This past spring, The Seattle Times ran a review of Barbara Sjoholm”s new book The Pirate Queen:  In Search of Grace O”Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea.  The review opens:

If Janet Forsyth lived in the here and now, instead of 17th-century Scotland, she would be on the front page across the country. As it was, she ended up on trial.

The rare seafaring woman, Forsyth single handedly sailed out in a small boat and rescued a large ship trapped in a gale and bound to run aground. While her neighbors looked on — and perhaps hoped to share in the spoils of salvage —  Forsyth took the helm and brought the ship into safe harbor.

For her efforts, she was arrested, tried as a witch and sentenced to hang.

Because of her own love of the sea and Irish-Swedish heritage, author Barbara Sjoholm wanted to lift historical women seafarers from obscurity.  She adventured on the North Atlantic to find and tells the stories of these women, both real and mythical, whose histories have been all but lost in recent times.  Researching, she traveled the coasts of Ireland, Scotland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Norway and indulged her love of travel, writing, and the sea.

The book”s title character Grace O”Malley was the daughter of a 16th century Irish seafaring family.  After O”Malley”s father died, she created a force of 200 men and extracted taxes and cargo from French, Portuguese and Spanish ships. Known as a tough fighter, she may have given birth to her fourth child at sea and then the very next day fought off marauding Algerian corsairs.

In recounting the stories she found about early seafaring women, Barbara Sjoholm tells the story of her research journey and allows us to see the landscape she is visiting and in which her imagination is immersed.  On Clare Island off the coast of Ireland, the author stays in a converted lighthouse. She reports:

I leaned forward into the refreshing wind (the time when I”d be heartily sick of constant Atlantic blows was still before me).  The captain of a ship passing off this rocky coat would hardly guess that on the other side of the island lay a pirates” lair, the harbor sheltering Grace O”Malley”s growing collection of vessels:  the wooden, clinker-built Gaelic galleys, with thirty oars, a single mast, and a lateen sail, whose shallow draughts, like those of the Viking longships, helped with maneuvering around Clew Bay”s reefs and shoals, Stolen Mediterranean caravels and “baggage boats,” the yawls and longboats that carried fish, cattle, goods and the spoils of plunder lay there as well. Those sailing offshore would never imagine that a widow and mother of thee had put aside domestic duties for a second chance to relieve her childhood dreams of seafaring and swashbuckling.

 At dinner, when an American diner asks her what she is doing there, how long she will be gone, what she does in America, and what point she wants to make, Barbara Sjoholm reflects:

I had some leads, some hunches, and boundless curiosity.  Where was the fun in knowing what I would find before I set off? Did I dare mention fun?  Or passion for the subject?  I wasn”t so naïve as to expect to discover that women had actually been the majority of seafarers. I”d be happy if I found a few more than Grace O”Malley.  In fact, I was happy with what I”d been finding out about Grace O”Malley in the last two days.

She remembers her own childhood at a Southern California beach with her mother and brother.  Her mother would stand:

On the shore, up to her ankles, complaining that the water was freezing and she just couldn”t understand how the Pacific could be so cold when it was ninety-five degrees in the shade, for goodness sake.  She splashed her arms and legs, but not her face or hair, and returned to towel and book, with the firm injunction to me to watch my little brother, and for neither of us to go in too deep or too far.

But deep and far was just where I”d longed to go.

The day I first saw a copy of The Pirate Queen, Barbara Sjoholm and I had taken a walk along the shoreline of the Straits of Juan De Fuca and talked about our history as Seattle city dwellers and our fondness for living by the water.  As we walked the beach, we listened to a seal barking and watched tourists gathered around a pup.  Mother seals beach their pups in spring while they go off and find food.  Everyone is instructed not to touch the baby seals and certainly not to replace them in the water.  The mother seals know where they left their pups and will be back with nourishment.

Having read and loved Barbara”s memoir, Blue Windows, about growing up in Southern California the daughter of a Christian Scientist mother who died early, I believed as I held my copy of The Pirate Queen that the author”s new adventures would yield excitement and opportunity for self-growth.

Toward the end of the book comes the story of Thuridur Einarsdottir, an Icelandic fisher woman born in 1777 whose fishing and skipper career lasted fifty years.  Once as witness to a robbery, she was called to testify before a judge.  She was wearing pants and a shirt under traditional outerwear made of water-repellent sealskin.  It was illegal for a woman to wear men”s clothing, but she didn”t have time to change.  She apologized to the judge, who said he knew she went about in men”s clothes and that she needed a permit.  He online casino canada would give it to her if she gave him a clue as to who the robber was.

In Iceland, Barbara tells a friend about the urge, or more fittingly the call, she feels to change her name.  “Wilson”s not right now…I don”t feel connected with it anymore.” The desire for a new name and finding it are part of what makes this book”s journey satisfying. The author”s story as well as the stories she brings to best online casino her readers are both a going “deep and far” and a bounty brought back.

Here is the transcript of an email conversation I had with Barbara Sjoholm after our walk:

Sheila
I”d love to learn more about the way you came upon the idea for writing The Pirate Queen and the directions this new book indicates for your writing.

Barbara
I have always been a traveler and have been impelled to leave home from time to time out of restlessness and curiosity, as well as for my past work in editing and publishing translations. I went to Barcelona, Venice and the Carpathians in Romania specifically to write about those places for a mystery series that featured the translator sleuth Cassandra Reilly. My early mysteries were action-oriented and satiric, as well as tackling issues of social justice and issues within the women”s community. Later on I wrote mysteries that were international in scope, and more playful and less bloody (Gaudi Afternoon, set in Barcelona, was made into a comic film with Judy Davis). But I”ve always had a more serious, even scholarly side, and while I think I”ve kept my sense of humor, these days following my intellectual curiosity is more interesting to me than posing political questions or offering solutions. About six or seven years ago I became interested in travel writing for its own sake, and especially with the notion of intentional travel, or travel as a way of exploring history and deepening the meaning of place for oneself.

I was staying in a stone cottage at the tip of Cape Cornwall in England and happened to read a book about women pirates. My imagination was stirred by the story of the sixteenth century Irish pirate and sea captain Grace O”Malley. I often sat down by the water”s edge and listened to the Atlantic surf crashing into the rocks, and I realized that I knew almost no stories of seafaring women, even though maritime literature and culture was so pervasive in the British Isles and Scandinavia. Right there and then I conceived the plan of voyaging around the North Atlantic and collecting material for a combination travel-history book of lost and forgotten stories of women and the sea. That was in September. The following May I set off for four months, starting in Ireland and going to Scotland, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Faroes, Iceland and Norway.

It was a big vision, and it had to be, to sustain me through the next few years of research. But it taught me much about traveling from a sense of quest and with questions in mind. It also brought me to many out of the way places that few tourists visit, and put me in contact with some remarkable people. It was a physical and emotional adventure as well, one that ended with getting in touch with my own seafaring self, and with the decision to change my last name.

I”ve found that I enjoy layering facts, especially unusual ones, into descriptions of place. I also am drawn to telling stories that are less about plot than about understanding or revelation. I”ve done a certain amount of travel journalism the last couple of years and while I don”t enjoy it as much as the more leisurely and atmospheric essay form, journalism has taught me some useful things about being edited for length and clarity and about getting my points across concisely.

The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O”Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, which is out now from Seal Press is only my second book of non-fiction. The first was a memoir, Blue Windows, about growing up in a Christian Science family. However, I”ve been intrigued by the personal essay and exploratory travel writing for some time, and now am very much focused on literary non-fiction as opposed to the fiction that I used to write exclusively.

My approach to writing now is to let ideas gestate for a good long while and to follow curious byways into new territory. In the last year or so I”ve written about the letters that people send to Santa”s Post Office in Finland (Smithsonian, December 2003) and about the Renaissance bishop Olaus Magnus, who wrote the first semi-factual description of the Far North while he was in exile in Rome (Antioch Review, Spring, 2004). I also just finished an essay about Frank Butler, a British Victorian wine merchant and balloonist who ended up making a trip above the Arctic Circle in 1914, and who wrote about it in Through Lapland By Ski and Reindeer.

Sheila
I know that you work with writers on fiction and nonfiction.  How do you use your experience as a fiction writer, nonfiction writer, journalist and memoirist to guide your students and clients?

Barbara
I understand how it feels to be critiqued and to try to absorb an editor”s cooler but hopefully helpful perspective. I attempt always to give feedback with clarity and respect for the writer”s style and process. Because of having edited dozens of books and having read hundreds of manuscripts when I was an editor at Seal Press, I have a strong sense of what publishers look for, and what grabs acquiring editors. Yet I am not overly focused on the commercial aspects of what I edit either, and never try to push authors in directions not natural for them. Much of my focus as a freelance editor is developmental and “big picture” editing. I tend to look first at the overall tone and structure of a work and offer constructive ideas on how to make the narrative flow more smoothly and coherently or how to knit disparate pieces together. I might be dealing with issues of plot and character in fiction, or ways of telling the story in memoir, but my approach is usually to first describe general problems before I get down to issues of style such as too much dialog, too much or too little explaining, and word choice.

Sheila
Are there some particular writing problems you come across frequently in the works-in-progress you read?

Barbara
There are two problems I come across quite often. One comes from writers trying to cram too much detail into a work. Memoir writers often find it hard to give up favorite stories, for instance, even though they can take us away from the main theme. Fiction writers can fall in love with certain characters and, again, that can take us away from the main tale. I don”t have anything against ambitious narratives, mind you, and I admire writers who prefer a large canvas; however, especially for apprentice writers, it can be better to choose a simpler format or narrower subject. Some parts of a novel or memoir, for instance, can be turned into separate stories or essays, so that the main arc of the narrative can proceed more effectively.

Another problem I see is the opposite: too many fragments that don”t cohere into a manuscript. This sometimes is the result when writers amass a number of timed writings from groups or classes, and attempt to jigsaw them together into a larger narrative. Sometimes this can work well, and sometimes these two and three page pieces can”t really fit together because their rhythm and tone are so different from each other. It”s the hardest thing in the world to get writers to give up beautiful writing; however, I usually suggest that the writer put aside all the bits and pieces and start fresh, so as to keep the tone of a longer work fresh and consistent. Then, after that is finished, is the time to return to the short pieces and pull out some great lines or images, and see if there”s a place for them. Often those images or stories will have worked their way into the longer work subconsciously anyway, but in slightly different language.

Sheila
If you were to teach a class on “intentional travel” for writers as a way of deepening the meaning of place, what would you cover?

Barbara
I have taught—twice—a class at Hugo House in Seattle called “Constructing the Journey.” We”ve looked at many ways to deepen the experience of travel and writing about travel:  by recalling hardships and epiphanies, and using some elements of the classic quest tales—expectations before setting off, a meeting with a guide, and the return. It”s a class that always seems to draw forth a lot of unexpected memories and details of travel, and also gives us a chance to reflect on the underlying meaning of those journeys.

*****

About journeys by ship, Barbara Sjoholm writes, “The ship hooted when we arrived and when we left, and in those blasts from the horn was everything I understood about departures and arrivals, about beginnings and farewells.”

Reading Barbara Sjoholm”s The Pirate Queen:  In Search of Grace O”Malley, we get a rich sense of how personal expectations, obsessions and memories create opportunities for self-reflection, self-growth, and opening to new adventures, all while journeying outward in the worlds of our choosing.  Like the author, we might smile remembering a departure:  “”Goodbye, goodbye,” I remember calling to my mother.  “Goodbye, goodbye,” my mother had called to me. “Don”t forget to write.””