Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
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? Which was the most difficult?
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.”
Inquiring foodies
and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any
recipes I might share?)
Yes! I’m so happy for this
question. Rissois de
Camarão is a small cream and shrimp pastry
that was brought to Mozambique and Cape Verde from Portugal through colonization.
It is so delicious. My sister and I ate loads of them every single day when I was
visiting. When I moved there for the Fulbright grant, the Portuguese mother of
a friend in my group taught me how to make them. Here’s the recipe.
*****
READ MORE ABOUT
THIS AUTHOR: https://www.jamybond.com/
ORDER THIS BOOK (preorders*
are available now, and are VERY helpful to authors and small presses): https://finishinglinepress.com/product/the-island-of-ghost-ships-by-jamy-bond/
*Price discount through 7/10/26
READ AN ESSAY
INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK, “Your Broken Hands,” originally published as “Prayer for
the Living”: https://pitheadchapel.com/prayer-for-the-living/
FIND THE AUTHOR
ON SUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@jamy007
