Santa Cruz Sentinel Interview with Lisa Jensen

An interview with

Lisa Jensen
author of The Witch from the Sea

reposted from the Santa Cruz Sentinel

A Novel Good Time for a Local Writer

by Chris Watson "Bookends"

Santa Cruz Sentinel, Sunday, September 16, 2001

You’ve seen her movie reviews in Good Times for more than a quarter century. You might even have seen her face on local TV in the same capacity. Recently, she’s even been spotted painting murals downtown with husband Jim Aschbacher.

She’s Lisa Jensen–a cultural pillar of the Santa Cruz community. But 26 years is a long time to do the same thing week in and week out. After a while, even stalwarts like Jensen get a hankering for something new.

Which is where her novel, The Witch from the Sea, comes in.

On Thursday [September 20, 2001] at Bookshop Santa Cruz, Jensen will read from this first novel of a projected trilogy.

It’s a story, she explained, that was brewing for a long time.

"I’ve always loved seafaring adventures like the books by Patrick O’Brian and Alexander Kent," Jensen said. "And when I was younger, I loved pirate movies like "Captain Blood" and "The Seahawk" with Errol Flynn.

"Then after a long time reviewing historical fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle, I finally said to myself, ‘I can do that.’"

So she did.

Jensen’s tale differs from others in the genre in one major regard: Jensen’s lead character is a woman–Tory Lightfoot–who flees her Boston boarding school in 1823 as a stowaway aboard a merchant ship.

Another distinguishing mark about the character: She’s half native American.

"I thought it would be fun to have a woman in the lead role who wasn’t noble-born," Jensen explained. "Outlaw captains and women in skirts are such a cliché, and I just couldn’t see myself as that woman."

Instead, the first-time novelist said she wanted to write a story about a woman who became a pirate out of her own free will, who opted for freedom and independence because–like male pirates–she couldn’t get it on dry land.

"Also, I wanted my characters to be very American, with a more modern, alienated perspective than a noble-born woman would have."

Jensen’s swashbuckling tale for women follows Tory as she joins a pirate crew and takes part in their escapades around the West Indies.

There’s romance here, too, but not the formulaic kind you find in most romance novels.

"I wanted to write a romance where two characters have to earn each other’s love, have to work hard to have their relationship pay off," Jensen said.

In her lover, Pirate Jack, Tory discovers the wisdom she, a naive teenager, needs to stay alive. In Tory, Jack finds hope and a resurrection of his early idealism.

While the novel gives us plenty of detail about Jack’s early years in England as an acrobat and roving actor, Tory’s back-story is strangely absent. Curiously enough, it’s available in the German-language edition of the book, published first in 1998.

"If you can read the German," Jensen shook her head and chuckled, "you can get 50 pages of the back-story on Tory that were cut from the English version."

On Jensen’s first leg of research for the story, she visited the Virgin Islands, taking notes and photographs of the foliage, landscape and weather.

Next, she read everything she could find about piracy in the Caribbean.

"That’s when I decided that I didn’t want to write about the Golden Age of Piracy, during the 1700's," she said. "All those buckled shoes and poofy wigs–it just seemed too comic opera to me."

What interested her more was the period just after the War of 1812 when the area was in ferment. It was a time when sailors who’d fought in the war had nothing else to do but become privateers. It was a time when slavery was ending its stranglehold on the economy.

"Their whole way of life was about to crash and burn in 1823," Jensen said.

Even if slavery was still viable and legal at that time, Jensen said, the competition that the cane sugar industry was experiencing from the beet sugar industry was about to have a devastating effect on the West Indies economy.

Still, The Witch from the Sea, Jensen said, is not meant to be a sociological novel so much as a psychological novel about a woman’s search for freedom in a time when women had fewer choices than today.

"There were, actually, a number of female pirates in those years, women who went to sea to get a life they couldn’t live ashore," she said.

"There just wasn’t any media telling them they could be independent like there is today. While many women were dissatisfied, few had any clue they could change their lives."

Jensen came to Santa Cruz in 1972 from Southern California because she thought it was important to go somewhere new and test herself.

"When you’re on your own," she said, "you’re forced to make your own life, forced to reinvent yourself."

With books two and three of the trilogy half-completed, Jensen continues to sail new waters.

But when each adventure ends, Jensen always returns to her home port of Santa Cruz.

Contact Chris Watson at cwatson@santa-cruz.com