2022
in New York Write to Pitch 2023 and 2024
Posted
Hi! I'm Michele Sullivan. I'm a journalist of 35+ years (ummm you know you're old when you use '+' instead of exact numbers). I'm very happy to be included in this group! My WIP is a historical novel based on a long-hidden manuscript written by the wife of my great great-Uncle Don Robinson. It's a tale that was often told in my family, but with few details. Before he died, my dad discovered that Aunt Ann had written a 500-page memoir of her adventures on Basilan Island and Zamboanga Peninsula during WWII. I retrieved the manuscript from the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History in Austin in June 2019. In January 2020, I quit my job to move there and conduct research on the ground. Unfortunately I had to leave due to COVID, but while there, I made enough progress to gain great confidence in the manuscript's validity - and Im going back in May to stay for the summer, research more, and write. Amazingly I'll be staying in Aunt Ann's house, which still stands on the coconut plantation she and my Uncle Don founded in 1912.
Attached - the house on the former Yakan Plantation, and pics from Aunt Ann's little photo book - when they came out of the jungle and about 8 months later on a visit to the US.
FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement.
Ann Hodges Robinson - the Berlin-educated concertmaster of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra – left her privileged life behind when she married Don Robinson, a footloose young attorney with a distaste for office work and an itch for adventure. Together they move to a remote Philippine island and create an enormous, lucrative coconut plantation on land once owned by the indigenous people of Basilan Island. But WWII forces them to leave everything behind as they flee into the jungles, relying on their wits and the kindness of strangers to survive four years of wartime horror. She loses everything that once defined her - her son and social circle, her home, her wealth, and eventually, her husband – but learns, in the end, who she really is.
___________________________________________________
THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT
Primary antagonist: Relentless change
The changes wrought by progress, by war, the changes wrought by time itself – all of these are things against which Ann struggles. Inside, she carries the privileged world of her youth, and for 30 years, she has recreated and maintained this on Basilan. Even as she flees her home in the middle of the night, she struggles against change: bringing her violin, her cat, furniture, a stove. But over the next four years, all these things fall away – in the end, all she has left is irrevocably altered self.
Secondary antagonists:
Benson Masaganda: Yakan teen, named after Don, at whose birth Don was present, a boy he always favored, who brings Don news of the death of their son during their flight; 3 years later, when Don reveals this to Ann, it fundamentally alters their relationship. After the war, Don appoints Benson foreman of the plantation. In 1949, Benson murders Don.
Obata: Longtime Japanese friend of Ann, the character who puts the plot into motion by betraying Ann and Don to the invading Japanese forces
Muksin: Bandit who sells the location of their first hiding place to the Japanese, forcing them to flee Basilan Island.
Shigeo Sugio: Japanese Ace pilot, fights Ann’s son, Bill, in several attacks and eventually kills him.
Hassan and Japanese patrol: Another betrayal brings a patrol to their hideout; they flee just in time, and the patrol murders Hasaan in Ann's hearing
Hunger, earthquake, flood, and locust and mice plagues exert their own tolls
THIRD ASSIGNMENT
BREAKOUT TITLE
Heart of the Balete
The ancient balete (strangler fig) tree is a central character in the novel. In nature, these trees use other species as supports while growing, eventually subsuming and killing them as they spread their own offspring through the forest.
Old Balete is the sole survivor of this ancient clan. When Don acquired the land from the Yakan tribe, a balete forest covered much of the riverside acres where he built the house and coconut processing buildings. However, the Yakan who were helping build the plantation held the balete tree in a place of fear and wonder, as home to trickster beings who exert powerful and dangerous forces. The prologue opens with Don cutting all of Old Balete’s children and sending them to the sawmill. This sets up a tension between the Colonialist Robinsons and the last surviving tree of the ancient forest, whose story is woven throughout the novel. He is intimately connected with the fates of Don, Ann, and Benson. The tree is the readers’ link between the ancient primeval Basilan and the modern, encroaching world. He is also the method by which we explore secrets, revenge, and perseverance. Finally, Old Balete is also the metaphor for Yakan family ties – the reason Don never goes home. As the balete subsumes all of the trees around it grow its own family, the Yakan, in Ann’s absence, grow a new family around Don – one that eventually kills him
The Coconut King of Zamboanga
This title focused much more on the concept of being a Colonialist “king” in the small world of Basilan. It’s a great hint about what Don ultimately becomes and why he never goes back to Texas to join Ann, who left in 1946 and never returned to Basilan. It’s actually the headline of a feature article about Don that appeared in the January 1948 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. That article ends with a discussion between the reporter and Don about why he isn’t going back to the US as his wife keeps writing him to do. The final sentence is a highly prophetic quote by Don. “Well, Ann’s the boss, so if she says Come home, I guess I’ll have to. But if it was up to me, I’d die right here and be buried underneath that old balete tree.”
ASSIGNMENT 4
COMPS
My book is a novelized memoir with a strong thread of magical realism, paying homage to the virtually unknown indigenous people of Basilan, the Yakan. I accomplish this by weaving the tribe's history and traditions into the narrative.
COMPS
1) Angels of the Pacific; Tess Hooper, released March 8. Author’s third book.
A novelization of the wartime experiences of a young Army nurse who joins with a Filipina to survive 2 years in St Thomas prison camp, the largest Japanese forces established in the country. It’s based on memoirs and interviews, and includes a 20-page “rest of the story” afterword revealing what happened to the two protagonists after they were evacuated in 1945.
Like mine, it begins a few days before Pearl Harbor. Like mine, it contains a description of the bombing of Clark Air Field and Cavite Naval Base. These are told from an observer’s standpoint. My chapters are told from the viewpoint of Naval pilot Bill Robinson (Ann’s son), who was engaged in the battle. This is the first scene in which he encounters his nemesis, Shigeo Sugio, who will ultimately kill him.
As with virtually all American-written memoirs and novels of this time in the Philippines, it’s written from the American POV. Mine incorporates characters, storylines, and mythology of indigenous people as well as the Americans with whom they are inextricably entangled.
Another key difference – setting is largely Manila and Luzon. Mine has scenes in Manila but largely takes place on Basilan and Zamboanga Peninsula.
2) When the Elephants Dance; Tess Uriza Holthe, 2002, Crown Publishers
Set in the waning days of WWII, this novel follows three Filipino siblings struggling to survive and maintain their family and culture under Japanese occupation in Manila. It’s based on stories the author got from her grandmother, who lived through this time, and those of her father, who was then a small boy. Unusual in that it’s told from a Filipino point of view, the story includes elements of folklore and local mythology, and contains some lovely lyrical passages.
3) My Faraway Home ; Mary MacKay Maynard; 2002
Based on the author’s experiences as the 8-year-old daughter of an American employed as a mining engineer in Mindanao. When the Japanese invaded, Maynard’s family and other Americans fled into the bush to escape capture. Her story tells of two years living in the bush, dependent on local families for news, trading for food and clothing. The book contains all sorts of fascinating details of how these families survived by using locally gathered foods, making soap and sugar, dealing with boredom, sickness and fear. Lots of informative details about Mindanao as well, and some references to a character who appears in my own book, Capt. Frank McCarthy. A former mining engineer, McCarthy became a friend of Don’s and the leader of a guerilla unit on Zamboanga. Maynard’s book is a very interesting read, not a novelization. A good example of the vast majority of literature on this topic: first-person memoir.
It’s tough to find comps for this novel, because very few authors have chosen to explore this part of American and Filipino history. The largest portion of books about this era and place are personal memoirs. These are fascinating and compelling, but typically not very well-written and certainly not novelized.
Something else makes comping tricky. My vision for sales of this book isn’t just the book. Readers will get exclusive access to a library of videos and photography taken during research. Several are already completed (see links). These videos will include:
· Explorations of Yakan culture and mythology (creation myths, weaving, music). EXAMPLES: Secrets of the Balete What Makes a Tribe?
· Interviews with elders who provided first-hand accounts of the years covered in the book (including people who knew Ann and Don) EXAMPLE: Pangilan’s Pira – story of Yakan warrior who killed a marauding Japanese soldier
· Yakan Plantation’s post WWII history: how after Don’s death it was stolen from the Yakan people still living there by President Marcos’ military strongman, Ponce Enrile. Enrile sent the Philippine Army to chase Yakan off the land and burn their villages in order to get it for himself, and repopulated it with his Christian constituents, who still work the farm.
· How Basilan became the birthplace of Abu Sayef, the terrorist group that was the object of the American Army’s Special Operation Enduring Freedom.
· The current bandit repatriation program that’s bringing the remaining Abu Sayef into the fold of community with medical assistance, education, jobs and paths to leadership. This also includes re-formatting of madrasa curricula to focus on Islam’s messages of peace and co-existence, rather than a militant interpretation.
· Travelogue-style videos of Basilan’s untapped international tourism potential.
FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: hook line
From 1912-1942, wealthy American planters Ann and Don Robinson cultivated a paradisical home on a seductively beautiful Philippine island. When WWII breaks out, Japanese invaders force them to hide in the jungle they have struggled to control for 30 years.
______________________________________________________
SIXTH ASSIGNMENT
PRIMARY CONFLICT
The coddled daughter of a moneyed Dallas family, Ann was well-educated in the States, and as a young woman, set to Berlin to study violin under the masters at the Stern Conservatory. Returning to Dallas, she took a position as the concertmaster for the primordial Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and was well-positioned to pursure this career. However, she gave it all up when she met the charismatic young attorney Don Robinson, a celebrated football star from the University of Texas, anda footloose wanderer who had already seen the world by age 25. He takes to to the completely undeveloped Basilan Island with a scheme to grow coconuts. Throughout the next 30 years, the spouses are universally pulled in different directions: Ann determindly recreating her upper-crust American life, complete with servants, fancy parties, music, and gardening. Her primary goal is to maintain her status quo despite heat, mosquitos, snakes, crocodiles, and typhoons. Don cossets her and is compeltely devoted to creating this world for her. Nontheless, while her nature is to stay and maintain, his to to relenetlessly pursue life and change. This tension between them - and within themselves- is always visible. Ironically, by the end of the book, the two have swapped places. Don is the one seeking the status quo: he can't leave Basilan, can't face the change he would undergo as a washed up old post-war Colonial in America. He stays firmly planted on Basilan, despite Ann's pleas and the lies he tells her - and himself. Ann, on the other hand, has been through enough hell - losing her home, her son, her friends, her money, and her social status. She is completely focused on going back to Texas and starting a new life - completely committed to moving on, which she does. Don stays, and the Yakan build a new family unit around him - until he is eventually murdered by Benson Masaganda, the young Yakan man named after him, on April 17, 1949.
SECONDARY CONFLICT
Benson loved Don completely, because he bore the big American’s name and carried his special favor. Ann hated Benson deeply, for exactly the same reasons.
Apu Don roBENson, as the Yakan called Don, had been present at baby Benson’s birth, a very unusual situation - a coincidence brought on by an unusually heavy afternoon downpour. Don had been riding in from the far rice fields and, caught in the shower, took shelter beneath Masaganda’s sturdy house. Made of bamboo, with walls of woven nipa palm, it stood on four tall and sturdy palmwood posts. Masaganda was squatting by a smoky little fire beneath the house, chewing betel nut as his wife labored in the room above. When the baby arrived, Masaganda invited Don to meet the tiny boy. Don’s only son, Billy, was 8 at the time. Ann had borne two other babes who perished shortly after birth. When Don held the squirming newborn, the infant fit right into the hole of sadness that these little lost ones had left behind.
Seeing the instant connection, Masaganda named the baby Benson, after Don’s Yakan name. Thereafter Don took a special interest in the boy, visiting with little gifts and later, taking Benson into the fields, riding in front and gripping the horn of the big stock saddle. This became a common sight around the farm. Don even paid for Benson to attend school in Zamboanga. As he grew Benson developed some unique characteristics that set him apart from other Yakan boys: his eyes were lighter, more of a golden brown with some hints of green, and his hair was not the typical raven’s wing black but sometimes took on rusty highlight in the sun.
Ann, who invested all her love into her one remaining son, was annoyed by the attention and affection Don lavished on the Yakan boy. When his unusual coloring began to show, her annoyance deepened into something darker. She had no obvious reason to doubt Benson’s parentage, but Don’s family history stuck in the back of her mind like a festering thorn. His brother Claude Robinson, had fathered two children by his housemaid. Alma, Claude’s wife, accepted Hazel and Claude Jr and the legal adoptions that placed the children in her care. Secretly, though, Ann always wondered whether Don had followed in his older brother’s footprints.
This distrust surfaces in several places in the novel, and is a key turning point toward the end, when Ann decides to leave Basilan and never return. With Don’s support, Benson becomes a scout for an American Army unit during WWII. He is actually the one who brings Don the news of Billy’s death in action the spring of 1942. Don withholds the news, believing that it would be too stressful for Ann to hear this while they’re running for their lives and hiding in the jungles. She doesn’t find out until they are back at Yakan Plantation in 1945. When she learns that Don knew, and that Benson had carried the news –combined with all the other destruction war had wrought in her life – Ann decided to leave Basilan and never return. We further explore this relationship in the years 1946-1949, until the moment that Benson murders Don in his office on Yakan Plantation.
ASSIGNMENT 7: Setting
The novel is largely set on Basilan Island, one of the most southerly of the Philippines islands. A volcanic island, Basilan in this time period is surrounded by prime reefs full of succulent crustanceans and teeming with fish. The forests are full of deer and wild boar. The air is full of parrots and toucans and the trees are full of chattering monkey tribes. The iron-rich volcanic soil is so ridiculously fertile, the rain so plentiful, the air so warm, that crops sprout and mature in weeks instead of months. The forests are full of virgin timber, including centuries-old wild fruit trees, enormous groves of ancient balete (banyan) trees, impenetrable thickets of nipa palm, which provides both food and material for building. Mangrove forests filter the tidal flats and protect the island against the seas when they rage – though that is infrequent, as Basilan lies below the typhoon belt.
The Yakan have made Basilan home since the 1200s. They are a Muslim people, but retain animist beliefs from pre-Islamic times. They have a strong belief in trickster spirits – kokoks – who inhabit the ancient balete trees. They mark important ceremonies and prayers with the sacrifice of white roosters. Loyal and gentle with friends and family, murderous with enemies, the Yakan are a mountain people who also cultivate the coastal plains. The coastal region is home to a related tribe, the Samal. Called “sea gypsies” this group of people live entirely on boats, which gather and travel in large family groups. The Yakan and Samal trade their produce: vegetables, fruits, and root foods for fish and shellfish. In the early 1900s, Basilan – untouched by industry - is so bountiful that hunger is virtually unknown.
Yet the jungle is full of danger. Crocodiles crowd the rivers and we know from eyewitness accounts that residents regularly harvest them, not only to eat the tail meat but to keep some control on the population. Cobras sighed through the thick grass of the open plains, and pythons draped themselves over thick and mossy branches, waiting to drop onto an unwary passerby. Bandits and sea pirates also make life miserable, and occassionally, someone will "run amok," in the ritualistic killing spree that always ends with the perptrator's suicide by kris - the long and flexible, wavey-bladed Yakan war sword.
OTHER SETTINGS
Yakan Plantation- 1,200 acres of the Lamitan Valley, formerly land of the Yakan tribe, which Don acquires from the clan of Datu Unding in the early 1900s. Over the years, he and Yakan employees built a 6-mile irrigation system and planted 100,000 coconut trees, in addition to cultivating rice, coffee, chocolate, and fruit. Ann's house sites on the banks of the small Bohe Gubawang river in the shade of Old Balete, the only banyan tree left on the land.
Manila - Ann's son Bill Robinson is a Navy pilot stationed at Cavite Naval Base with his young wife Gertrude and his adopted son. We have a brief scene in Manila at their their home, with additional scene of aerial combat and bombing over Manila Bay.
Small unnamed village NW of Manila, near Bataan - Amalia, a secondary character, the pregnant Filipina fiancee of Bill's co-pilot, leaves Manila after the attack on Cavite, returning to her parents' home. She witnesses the Bataan Death March and in fact is killed for trying to give water to some of the American prisoners forced to walk from Manila to the prison camp in Bataan.
USS President Pierce - Gertrude and her little boy leave Manila just days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, after Bill spies Japanese activity on a reconnaissance mission. The ship is bound for San Francisco but takes elaborate evasive action after news of Pearl Harbor, including running with no lights, passengers required to wear life jackets 24/7, no passengers on deck, and course changes every hour. They do stop at Honolulu to pick up some survivors of the PH attack, and arrive in San Francisco on Christmas Day 1941.
Bohe Langgung - the hidden Yakan village where Datu Unding, the Yakan chieftain, hides Don and Ann when rumors of invasion begin to swirl. The village is set around a spring that flows down the mountainside, and has been terraced into 5 levels, each for a different use. The founder of the village is an ancient Yakan man who, with his brother, cleared some of the virgin timber and planted an Eden-like assortment of fruiting trees and bushes. Houses are on stilts, made of bamboo and palm leaves
Zamboanga City - a small and lovely, white-buildinged Spanish Colonial city off the very tip of Zamboanga Peninsula. Home to an American Army base and a stop on Asian tourist cruises. Lovely white beach, Westernized hotels and restaurants, a golf club that has a room set especially aside for plantation owners and other Americans to socialize and drink. A laarge Japanese-owned fish cannery turns out to have been operating as spy headquarters for several years. The city is utterly destroyed - bombed once by Japanese forces in 1942, and pulverized by American strokes in 1945. Many of Ann and Don's friends die in the first bombing. Those who do not are imprisoned.
Tungawan - The Robinsons must flee Bohe Langgung because their whereabouts are discovered by a bandit named Muksin, who threatens to sell them out to the Japanese. Under cover of night, they escape Basilan in their copra transport boat, taking along about 30 others who are similarly fleeing. Ann and Don then go up the coast of Zamboanga to a region called Tungawan. Here they enter into an underground railroad of sorts, protected and hidden over the next 4 years by three different families.
Dallas - We visit Dallas of 1910 at the beginning of the book, and then again, Dallas of 1949 and 1974, when Ann died.
Here’s Ann’s description, as she sees Basilan from the steamer leaving Zamboanga CIty.
Basilan was blue the first time I saw it.
Floating blue on the blue sea, blue in the blue sky, misty and untethered to the earth. The staggered mountains embraced each other in deep blue folds, set off by a ring of pearly beach. The peaks grew ever lighter blue, as if they longed to join the white and pearly clouds all ringed all around by blue blue sky. Basilan could have been a mirage floating in a blue desert. But as we made our way across the blue-glass water of Basilan Strait, the mirage grew larger and more solid instead of dissolving in a misty shimmer. As we neared the shore, broad sunlight fell across the face of Punu Lapurap, the largest mountain, revealing Basilan’s truth: Not blue but green. And not just green. The color of the living world.
To call Basilan a jungle island is a simplistic error. Basilan is riotous, unrestrained, impetuous. It's both impenetrable and vulnerable. Tender and fierce. Passionate and dangerous.
As Don discovered early on, Basilan can seduce.
And as we both discovered later, it can also kill.
Don’s first impressions:
“The island drifts in the sea, so blue you can’t tell if you’re looking at the sea or the sky – all the time getting bigger and bigger as you sail toward it and suddenly, it’s not blue at all. It’s the greenest green you can imagine, with blazing white beaches made of crushed coral and foamy with the waves. Why a man hardly needs to worry about food. You walk the beach or through the jungle and the trees just bend down and drop fruit right in your hand. You put a bent pin on a string and catch fish all day long. Pick up a green coconut, whack it open, and the cool sweet water inside slakes a thirst you never even knew you had.”
That first day exploring, Don wore a white sun hat and a half-buttoned linen shirt tucked into tan riding pants, pants tucked into tall black boots. He was cantering Coronet along a white beach. Palms cast cool gray shadows on the hot white sand. He dismounted and picked up a green coconut, cut the top away with a machete, put it to his mouth and drank. As he lifted the nut, sweet water spilled over his chin and down his chest, soaking the linen. He dropped the nut and stared down the beach, absently wiping his mouth with the back of one sun-browned hand. His face was brown too, and his eyes burned blue like the flat sea, like the bowl of the enormous arching sky.