I grabbed this photo from facebook -- Fran and Greg during a brief and unexpected meetup between planes at Narita. Fran being Francis X. Hezel, a Jesuit priest and scholar who has lived and worked in Micronesia since 1963, and Greg Dvorak who lectures and teaches Pacific Islands Studies at Hitotsubashi and Waseda Universities in Tokyo. Fran has published half a dozen books on Micronesia and Greg’s first book, Coral and Concrete (a history of Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands where he grew up), will be out sometime this year.

Mainstream publishers have a whole stable of more famous authors they can coerce into saying sweet nothings about a new book by an unknown author. My small publisher had no stable -- I was only the second book he published. As it was, he took a risk selecting my book whose audience is such a tiny niche: mostly family and friends, or readers interested in Micronesia as a Japanese colony before and during during WWII, and/or Pacific Islands women’s studies. Blurbers, I’m told when I google, don’t grow on trees or fall from the sky -- although these two did fall in my lap from cyberspace.

Since a large piece of MGO had been previously published in a Guam glossy and was therefore listed in the catalog of the Micronesian Seminar, I wanted that organization to have a copy of MGO for their non-circulating library. I emailed Fran Hezel, the head of MicSem at that time, for the postal address; he asked me to send the book to him instead. He and I had never met but we do have a few mutual friends. He wrote back requesting to keep that copy for his personal library, and would I send another to MicSem. An email conversation ensued and the blurb was taken from that correspondence -- with his permission.

Somehow Greg Dvorak found the book online (perhaps trolling books by subject on amazon) and wrote to me about how much MGO fit with what he was teaching, particularly gender studies related to the Micronesian Islands. Greg has made the western Pacific his life’s work. His blurb was also taken from our ensuing correspondence -- with his permission. In turn, he asked if he could copy parts of the book for hand-outs to classes. The utter dream of a lifetime: to have one’s book taught in school (even if just part of the book)!

I was so thrilled that these two eminent scholars found my narrator accessible (never mind she was a brothel worker), and they approved both the writing and the style I chose (a pillow book) as being clear and precise enough to convey that particular period in Micronesian history. My only wish, however, is that the book came with a warning label: die-hard readers of romance paperbacks no likee.