On Praying for Mrs. Mombasa: A Conversation with Doug Brendel
By Victoria Fortune
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing author, artist, actor, and humanitarian Doug Brendel about his latest book, Praying for Mrs. Mombasa, which won the 2021-2022 Reader Views Reviewers Choice Award for best book in the humor category. As Reader Views website states, it is “recognized industry-wide as one of the most respected literary awards programs for independent authors.”
What was your original idea or inspiration for Praying for Mrs. Mombasa?
It really started with a language idea. We deal with Russian-speaking people all the time through our charitable organization New Thing, and English makes them berserk. . . . One thing that makes the Belarusians crazy is our prepositions, so that a phrase like “praying for” can mean three different things. Because I was clergy for 15 years, that phrase is one I’ve used a lot. “I’m praying for you” can mean I’m asking God to bless you, or I’m praying for something like good weather, meaning I need a gift, or the third, less common usage can mean I’m praying for someone, as in I’m standing in for them, praying in their place. And I got to wondering, what would be a situation where somebody would cycle through those meanings of the same phrase? And I thought, well it would be a religious setting, but with a language barrier. And then I was like, what if there’s a preacher who prays for someone in three different ways? Like he’s praying for God to bless her, then he’s praying for her to become his, and then he’s praying in her place. So that’s the story line. Mrs. Mombasa’s alienation from God is the third step. But why the language barrier? That’s what led to [the preacher] being Hispanic, and he’s got a PhD, he’s got everything nailed except the accent. And the angel who comes to save him is Korean for Heaven’s sake. Then I invented the whole idea of, how do angels operate and their nationalities, and one’s Samoan, and all this stuff.
I was intrigued by the idea of the active vs. the passive angel.
That came to me late in the process. There’s this concept in scripture where, I think it’s the apostle Paul who says that you may run into somebody who is God’s messenger to you, but you’re unaware that it’s an angel. It’s also an admonition not to treat people like shit, because you may be dealing with the angel unawares, and that fascinated me, that concept, my whole life. And the idea that, what if homeless people, who get such grief, what if . . . some of those people who challenge us to respond with grace, are actually angelic? Then I got to thinking about what are the functions of angels if you have passives and actives? Somebody who can influence events, like Cary Grant did in [The Bishop’s Wife], versus somebody who influences events just by reflecting to you what you already are. That’s what a homeless person does. Just how you respond to somebody sitting on the sidewalk tells you a lot about yourself. And what if that’s like a whole job description?
I love the way the narrator debates throughout the story the pros and cons of a novel vs. a play, and how you use elements of both so that the reader can see the advantages of one versus the other.
The narrator’s fickle. Sometimes he’s like, it should be a play, no it can’t be a play, no this doesn’t work. . . . I’m glad you got it and liked it, because I’ve gotten blow back about this whole concept you’ve just described. A fan who read both of my novels said, “that first novel, that should be a movie.” (It’s a conventional novel.) “And that other one,” he said, “I had some problems with it.” And I said, “Well, it just won the gold award, the medal for humor.” And he said, “ I’m going to have to reread it, but going back and forth from book to stage play was so confusing for me.” And I was like, “You either love it or hate it.”
The thing that kept running through my mind as I read it was, this is a writer’s book, a book that anybody who deals with trying to figure out the best way to tell a story can appreciate.
I’m flashing back now to an early conversation I had with an English teacher, maybe elementary, maybe middle school, and I was like, “I don’t understand novels. What is the point? The key is the dialogue, and you can see people on stage, and that’s enough.” And I remember the teacher looking at me confused and saying, “You know, there’s an opportunity for description. There’s value to giving perspective to all that.” And back then, I was like, uh, I don’t think so. And now, I’m the other extreme . . . . When I would write sermons, back when I was in the evangelical movement, my wife-- always my first reader--would invariably read to page five, then draw a line and say, “Start here.”
Your experience as a clergyman really comes through in the protagonist, Moishe Escovado, and the setting, Hope Here Church. The description of Hope Here, in which you go through the elements of other churches that it does not have, is so funny. A perfect example of something a novel offers that a play can’t.
Because if you had a character say that it would be boring.
Talking about churches, of course Praying for Mrs. Mombasa is set in a church. I grew up in the Chicago area and so for a time during my first marriage I lived in that neighborhood I describe: Clark Street. The description of that street is absolutely the neighborhood where my church was. Back then I was just an attendee. But all the different ethnicities and types of food and businesses and stuff, everything owned by a different nationality. Even down to the cracks in the sidewalk, it was just all co-opted from the time I spent there.
You address controversial topics—sex, religion, race-- in both your novels.
I’m always interested in any way to attack racism or sexism. . . These are two issues that are important to me. Our eldest daughter is African-American, so we’ve dealt for 30+ years with racial issues, so I lean that way anyway.
I wondered if you found it easier to write about these topics with humor, as you did in Praying for Mrs. Mombasa?
I felt more anxiety about dealing with things humorously than seriously.
Even though humor seems to come very naturally to you?
Yeah, it does. But the narrator in Praying for Mrs. Mombasa is clearly a straight white male, and the risk is that the reader won’t realize that he’s also presented as clueless. That was the risk of the structure. And I’ve had some people push back to some extent, although the book has been more successful than I feared. (laugh) Someone said, “How can you make fun of this?” And I was like, “That’s the device. To expose the straight white male cluelessness.” And if you don’t get into that groove early in the book, then we’re doomed.
To write dialect and play with accents the way you did was a big risk. Have you gotten any push back about that?
When I decided to do this as a stream of consciousness format . . . and once all these characters with foreign accents peopled the story, then I realized this is going to be better read aloud than read silently. So, I steered the characters into accents I could do.
I also went online and found websites that had been put up by people who, for example, grew up in Korea and are now in the US and make fun of how Koreans speak English. And also serious sites that teach you what are the principles of a Korean accent . . . and Norwegian. I had no idea about Norwegian. I could hear it and say that’s something Scandinavian, but I couldn’t reproduce it till I went and studied up so I could do my readings.
Against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, I needed to be able to say to an audience during Q & A, I studied up, and this is all from those ethnic groups. This is how they talk about themselves.
Tell me about Dragonhead Press and the process of publishing your books.
Dragonhead Press is totally fabricated. In almost every case, I’ve self-published books on lulu.com, digital demand publishing. But in order to avoid registering a book or promoting a book with the publisher indicated as lulu--because that sounds ridiculous and calls undue attention to the fact that it’s self-published--it’s typical now for writers to fabricate a publishing entity. So I bought the domain name Dragonhead Press, and the website says very honestly, right there on the home page, “featuring the work of Doug Brendel.” But it gives me a place to load up all of my books.
These days if you go through a publisher, and you are a white writer with non-white characters in your book, you’re probably going to have to have sensitivity readers for each different group you portray. If you had submitted your book to a publisher . . .
Can you imagine sensitivity readings for Praying for Mrs. Mombasa? Oh my gosh. The Norwegians would be devastating.
Winning the awards has sort of affirmed that it works. It’s legitimized it. And if it was truly controversial or regarded as somehow dangerous or harmful, it’s hard to imagine it would have gotten this far, although I have no idea what the ethnic make-up is of the reviewers.
Among other awards, Praying for Mrs. Mombasa won the Reader Views Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best Humor. Tell me about that.
Anybody can submit their book to any of these contests. There’s a million different contests. Actually, I had never thought of getting involved in contests until a friend of mine--an actor friend in Arizona who is a successful self-published comic murder mystery novelist—advised me, “enter every contest you can, because that’s what gets you the buzz, and that’s how you can build readership.”
Every new award is an opportunity for a new press release, and you might pick up a few more readers. It might get me into another book club, or another rotary club. And in my personal world, everything winds up in Belarus. If I stand before a rotary club and talk about my novels, everybody also gets a brochure for New Thing. The more eyeballs I can get on Belarus the better. It’s not duplicitous, it’s who I really am . . . that’s where my heart is. I’m a creator by instinct, but my livelihood is marketing other people’s causes. And so, the idea of spending time and energy marketing my own creative stuff is icky to me, and I just don’t do it, which frustrates my fans
Has winning the award brought more attention to the book?
A little bit on social media. It’s still fresh enough that I haven’t exhausted every opportunity by any means of leveraging the award. I have yet to get out beyond Ipswich, where I submitted a press release right away to the local paper. I haven’t emailed a bunch of bookstores or rotary clubs and all that stuff. I hope to do that. . . it’s not my top priority. By the time you’ve read a book, I’m so deep into the next project. I’m eager to get a stage reading of my new play going.
Learn more about Doug Brendel and his works at https://dragonheadpress.com/ or https://www.dougbrendel.com/ or visit him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/dougbrendel
Doug also writes a weekly humor column in Ipswich, MA, called The Outsidah at https://dougbrendel.wordpress.com/
