An Interview by Jonathon LaMella
Alan Brennert was born in Englewood, New Jersey, to Herbert E. Brennert (an aviation writer who contributed to such magazines as Skyways and American Helicopter) and Almyra E. Brennert. Since 1973 he has lived in Southern California. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from California State University at Long Beach, and also did graduate work in screenwriting at UCLA. In addition to novels, he has written short stories, teleplays, screenplays, and the libretto of a stage musical, Weird Romance, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by David Spencer—produced in 1992 by the WPA Theatre in New York, it has since been licensed for regional, high school, and college productions. A cast album was released by Columbia Records in 1993.
Hi Alan, tell us about your novel Moloka’i What’s the story about?
It’s the story of a Native Hawaiian girl, Rachel Kalama, growing up in Honolulu in the 1890s, who at the age of seven is diagnosed with leprosy (Hansen’s Disease) and sent to the quarantined settlement of Kalaupapa on the island of Moloka’i. It’s her story, but also the story of Kalaupapa itself, and of the ordinary men and women who were exiled there over the course of more than a century.
How did you get started as a novelist?
I sold my first novel, a paperback thriller, when I was twenty-three. Over the next twenty years or so I wrote two more contemporary novels at the same time I was working in television and film. The unexpected success of my first historical novel, Moloka’i, has allowed me to become a full-time novelist, something I’d always dreamed of.
Why did you write Moloka’i?
The majority of books I found in my research centered on Father Damien, who was a great man who did great good for the people of Kalaupapa. But he was just one man who died of leprosy…out of thousands of other men and women who lived and died there, pretty much anonymously. But because Damien was white, and a priest, he has commanded most of the world’s attention all these years. I like to think that he’d find this as unjust as I do. I was interested in those anonymous lives, and I felt while writing the book that I was in some small way giving voice to those whose voices have been lost to time. I hope they’d approve of what I’ve done.
What do you want readers to get or learn from reading Moloka’i?
I want them to experience a little-told part of history that has been largely swept under the rug due to the stigma of leprosy.
How did you get ideas for the main characters?
Some are based on real people, others are real people, but my main characters are fictional—though everything that happens to Rachel as a Hansen’s Disease patient is something that actually happened to such patients back then. I took experiences that were common to most patients and made that the armature of Rachel’s life, then superimposed a fictional character onto that.
Have you ever been to Hawaii? If so, how was the experience? And how did you translate that research into Moloka’i?
I’ve been going to Hawai’i for thirty years—it’s my favorite place on earth. I’d been collecting books on Hawaiian history, mythology, and sociology for years, just out of personal interest, before I ever thought of writing something set there. But when the time came, my familiarity with the islands and my research library came in handy.
As a writer, who are your main influences?
I have an eclectic group of authors and books that have influenced me; taking it vaguely chronologically from my youth: Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, George Elliot’s Silas Marner, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, Robert Anderson’s play Silent Night, Lonely Night, J.G. Ballard’s short story collection Vermillion Sands, Jonathan Strong’s Ourselves, John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts, the novels of Edward Lewis Wallant (who wrote The Pawnbroker), Larry McMurtry’s The Desert Rose, and Harriet Doerr’s Consider This, Señora (which indirectly inspired me to write Moloka’i).
The common elements among the above books? An emphasis on character development and a strong sense of time and place. Which I guess has inspired the same qualities in my own work.
What is the best part about being an author?
Communicating with readers, both through your work and now, directly, via the Internet and book clubs.
And the worst?
Communicating with readers with borderline personality disorders, of which I’ve encountered a few.
What books have you recently read and loved?
I don’t have much time for recreational reading while I’m working on a book—the last one was Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney by Marion Meade, whose work I love (she also wrote a fine biography of Dorothy Parker and a terrific book about Jazz Age women writers, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties).
What can your readers expect next from you? What do you have planned for the future?
I’ve just finished a new novel, Palisades Park, which—although there is one chapter set in Hawai’i during World War II—takes pace largely in my native state of New Jersey. It’s about a quirky family of dreamers who own a food concession at the legendary Palisades Amusement Park (subject of the Freddy Cannon song from 1962) and the story follows them from the Great Depression through World War II and the Korean War, up till the park’s closing in 1971. It’s a love letter to a place that I loved as a child, as well as the story of a little girl who grows up dreaming big dreams.
Are you on Twitter or Facebook? Do you have a website? Is there more info about Moloka’i?
My website is www.alanbrennert.com and I am on Facebook, under my own name. There’s also a Facebook page devoted to Moloka’i that my publisher administers, and I drop by it occasionally. I do not tweet. You have to draw the line somewhere
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