Author Wendy Dale

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Danielle Jack
Phone: (310) 559-4574
Cell: (310) 902-6974
blankverse@​earthlink.net

Los Angeles, June 2003 — A young woman meets and falls in love with a man in a Central American prison and risks everything she has to free him. Sounds like good dramatic material for a novel — except that this is a true story. On top of that, author Wendy Dale turns real life tales of prisons and other dangerous places into a comedic tale, always managing to find the lighter side of some of the world’s darkest corners.

In Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures in Love and Danger published by Crown (Random House) this month, Dale writes about her travels to unconventional places in search of adventure, including illegal trips to Beirut and Havana, a nine-month stay in Colombia as well as an Indiana Jones-like journey through Panama by four-passenger plane and canoe. And all of this was accomplished by a woman who used to put on a business suit and commute to a corporate job in the aerospace industry every day.

When asked why she chose to embark on her adventures, she explains that her decision was inspired by her parents. "One day, my folks spontaneously decided to sell everything they own — meaning their house, their car and anything else that could be considered their children’s future inheritance — and took my eleven-year-old brother and one suitcase a piece and moved to Tegucigalpa, Honduras."

A visit to her parents’ new Central American home led Dale to consider embarking on her own international journey which eventually resulted in a trip to Costa Rica, where Dale’s life became stranger than fiction. "I still have a hard time believing it myself, but every time I visited Costa Rica, in spite of my best efforts to the contrary, I was forced to visit a different prison. There were three prisons on three separate trips." She eventually met and fell in love with a Colombian inmate name Francisco who was incarcerated on trumped-up charges, and she made the dramatic decision to move to Costa Rica to help free him.

Deborah Kogan, author of Shutterbabe (Random House, 2002), says that Dale’s writing is "a mix of David Sedaris, Lucille Ball and a fifth of tequila in a blender" and refers to Dale as "quite possibly the funniest travel writer since Homer."

Q & A with the author

What was the biggest creative challenge you faced in writing this book?

When I first began my travels, I mistakenly assumed that nothing really interesting would actually happen to me so I had created this sardonic narrator who wittily prattles on about the country she happens to find herself in. But when I fell in love with Francisco, a man imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit — and when that man got accused of leading a prison breakout that he also hadn’t been involved with — my life as well as my story spun out of control. How did I make light of such a serious incident? How did I tell my story without destroying the narrative voice I had worked so hard to create? Ironically enough, it was this creative challenge, the desire to talk about Franicsco’s imprisonment in humorous terms that saved not only my book but also my sanity. In order to write about the lighter side of the dark situation I found myself in, I was first forced to find the lighter side — and it was this discovery, this ability to laugh again, that rescued my work as well as my life.

Out of all the men to choose from, why did you pick Francisco, especially given that he was in prison when you met him?

In many ways, it was the fact that he was in prison that made me choose him. I was questioning a lot of beliefs that I (or any American, for that matter) was raised with — and I wanted to open my mind to new possibilities, new ways of looking at the world. Francisco was such a refreshing contrast to the men I kept meeting in Los Angeles, men obsessed with getting ahead in the film industry, driving expensive SUVs and eating Italian lettuces in trendy restaurants. I met Francisco and his problems seemed so significant. This was a man who was sleeping on the concrete — at the prison, inmates had to buy their own beds and Francisco didn’t have the money to pay for a mattress. Yet he never complained. I admired him for that — and I knew I had a lot to learn from him.

Did you ever want to give up fighting for Francisco and just go home? And if so, what made you stay?

When I left Los Angeles, I burned many of my bridges behind me — there wasn’t a lot to go back to — which doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of dark days when I just wanted to give up. However, there was one event that really made me commit to sticking it out: a group of prisoners sneaked up on Francisco in the middle of the night, wrapped newspapers around the edge of the bed and and lit him on fire. Francisco survived, but his legs were badly scarred.. Every time I looked at those scars, I knew I couldn’t abandon a man who was unjustly suffering so much. It made me furious and that anger impelled me to action.

Did your view of justice change during your travels? Why or why not?

Not my view of justice as much as my view of truth. In my travels, I was reminded over and over again that so many of the beliefs I had taken for granted as an American no longer held true when transferred to a foreign place. Sometimes this realization was banal and downright funny — for Costa Ricans, seeing a monkey was no big deal but a squirrel was something to write home about. Sometimes it was intriguing — Colombians didn’t have a word for snowflake because they had never experienced what we would think of as winter. And sometimes this was profound — in Panama, for the first time, I understood what it meant to experience true freedom.

How large a role did your parents play in your decision to travel?

The good thing about having such eccentric parents is that I can always blame them for all the bad decisions I have made in my life. By the time, I was four, my parents had moved us to Peru. By the time, I was eight, we were living in the back woods of Tennessee in a station wagon parked on 150 acres of vacant land that my father dreamed of transforming into a farm. So as an adult when I decided to go to Lebanon illegally, fly to Cuba on a whim or move to Costa Rica without much forethought, in a way you could say that I was just following in my parents’ footsteps.

For more information, visit http:/​/​www.wendydale.net or call (310) 559-4574.

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