NBC, CNN, Yahoo News, and Vice News. He was a 2010 Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University and a 2012 Dart Fellow in Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University. For a decade he lived and taught in Hong Kong as an associate professor of practice in journalism at the University of Hong Kong. He’s the author of three books on war, In the Hot Zone, The Things They Cannot Say, and Swimming with Warlords. He lives in Oregon.
Sites applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Ocean Above Me, and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Kevin Sites's website.Ortiz: It’s hard to explain. This ship brought many like me and my family to a new life here. But after a few months, toward the end of the boatlift, that changed. Fidel saw a chance to poke America in the eye. Can’t really blame him, they’d tried to kill him for years. He opened up—What the reader sees on page 69 of my novel can be puzzling without context.
Landon: The jails and mental institutions.
Ortiz, nodding: Pushed the undesirables out. It wasn’t just ordinary Cubans anymore, those with “questionable” loyalties. It was criminals, troublemakers, the feebleminded. Bustamante and some of the others who had embraced the exodus early on began to see what was happening.
After a few months and a couple of bad trips—boatloads filled with predators and prey, reports of rapes and murders taking place on the ships and other boats capsizing because of overcrowding— he pulled Philomena out of the people-ferrying business and went back to work fishing.
But it was rumored never to be as profitable as it once had been, before Mariel. Bustamante sold the ship in ’85. Some claimed Miami was never the same after the boatlift either. Crime and chaos unleashed.
Landon: The damage was already done.
Ortiz: Worse—it was just beginning. But it wasn’t just the exodus causing all the problems, it was the influx of drugs too. Coke. But many of the new refugee families were victims as well. We’d simply traded one set of oppressors for another. Snitches for psychopaths.
Landon: Okay, but I don’t understand. You got through those tough times, made a life and career for yourself there. Why move to Port Royal from Miami at this stage?
Captain Esteban said with your chops on diesel engines and all the thousands of mate hours you’ve logged, you had your pick of boats down there. Could’ve captained one of your own if you’d wanted.
Ortiz nods.
Landon: So why give all that up to come here? Oh, and why a Seventh-Day Adventist making a career on shrimping boats? Can we get back to that?
It’s a transcript of a newspaper interview between embedded journalist Lukas Landon and Lorenzo Ortiz, engineer/first mate of the shrimp boat Philomena.
Ortiz was reluctant to have a journalist on board the ship. Felt it would only add to their mounting troubles. But Landon had been persistent and seemed earnest in wanting to know their stories.
And Ortiz’s story is one of the most interesting. The Philomena where he is now the first mate, was the same ship that first brought him to the U.S. from Cuba during the Mariel boatlift when he was a child.
Ortiz sees this voyage like bookends for his life with the Philomena at either end. He’s trying to explain to Landon that there’s more than nostalgia to his story. He feels a responsibility to the ship, to cleanse it of some of the bad ghosts from the past with a new and honorable purpose.
For readers at this early point in the book it also reveals the kind of relationship Landon is attempting to establish with the crew. One of confidence and trust.
But the full extent of this exchange indicates that it’s a one-way street. Landon skillfully extracts information, but provides little of his own. It’s transactional to him and built into the profession.
Perhaps the reason he chose journalism in the first place.
My Book, The Movie: The Ocean Above Me.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
