Peter Whitmer’s Navassa Island Murderersis a now finalist in Media Predict’s Project Publish contest with Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. We checked in with Peter for a quick e-mail interview.

Navassa describes some fascinating events. Tell us the story of what you’ve gone through to try to get your book into print.

Trying to get The Navassa Island Murderers into print has proved an odyssey.  The story came to me; I did not seek it out; at times I feel as if I am merely a conduit.  It just appeared:  Vivid; graphic; appalling; human; real, and timeless, after one very long day in Lamont Library, my head stuck in a microfilm machine, reading old newspaper accounts of the riot, something I stumbled over on the Net. 

Fleshing-out the story, I came away amazed at the complex scope of it – a human saga of the world teetering on the cusp of immense change – change in industry, technology, warfare, and territorial imperative. 

I spoke with Tom Robbins, a good friend familiar with the story line.  He said, “Take six months – do the Screenplay; take six years – do the book.  But do it.” 

I usually have real trouble writing without a Contract.  The Screenplay emerged with a Herculean force of its own.  It has been done for quite a while.  Puff Daddy – that’s right – came an inch from optioning it. 

Immediately, I rode that beast of inner motivation, and charged onward with the non-fiction book.  As a ‘Period Piece’ it proved a tough sell.  And yet it holds universal themes, some of which were, when I first began, politically incorrect.  The tectonic plates of world politics have shifted.  Issues of Presidential Powers, Terrorism litigation, individual rights, treatment of detainees, and definitions of American jurisdiction have, recently, been full frontal and in heated debate:  This is what Navassa is all about.

Consequently, I continued quietly to research this Moby Dick of a tale, adding to both the Screenplay and the book – on my own, never showing anything to anyone.  Then, I read a line or two about Simon & Schuster, and MediaPredict.com, embedded in the New York Times mini-section on ‘Publishing.’  I sprinted for my phone, called my Agent, and the rest, as they say, is histrionics.  

Your book describes a amazing sliver of history – almost unreal. And yet most people have never heard of it. How did you first get interested in this subject?

Navassa is an amazing and under-the-horizon-of-history saga.  It came to me in an odd manner.  I live part of the year on a small Caribbean island, Montserrat, known best for its volcano, ands Sir George Martin’s recording studio.  On nautical charts, two hundred miles over my western horizon view, are the Aves Islands – owned by Venezuela.  This made little sense; Googling, up popped a site titled “…American Islands In The Caribbean You’d Never Expect.”  Navassa was one.  It was described as a ‘Guano Island’ and of outrageous geopolitical value, in the middle of the Windward Passage, controlling ‘snooping’ on the Panama Canal, Cuba, Hayti, Jamaica, Venezuela, and Columbia.  Like listening-in on the world’s ultimate ‘party line.’  And yet, no ‘regular’ U.S. citizen is allowed to step foot on it.  Why?

Years before, I had lived, doing research, on Anguilla, and knew of guano mining on nearby Anegada Island, so when it turned out that Navassa was used to mine guano, it sort of made sense.  The web site mentioned a ‘bloody riot’ in 1889.

Digging in to old newspapers and documents, the story became human, especially when it was reported – in news papers around the world – as a “Black David v White Goliath” story; one-hundred-thirty-seven Black workers rioting with stones against shotgun-firing white management, a huge murder trial in Baltimore, and three hanging sentences.  Oddly, one of the workers was a deaf-mute; he was processed by a legendary, history making State Department official, also a deaf-mute.

Going into the dusty bowels of government Archives, links in the chain fell into place, creating an epic in untold American History and Civil Rights.  The story revolves intimately around the difficulties of getting Frederick Douglas, the U.S. Minister to Hayti, to Port au Prince – just at the time of the Navassa riot.  The U.S. Navy Captain, Augustus Kellogg, charged with transporting Douglas, refused – on racial grounds – and ended up as a political prisoner in St. Elizabeth’s, “ Government Hospital For The Insane,” for twelve years.  In a totally unexpected twist, one of the men sentenced in the Navassa trial, a schoolmate and neighbor of W.E.B. DuBois, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, ended up as a fellow patient with Cpt. Kellogg, in St. Elizabeth’s.  I found all of their records.

The appointment of Douglas was, among other things, to mollify Hayti as regards the U.S. claim to Navassa, thirty miles off their shore, and long claimed by them.  Another link was a pre-Civil War flyer, part of a Slave Relocation to Hayti program [that President Lincoln actually reviewed and thought workable].  It was used – years later –  by the Baltimore guano company to dupe illiterate Blacks into going south.  But they only got as far as Navassa.  The brains behind what is called The Black Palm flyer [a copy is in the Library of Congress], promising free land, freedom of religion, etc., was F.E. DuBois, friend of Frederick Douglas, and cousin of W.E.B. DuBois, co-founder of the NAACP, author of the classic, The Souls of Black Men, who died on the eve of the August 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I have a Dream: speech.  For me, this linkage brought the story up to date.

The U.S. Supreme Court Precedent set by the Navassa trial was, I found, used as an anti-terrorist tool, starting with the Pan Am Lokerbie explosion, and is now a ‘Point’ in the Patriot Act, and the legal platform for Presidential Powers issues.  The entire precedent is constructed on a house of cards.  The Act creating Guano Islands was never signed by the President – a Pocket Veto – and none of the mining leases were ever paid for.  Years later, most of the “Guano Islands” were given back to the countries of origin, as the U.S. could not substantiate their claim of sovereignty.

In sum, with this – and much more in hand, could anyone not get interested!   

You have a PhD in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley. Do you find yourself using your psychology background when writing?

The use of my training as a Clinical Psychologist came full bore with my psychological biography of Elvis, The Inner Elvis.  It involves the ultimate Trauma of PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder], wherein a twin loses their sibling at or very near birth.  Instead of an existing personality getting whacked by a trauma, in these cases, the personality develops around the trauma.  A ‘blue-print’ for life is handed them.  Philip K. Dick, Diego Rivera, Thornton Wilder, and Liberace [with whom Elvis carried on a twelve-year-long conversation about this] were other ‘twinless twins,’ all sharing hallmark symptoms – ultimate ‘survivor guilt,’ driven to prove their uniqueness, then realizing a carbon copy of themselves had disappeared at birth.  Back and forth – for life.

But back to the beginning:  since a child, I have been fascinated with biography.  In college, no Ph.D.s in Biography were [then] offered; Clinical Psychology was the closest to it.  Besides, I can always revert to a ‘day job.’

I always use this training to look for motives in individuals’ behaviors.  I think it adds a unique human dimension to my work; some reviewers picked-up on this in my biography of Hunter S. Thompson, When The Going Gets Weird; I had used psychometric tests, completed by people who had grown up with Hunter, to better focus my interviews. 

We notice you’re the master of typeface: bold, italics, whatever. It certainly keeps people engaged. Did you always write that way?

My use of odd, and hopefully interesting fonts, typeface, etc., stems from the fact that for the first two years in college, I was an Art major.  In high school, I had been profoundly interested and impacted by the Surrealists and the Dadaists.  Their element of surprise; their mastery of combining the unthinkable with the unbelievable and make it come out as credible; their ‘street guerilla’ ability to shock, to jolt the mind, to offer something previously unthinkable, perhaps bordering on inappropriate.  All this was wonderful for me, especially at Berkeley during those four [plus] years of anarchy and change.

In the more full text of The Navassa Island Murderers, I have imported images of individual characters, maps, newspaper headlines, diary entries, hologaphic letters, Presidential Decrees, ‘classified’ State Department documents, and FOIA search returns.  I even included the original holographic telegram [wafer-thin, fragile as a butterfly, found in a shrink-wrapped, never opened packet in the National Archives], sent to the U.S. Consul in Kingston, Jamaica.  It misspelled the place of the riot as “Havanna” instead of “Navassa:”  An error a breath away from starting the Spanish-American War a decade early.

The concept of my doing this is to infuse the reader with the smells, the touch, every sensory function of the story – almost a Montessori approach – to make it – and keep it – alive with a pounding heart-beat, engaging if not enthralling.

What do you think needs to happen to improve the book business? Are the best books making it before audiences?

Thoughts on “improving the book business” have to start with “improving the culture business.”  It is all about kids, and kids’ literacy, and kids’ motivation to possess literacy, not as a requirement, but as an enjoyable obligation from themselves to themselves.   It may take some time, yet perhaps not.

The concept of “reading is cool” cannot, in current American culture, come as any sort of mandate from the older generation.  It must come from an avatar, from the future, to be perceived by ‘youth’ as new and mysterious and unpredictably exciting, something anticipated with hearty eagerness, talked about with their friends, like the next sequel to Harry Potter. 

Hollywood has to create a  Super Hero who, every Saturday morning on TV, solves world problems, saves Pauline from her Perils, all because of things she has gleaned, reading real books. 

For example, the Super Hero saves a drowning person because she had read about ‘buddy-breathing’ in Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.  Or, to better understand an inter-racial issue, the Super Hero draws on what she has read in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Alan Payton’s Cry! The Beloved Country.

I think Oprah’s book club makes some impact.   And all the Oprah’s of the Media shoulder a heavy weight of cultural evolutionary responsibility, to emulate her having pushed-open that creaky old door of American slothfulness and ennui, helping to make the written word an integral part of one’s life.  While the medium is the message, the Media must spawn the new message: Books Are Cool.

Of course, I’m a dreamer, but to paraphrase Freud, “To live within a dream is psychotic; to live without a dream is just plain foolish.”

Are you surprised to be on Media Predict? We doubt six months ago you were planning to be a heavy-weight on “a fantasy-money prediction market for media content.” What made you decide to get on board?

“Surprise” at being on MediaPredict is not the right word:  Until I read that tiny article in the New York Times, and immediately phoned my Agent, I never knew such a ‘thing’ existed! 

However, I am imminently pleased to be part of MediaPredict.  I know that my own interests and writings are shared by a sizeable, yet poorly galvanized and widely scattered public.  Consequently, the most effective engine to deliver my thoughts and style and content, is a properly harnessed e-algorithm, such that this diaspora can sample what might come.