Bloodshed, and what it means to our world, informed the †musings of novelist Jan Worth-Nelson, from her childhood as a winsome, small town Ohio preacher’s kid, raised on the message of Jesus’ crucifixion.†Cruel, violent deaths and how we struggle to cope has become a recurring theme in her work.
     Worth-Nelson recently published Night Blind, a fictional recounting of the 1976 murder of Deborah Ann Gardner by a fellow American Peace Corps member, Dennis Priven, in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga and the subsequent miscarriage of justice.
     The story begins with two young schoolteachers, an ethereally beautiful woman and the other, a muscular youth others perceived as peculiar but harmless.
     Gardner was stalked and savagely stabbed and slashed to death 22 times by Piven. She had chosen as her lover another of America’s young male emissaries sent to teach modern ways in the Third World.
     Worth-Nelson, graying a bit but still gregarious as the night she burned her bra at a press-club barbeque, never expected to witness murder and mayhem at so many turns in her life.†She was a sophomore at Kent State when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on demonstrating students. They killed several of her classmates.
     Worth-Nelson worked as a daily newspaper reporter and social worker in the 1970s. In 1975, as a Peace Corps volunteer in the exotic Polynesian kingdom of Tonga, the naÔve but well-meaning young woman, outraged the Crown Princess for identifying her Highness as “pleasingly plump” in a Los Angeles Times travel section article.
     “She actually tried to have me deported,” says Worth-Nelson, a University of Michigan English and creative writing professor with two chapbook volumes of poetry––vibrant with wry wit and sassy San Pedro color––to her published credits. She has also earned national honors as a short story author.
     “I had to learn to curtsy properly and then compose a detailed, formal apology,” adds Worth-Nelson, who 29 years later on July 4, 2005, married an old flame from that Tonga time here on a windy Point Fermin bluff. She’s more at home as a Pedro Girl, holding court Sundays over breakfast biscuits and gravy at the Pacific Diner. †††
     Ironically, Night Blind, her South Seas novel of encountering ineffable and bloody realities, led to her own storybook romance with a happy ending.
     Threads of attraction 25 years earlier†were re-spliced after she and another author, Philip Weiss––neither aware of the other’s plans––called Peace Corps headquarters in Washington researching the 1976 murder, both a tragedy, and a travesty of international justice.
     “What is it with you writers?” a Peace Corps researcher asked. “You’re the second one in just the last hour to call about that old murder in Tonga.”
     Weiss became fascinated when he heard the story†while visiting neighboring Samoa that same year. His meticulously researched nonfiction†book, American Taboo was published in 2004 by HarperCollins.
     He eventually called Ted Nelson, who owns Hollywood Awards, a plaque and trophy company in a San Pedro industrial complex and a hugely successful gift and novelty shop in Hollywood. Weiss explained his book project and asked for help in telling the story properly.
     “Who else have you talked to?” asked Nelson, who’d never forgotten Jan Worth, whom he met at a New Year’s Eve party in 1976.
     Weiss mentioned several names including hers, a poet and literary teacher in Michigan. She contacted him about trading notes for their respective books.
     “I will help you in whatever ways I can, provided you put me in touch with Jan Worth, otherwise…” Nelson replied.
     Nelson and Worth began corresponding and found the years had been kind enough to each for old mutual interests to rekindle. Married, they divide time between Flint, Michigan and San Pedro.
     The self-confessed killer, Priven, went free, with U.S. State Department complicity in the rush to save Uncle Sam from embarrassment. Under pressure, a Tongan jury that could have put the young American to death, hanged from a coconut tree, found him insane at the time of the murder.
     American authorities promised Tonga that Priven would “get treatment,” leaving them to assume that meant†locked away forever. But no legal precedent existed in America to confine someone for killing on foreign soil. Piven voluntarily committed himself just briefly. He didn’t like that life, checked out and has gone free since, sentenced only to memories. Chroniclers of the near-forgotten affair suggest those memories don’t trouble him much.
     The yarn became a cautionary folktale in the culture of Tonga, a formal society where tolerance depends on appearances.
     If there is mutual consent then boink whomever you please, but make it look good, personal discretion dictated. Rap lightly at his or her back window. Don’t go to the door drunk at 3 a.m., bellowing desire like a bull elephant, because being soused is not seductive.
     While Weiss’ book brings the slaying in a far place alive with vivid reporting, Worth-Nelson’s fictional work explores†how people behave in a strange land and respond to catastrophe, bereft of familiar old family and hometown support systems.
     “A lot of us who were there are still trying to process it all,” she explains. “Response by readers is really interesting. They are fascinated by three aspects: the first being the exotic setting in Polynesia.
     “Then there’s the tragedy; how people deal with violence, death and horror, outside their own element. In a way, it’s somewhat like young military troops today in Iraq and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Of course, our experience in Tonga was on a much lesser scale.”
     “And then you face the whole shocking question: how and why could it happen at all? There had not been a murder anywhere in Tonga for at least 10 years. People get drunk and have fights, but usually the cops sit them down and feed them a little cup of kava [a mild narcotic] and they mellow out.”
     Worth-Nelson, assigned to a public relations role to attract trade and†promote the Tongan economy, knew the lovely murder victim, but not well.
     She recalled her as poised and beautiful, favoring casual flowing gowns while most in her group slovened around in shorts and t-shirts. Once charged with Gardner’s murder, Priven lapsed from incoherent semi-hysteria to total withdrawal and only rare responses to his plight 9,000 miles from home.
     “He didn’t have any reason than to think he was going to get off,” Worth-Nelson recalls. In his nonfiction book, Weiss recalls conversations in which Priven polls friends, his lawyer and others on whether they think he will be executed, begging assurance he will be buried back†home in America. Weiss and Priven have one final meeting at which the author shows the possibly penitent(but never-punished killer) an array of photos collected for the book, many showing Gardner, vibrant and alive. He reports that Priven skipped†over those nonchalantly, but became emotional and weepy at pictures of old male friends and drinking buddies who abandoned him. Priven has apparently stayed out of trouble since.
     Worth-Nelson’s Night Blind is now available at Williams’ Bookstore in San Pedro, as well as through its internet publisher, iUniverse, or online at major bookstores’ websites. Her novel is designated an iUniverse Publisher’s Choice for content and merit. Weiss’ nonfiction account can also be accessed or ordered online.

A Peace Corps Tragedy in Tonga
Book Review by Arthur R. Vinsel

Night Blind
Jan Worth-Nelson, HarperCollins
2006, 265 pp., $17.95

     Published poet, essayist and novelist Jan Worth-Nelson tells†a story one can experience with several senses— taste, touch, smell, sight and sound— giving a three-dimensional leverage to her descriptions of Tonga, an idyllic place of simple beauties and deep satisfactions. But, it is never immune to a touch of madness.
     They say creating a work of literature is like giving birth. Readers who appreciate a fine read that leaves lasting impressions can concede Ms. Worth-Nelson has borne a beautiful child in this, her first novel.
     Night Blind is fiction based on fact. A troubled colleague viciously murders a young female Peace Corps volunteer, while the American political apparatus tried with bungling efforts to hide the truth and make folks forget her. She passed away 9,000 miles from home at age 23 and let’s try to let her family grieve in peace. Never mind the truth.
     Melanie Porter didn’t pass away. She was butchered by a psychopath who thought he loved her and in the rush to avert an international scandal and save Uncle Sam’s stern, bewhiskered face. Her†confessed killer slipped through the cracks of jurisprudence and essentially went free.
††††Where Worth-Nelson transcends just another good, professional read is in her palpable poet’s delight in the use of words. She incorporates the lilting language of Tonga with our grand old English—fine and functional enough for Bibles as well as porno pamphlets.
     She opens each chapter with a Tongan proverb, roller coasters of long and short strings of letters that translate into homespun wisdom. They are as plain as a crocheted sampler in a frame on a New England cottage wall.
††††††Her protagonist, Charlotte Thornton (called Salote in Tongan), a Midwestern preacher’s daughter who’s tried forbidden alcohol, tobacco and sex, describes their language in the book:
     “I loved the ribbons of language, the fluid magic of sentence making. I was awestruck by the sensuality of the Polynesian tongue. How could I have grown up not knowing such a beautiful language existed? It was like a cat, one minute clicking its consonant claws across the floor, the next purring vowels and rolling over on its back in the sun. While I had toiled away, dutifully memorizing staunch Anglo-Saxon verses and astringent Puritan hymns, the Tongans, thousands of miles away, were speaking with honey,
ripe moonlight and saltwater.”
     †Worth-Nelson, a university instructor knows well that behind her back, some in the academic world cluck their tongues at self-publishing. The truth is, many more worthwhile and memorable novels and nonfiction now see the light of print as opposed to when staid and stuffy publishing houses published.
     We can be grateful for progress when it yields a first novel as impressive as this.
     Since the holidays are upon us, Night Blind would be a fine gift for serious book-lovers in your life, with an inscription that heads one of its chapters on the month of December in the South Seas: Mele Kalisimasi.