![]() ![]() And so I read everything I could find about the Lost Boys.įor Nya’s part of the story, which is basically a contemporary story about how Salva’s organization comes into her village and builds a well, my husband went on a trip with Salva in 2008. There are now several books about the Lost Boys’ experience, such as What Is the What by Dave Eggers. That enabled the one line to become the whole first chapter of the book. For example, the opening scene in his memoir was just a sentence: “The war came and I had to run away.” It seemed like such a dramatic statement and yet there were details missing ,so I would interview him to get more information. ![]() I also had access to Salva himself, so whenever I had any questions I could ask him directly. So that was my first source and it doesn’t get any better than a first-person source. I rewrote them in such a way that there was a narrative line to the story. I did things like imagine dialogue for scenes. And Salva’s English is perfectly competent but he’s not a writer, so his document was mostly kind of a list of events. He wrote down the things that happened to him as a young person and in his early adulthood. Salva’s part of the story is based on his own memoir. I kept telling everyone I knew about him, and it finally dawned on me that if I wrote this story I could tell a whole lot of people at once. And then in meeting Salva several times, I just was so amazed by his story. It was my husband who got to know him first in 2004. My inspiration came directly from the protagonist of the book, Salva Dut, who is a family friend. ![]()
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