December, 2008

Dormia Press Release

Dormia: What happens when a journalist, who covers Hollywood , ends up living on a Navajo Reservation and writing a fantasy novel with a U.S. diplomat stationed in Paris?

An Improbable Collaboration

Jake Halpern never intended to write a fantasy book. He was a journalist whose stories on American Pop Culture and Hollywood appeared in the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, and on NPR's All Things Considered. Then one day, his wife announced that she had landed a job as a doctor with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Not long after this, Halpern found himself living on the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico, which remains one of the most remote and sparsely settled regions in the continental United States. From his desk, in their tiny ranch house, Halpern watched prairie dogs frolic and tumbleweed blow across the street. On most days, there wasn't much to report.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Halpern's longtime friend Peter Kujawinski was serving as an American diplomat in Paris. His environs could not have been more radically different. Kujawinski, known simply as Kujo by friends and family alike, inhabited a sprawling three bedroom penthouse with stunning views of the Eiffel Tower. On weekends, he and his wife Nancy (a popular local musician) hit the bars, nightclubs, and bistros of the Left Bank. However, by almost any measure it was not an ideal time to be an American in France . America was knee-deep in a war that was as popular in France as Spam or Kraft Singles American Cheese Slices. As he lunched with diplomats from other countries, Kujo often imagined that he was in another country all together --- that country being the kingdom of Dormia.

Dormia is a kingdom nestled deep in the Ural Mountains, inhabited by people who do all manner of curious things in their sleep --- ski, climb, compose operas, make pancakes, and shoot arrows with deadly accuracy. Dormia is, of course, a made up place, a figment of their collective imagination, and the setting for their forthcoming novel.

So what's the book about?

This is a book about the magical powers of sleep. Ordinary sleepwalkers may wake up in the living room or in the kitchen eating ice cream. But twelve-year-old Alfonso Perplexon tends to wakes up tightrope-walking along a set of power lines or clinging to the top of a massive, wind-blown pine tree. No one in his hometown of World's End, Minnesota, has seen anything like it. The doctors are stumped, but one wintry evening an old man arrives at Alfonso's doorstep with an astounding explanation. The old man introduces himself as Hill, Alfonso's long lost uncle. He spins a wild tale of Dormia, a kingdom hidden in the faraway Ural Mountains whose people have mastered the art of *wakeful sleeping.* Dormia is now in grave danger, says Hill, and its survival depends on a mysterious plant called a Dormian Bloom. Once every few centuries, someone of Dormian descent is born with the ability to grow such a plant and, as Hill suspects, this person is Alfonso. Hill insists that they depart for Dormia before it's too late, but the hour is late, and they are already being hunted by a shadowy figure named Kiril.

Alfonso's journey takes him to an iceberg fortress in the Bering Sea, across the North Pole, and then deep into the snow-bound Ural Mountains. Slowly he realizes that his arrival in Dormia is the key to saving a mythical kingdom and to discovering the secrets that lurk in his own sleep.

Okay, so these two guys were living on opposite ends of the planet, how did they write a book together?

E-mail. They overburdened their e-mail accounts by sending the 500-page manuscript as an attachment to each other at least once, sometimes twice or even three times a day. *We just passed the thing back and forth like a cyber football,* says Kujawinski. *I would go out for drinks at a local bistro, come home late, burn the midnight oil in Paris, hammer out a new chapter, and then fire the thing across the globe to Jake.*

Halpern was initially living in Boston, but then in 2006 he and his wife moved out to the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. Later that year, Kujawinski left Paris and moved to New York City, where he is currently stationed at the US Mission to the United Nations. Throughout the writing of the book, the two collaborators never lived in a remotely similar time-zone. *We really didn't even talk much by phone in those days,* recalls Halpern. *We were like two pen pals who just happen to be writing a book together. We would also text cryptic messages to each other like: I just got the best mutton sandwich from this Navajo grandma by the side of the highway. By the way, check out what I did with the fight scene in the iceberg fortress.*

Sometimes, of course, they did talk by phone. Halpern did much of his writing from a remote cottage in southwest Colorado. He would hike from the cottage to a massive rock on top of a desert butte in order to get cell phone reception. The rock offered panoramic views of Mesa Verde National Park. Here it was possible to gaze out for fifty miles without seeing any signs of civilization. Halpern called this perch *Telephone Rock.* *So I'd hike up to Telephone Rock to call Peter,* recalls Halpern. *And when I'd finally reach him at the United Nations in New York, he'd say, *Sorry man, I can't talk during lunch today. We're having an emergency session of the Security Council.* So we kind of gave up on the phone, at least during the week. We did e-mail, and it worked out for the best, because we just focused on the nuts and bolts of writing the book.*

*It's hard to imagine this book being written in any other era,* adds Kujawinski. *If it wasn't for e-mail, it simply never would have happened.*

Luckily, they also saw each other. Every few months they rendezvoused in order to collaborate and write together in person. It was during these times that the major themes and scenes of the book came into being. They argued the finer points of Dormian mythology while hiking from village to village in the Burgundy region of France. They crafted Dormian law and sketched out Dormian architecture from a tree house at the foot of a waterfall in the Berkshires. They edited portions of the manuscript aboard planes, in cars of all shape and size, in the Paris and New York subway systems, and at diners in New Haven and Chicago. On one occasion, during their time together in Navajo country, Halpern and Kujawinski took a break from their writing in order to go on a snowshoeing expedition in Colorado. On their way home, they got caught in a blinding snow storm and took refuge in a warm, sulfurous hot spring. This served as inspiration for many of the hot springs in the book.

Their book is a fantasy, but in many ways, it is no more fantastical than the environs in which they did their writing.

Is it true that they wrote this 500-page tome in just 9 months?

Yes. They did the actual writing in just 273 days. But the planning and outlining of the book took years. Halpern and Kujawinski first met in the late 1990s. Kujawinski was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and Halpern was the writing tutor at the American International School. The two met, became friends, and at some point took a trip together to the Sinai Peninsula (a rugged, beautiful, but deserted stretch of Egypt that stretches out into the luminescent waters of the Red Sea). They slept on a sand dune, beneath the stars, like the Bedouin. One night they got caught in a sand storm known as a khamseen. Luckily, the storm wasn't too severe. They were never in danger, but sleeping proved impossible, and as they huddled and chatted through the night, speaking about the magic of travel, wandering in the desert, and sleeping. This is truly where the idea for Dormia was born.

Over the years the two of them began developing an extensive outline that described the world of Dormia, the characters inhabiting it, and the kind of challenges that Dormians would face. The outline grew to almost one hundred pages single-spaced. *It was really more than an outline,* says Kujawinski. *It was an atlas, a guidebook, and an encyclopedia to our made-up world.*

*We developed the outline for years and years,* says Halpern. *We knew the world of Dormia inside out, so when we finally sat down to write the book, it was like writing about Canada. It was a place almost as familiar as home.*

Will this be a movie?

We certainly hope so. Representatives from several big Hollywood agencies, including Creative Artists Agency (CAA), United Talent Agency (UTA), and 3 Arts Entertainment, have been vying for the book. Currently, Sally Willcox of CAA is representing the book. She is getting ready to send it out to studios.

Last question, will there be a sequel?

Yes, Dormia is actually the first book in a trilogy. So the ride has just begun.

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