Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Write About What You Don’t Know About

George Guthridge

I’m sure that everyone has heard the advice: write about what you know about. But when I was starting to write seriously, I had few worldly experiences on which to draw. I wrote my first published story about picking berries, which I had done for money for 14 summers, but after that I was stumped. I had spent all of my years in school, which at least to me seemed as devoid of interesting experiences as one can get.

Enamored of the writing of several science fiction writers I happened to meet, I began writing about other worlds, but with increasing dissatisfaction. Much of the SF and horror I read was so mundane that it seemed as if I could sheer off the SF or horror coat and the world beneath would be as common as my own.

Later, I became increasingly interested in those parts of our own world with which I was unfamiliar. I found the research involved in writing about unfamiliar places to be exhilarating, even joyful.

As a result of such writing, I became friends with Janet Berliner. We started writing a story set on another world, but soon shifted it to Madagascar and to Hitler’s attempt to settle European Jews there. Janet had grown up in Africa but had never been to Madagascar, and the closest I had come to that island – the world’s fourth largest – was the articles I culled from National Geographic.

We wrote and sold a novelette, but when we decided to expand it into a book, we realized that we had a problem. Neither of us could afford to go to Madagascar – Janet for health reasons besides the obvious financial one for both of us – and the information we had about the island was both sketchy and overwhelming. Sketchy because we had difficulty finding a lot of information about it, and overwhelming because of the island’s size and diversity.

I remember standing in her apartment, which looked out over San Francisco Bay and, seeing the island before me – Treasure Island, if I recall correctly, but I was thinking about that storied island, Alcatraz – and suggesting that we look at Nosé Mangabé, the island near the mouth of Antongil Bay, where we had set the novelette. We got out our map, and she instantly agreed.

The choice proved to be serendipitous. The more we researched this tiny particle of Madagascar, the more excited we became. It is the world’s only refuge for the aye-aye, a small lemur that has been hunted almost to extinction because its long, bony forefinger supposedly foretells death in whomever it points toward. Mangabé also is home to sorcery and figured into Madagascar’s pirate escapades. And for a brief time it was the home of Augustus Benyowsky, an Austrian-Hungarian count who was imprisoned in Siberia and, after seducing the warden’s daughter (how much of this is true is uncertain, since there is only the count’s memoir to validate it), with a number of other prisoners he stole two ships and made his way to Madagascar. There, he wrote the island’s first constitution, eventually befriended Benjamin Franklin, and ultimately was killed by the French because he was becoming too powerful. In the novel we called Mangabé “the island where the dead dream.” The description seemed – and seems – appropriate.

But maybe, I have begun thinking, all places have similarly interesting histories, if we are only willing to dig deeply enough. For example, for six years during the ‘80s I lived in the Siberian-Yupik village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. Only 550 people resided there, yet the longer I stayed, the more fascinating I found the village’s history, which dates back 2,300 years. There had been at least a millennium of warfare against the Eskimos from Siberia, two or three famines that had killed almost everyone, epidemics of measles and the flu, and a number of military episodes, including fights (including at least one while I lived there) between the locals and Spetznatz, the Soviet secret army. Then, too, there were numerous personal stories. The time, for instance, a missionary was stabbed to death by a harpoon and left hanging from a doorway because he did not give a local any canned milk. Or the time the locals hid a Soviet defector in the basement of the house in which I resided. Or the time when a teacher friend of mine was one of five men in two skinboats lost for 21 days out at sea.

So maybe even school could have been interesting, had I been more willing to listen to the stories the buildings held.

—George Guthridge

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