Erica Ferencik's Blog - Posts Tagged "jungle"
Q & A: Into the Jungle
Q&A with Erica Ferencik about her new novel, INTO THE JUNGLE
1) What is the book about?
Into the Jungle is a thriller about a young woman who falls in love with a Bolivian man and follows him to his remote jungle village in the Amazon rain forest where she must call on all her wits and resilience to survive. It’s also about the decimation of the rainforest by poachers and land-hungry corporations, and the desperate situation of indigenous tribes who are being driven to extinction.
As my friend Jude Roth put it: “It's a journey not just into a jungle, but into our wildest journeys to find ‘home.’"
2) Why did you pick this story?
For me, finding a story worth telling is like falling in love. All the gears in my head and heart go click-click-click, and I know I’m doomed to do nothing else but live inside this idea for the foreseeable future.
That’s what happened when my friend Pamela Rickenbach told me the story of her time in the Bolivian Amazon. A troubled foster kid, she made her way at age sixteen to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where she fell for a local man, married him, and followed him to his ancestral home, the remotest in a series of remote river villages in the Amazon rainforest. No roads, no electricity, no running water. Just a crescent of land carved out of wild jungle where pit vipers snapped and hissed in the manioc gardens, electric eels as long as limousines coiled in the river, and jaguars slinked in the shadows.
She didn’t return to America until she was twenty-six years old.
3) What elements of your own life do you share with the protagonist and narrator, Lily?
I relate to her “lost-ness” as a young woman. I didn’t have it as bad as she did, but I left home at sixteen, traveling aimlessly around Europe for a couple of years, at times getting into some really dangerous situations via my own youthfulness and naivete. I know that I was looking for a home, because my “home of origin” never felt like one, and it was one I couldn’t wait to leave. It just turned out to be harder than I thought to find a place where I felt at peace, where I felt loved, where I had a community. I’m still working on that, as perhaps many of us are.
4) What research did you do for the book?
I read every book and watched every movie I could get my hands on and conducted countless interviews. I also took a month-long trip to the Peruvian Amazon. I stayed at Amazonia Expeditions, a lodge about a six hour boat trip and a hundred miles deep into the Amazon from Iquitos, Peru, a landlocked village surrounded by swampland. I had my own guide, a young man who had grown up in a small river town nearby and who had begun hunting at age nine. I had a mind-blowing time. I went on three trips a day: morning, afternoon and night; hikes through the jungle or canoe trips through the floating forest.
5) How did you manage your fear about this trip?
I’m only somewhat braver than the average person. Beyond that, I just make sure I always have an escape route, a plan B and usually a Plan C. This was the case when I interviewed off-the-gridders in the Allagash wilderness of Northern Maine for my first novel, The River at Night.
In the jungle, I found myself living each moment – even the time spent in my room - at a heightened state of awareness. In the woods of the Northeast where I live, I feel pretty comfortable on a hike – I know what precautions to take. Except for getting lost, ticks, and mosquitos, I’m pretty blissed out and confident. In the jungle you can’t let yourself go like that – there the rules are very different. Multiply any anxiety you might have about walking through the woods behind your house by a hundred, and you have a trek through the jungle. You are walking food for countless predators: insects, snakes – even the plants wouldn’t mind slicing off a piece of flesh with their spines. Everything is either hunting or hiding or both.
It was the nighttime canoe trips through the floating forest – chocolate-colored water up to the waists of tress - that were the most terrifying for me. I tried to buck up and say yes to everything – Come on, don’t hide in your room – where it isn’t safe anyway and - when will I ever be here again? My patient and knowledgeable guide asked me each evening, so what is it tonight? The river or the forest? To my credit I only bagged the night trip once; I huddled in the lodge happily drinking lukewarm beers and listening to the crazy chorus of frogs and insects outside. But the next night and every other night I couldn’t say no.
With only headlamps for illumination, we made our way in a dugout canoe along narrow tributaries. We were moving through 360 degrees of danger: above us poisonous snakes lounged in huge tangled tree limbs; below us, the thick brown water hid countless perils. One night we watched as an electric eel, disturbed by our boat, leapt from the water. Six feet long, thick as truck tire, it twisted in the air before splashing down in the brown soup. These creatures pack enough electricity to stun a horse. Moments later, the shadow of a seven-foot long pirarucu, the largest freshwater fish in the world, passed under our canoe.
Even with all these adventures, the longer I spent with my calm, yet alert guide, the more I became at peace with my fears about this place. After all, millions of people call this place their home, live in harmony in their surroundings, and love it for what it is.
6) What was the hardest part about writing this story?
Trying to tamp down my fascination with the jungle/rainforest and focus on the story I was trying to tell. To make matters worse, initially I felt quite sure about the story I wanted to tell, until I realized - after writing a 100k word first draft - that the real story was still buried in LOTS of entertaining scenes that just didn’t gel. Two more grueling to-the-studs rewrites and things got a lot better.
I was also dealing with the fact that in the jungle, the adage truth is stranger than fiction is never more apt. I had to make what was true believable. For example: yes, certain indigenous people can call wild eagles out of the sky; yes, there are plants that grow only in the Amazon that can cure all sorts of terrible diseases; and yes, there really are thirty-foot anacondas, dinner-plate sized spiders, and caterpillars – with a flex of their muscles – that can mimic the head of a pit viper, thus discouraging predators to attack.
7) Who is your favorite character and why?
I love them all, and feel empathy for them all, because they’re all little lost pieces of me, let’s face it: who I’ve been, who I’ll be, who I’d like to be, who I’m afraid I’m a little bit like. If I had to choose it would be For God’s Sake, because he’s so charming and conflicted and actually pretty sweet and honest.
8) What was the easiest part about writing this story?
There was nothing easy about writing this story. The most seductive part was falling madly in love with research – all I wanted to do was read about the Amazon’s tortured history, the amazing animals and plants – I had to keep reminding myself that I had to come up with my own story, and focus on that! Once I really did that, I was better able to focus my research.
9) What was the most fun part about writing this book?
Probably when – on rewrite number three – the story started to make an appearance and I felt like, finally, I knew what I was doing.
Into the Jungle
1) What is the book about?
Into the Jungle is a thriller about a young woman who falls in love with a Bolivian man and follows him to his remote jungle village in the Amazon rain forest where she must call on all her wits and resilience to survive. It’s also about the decimation of the rainforest by poachers and land-hungry corporations, and the desperate situation of indigenous tribes who are being driven to extinction.
As my friend Jude Roth put it: “It's a journey not just into a jungle, but into our wildest journeys to find ‘home.’"
2) Why did you pick this story?
For me, finding a story worth telling is like falling in love. All the gears in my head and heart go click-click-click, and I know I’m doomed to do nothing else but live inside this idea for the foreseeable future.
That’s what happened when my friend Pamela Rickenbach told me the story of her time in the Bolivian Amazon. A troubled foster kid, she made her way at age sixteen to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where she fell for a local man, married him, and followed him to his ancestral home, the remotest in a series of remote river villages in the Amazon rainforest. No roads, no electricity, no running water. Just a crescent of land carved out of wild jungle where pit vipers snapped and hissed in the manioc gardens, electric eels as long as limousines coiled in the river, and jaguars slinked in the shadows.
She didn’t return to America until she was twenty-six years old.
3) What elements of your own life do you share with the protagonist and narrator, Lily?
I relate to her “lost-ness” as a young woman. I didn’t have it as bad as she did, but I left home at sixteen, traveling aimlessly around Europe for a couple of years, at times getting into some really dangerous situations via my own youthfulness and naivete. I know that I was looking for a home, because my “home of origin” never felt like one, and it was one I couldn’t wait to leave. It just turned out to be harder than I thought to find a place where I felt at peace, where I felt loved, where I had a community. I’m still working on that, as perhaps many of us are.
4) What research did you do for the book?
I read every book and watched every movie I could get my hands on and conducted countless interviews. I also took a month-long trip to the Peruvian Amazon. I stayed at Amazonia Expeditions, a lodge about a six hour boat trip and a hundred miles deep into the Amazon from Iquitos, Peru, a landlocked village surrounded by swampland. I had my own guide, a young man who had grown up in a small river town nearby and who had begun hunting at age nine. I had a mind-blowing time. I went on three trips a day: morning, afternoon and night; hikes through the jungle or canoe trips through the floating forest.
5) How did you manage your fear about this trip?
I’m only somewhat braver than the average person. Beyond that, I just make sure I always have an escape route, a plan B and usually a Plan C. This was the case when I interviewed off-the-gridders in the Allagash wilderness of Northern Maine for my first novel, The River at Night.
In the jungle, I found myself living each moment – even the time spent in my room - at a heightened state of awareness. In the woods of the Northeast where I live, I feel pretty comfortable on a hike – I know what precautions to take. Except for getting lost, ticks, and mosquitos, I’m pretty blissed out and confident. In the jungle you can’t let yourself go like that – there the rules are very different. Multiply any anxiety you might have about walking through the woods behind your house by a hundred, and you have a trek through the jungle. You are walking food for countless predators: insects, snakes – even the plants wouldn’t mind slicing off a piece of flesh with their spines. Everything is either hunting or hiding or both.
It was the nighttime canoe trips through the floating forest – chocolate-colored water up to the waists of tress - that were the most terrifying for me. I tried to buck up and say yes to everything – Come on, don’t hide in your room – where it isn’t safe anyway and - when will I ever be here again? My patient and knowledgeable guide asked me each evening, so what is it tonight? The river or the forest? To my credit I only bagged the night trip once; I huddled in the lodge happily drinking lukewarm beers and listening to the crazy chorus of frogs and insects outside. But the next night and every other night I couldn’t say no.
With only headlamps for illumination, we made our way in a dugout canoe along narrow tributaries. We were moving through 360 degrees of danger: above us poisonous snakes lounged in huge tangled tree limbs; below us, the thick brown water hid countless perils. One night we watched as an electric eel, disturbed by our boat, leapt from the water. Six feet long, thick as truck tire, it twisted in the air before splashing down in the brown soup. These creatures pack enough electricity to stun a horse. Moments later, the shadow of a seven-foot long pirarucu, the largest freshwater fish in the world, passed under our canoe.
Even with all these adventures, the longer I spent with my calm, yet alert guide, the more I became at peace with my fears about this place. After all, millions of people call this place their home, live in harmony in their surroundings, and love it for what it is.
6) What was the hardest part about writing this story?
Trying to tamp down my fascination with the jungle/rainforest and focus on the story I was trying to tell. To make matters worse, initially I felt quite sure about the story I wanted to tell, until I realized - after writing a 100k word first draft - that the real story was still buried in LOTS of entertaining scenes that just didn’t gel. Two more grueling to-the-studs rewrites and things got a lot better.
I was also dealing with the fact that in the jungle, the adage truth is stranger than fiction is never more apt. I had to make what was true believable. For example: yes, certain indigenous people can call wild eagles out of the sky; yes, there are plants that grow only in the Amazon that can cure all sorts of terrible diseases; and yes, there really are thirty-foot anacondas, dinner-plate sized spiders, and caterpillars – with a flex of their muscles – that can mimic the head of a pit viper, thus discouraging predators to attack.
7) Who is your favorite character and why?
I love them all, and feel empathy for them all, because they’re all little lost pieces of me, let’s face it: who I’ve been, who I’ll be, who I’d like to be, who I’m afraid I’m a little bit like. If I had to choose it would be For God’s Sake, because he’s so charming and conflicted and actually pretty sweet and honest.
8) What was the easiest part about writing this story?
There was nothing easy about writing this story. The most seductive part was falling madly in love with research – all I wanted to do was read about the Amazon’s tortured history, the amazing animals and plants – I had to keep reminding myself that I had to come up with my own story, and focus on that! Once I really did that, I was better able to focus my research.
9) What was the most fun part about writing this book?
Probably when – on rewrite number three – the story started to make an appearance and I felt like, finally, I knew what I was doing.
Into the Jungle
