In the Author Spotlight,
Ninie Hammon,
author of
Sudan and
The Memory Closet

 

 

Though author Ninie Hammon had spent a quarter of a century as a journalist, she had never written a novel. An arranged meeting with a Florida pastor sparked her interest and soon inspired Sudan, her first novel, followed closely byThe Memory Closet - both based on true stories.

"My literary agent connected me to Art Ayris, a pastor in Florida, whose heart had been touched by a story in Christianity Today about a Dinka farmer’s quest to rescue his little girl from slave traders", Hammon explains. "Art wrote a screenplay based on that true story and I was commissioned to rewrite the novel he’d crafted from the screenplay. I was riveted by the Dinka’s ordeal, too, and knew instantly that it was a story the world needed to hear."

After an agonizing struggle to re-write the first couple of chapters, Hammon stopped re-writing Sudan altogether and just ran with the plot and characters Art had developed. "During that writing and collaborating process, Art and I developed a deep friendship," she says. "His company, Kingstone Media, now publishes all my novels under their Bay Forest Imprint."

Based on that true story, Sudan tells of human rights journalist Ron Wolfson who travels to the heart of Africa to investigate reports of modern day slavery. When a raid by Bedayene guerrillas results in the capture of a young girl, her father, a simple village farmer, mounts an against-all-odds attempt to redeem his daughter. While Ron’s brother, a U.S. congressman, seeks to force international political pressure, Ron becomes an eyewitness to the horrors of slavery. "Though I’ve been to Ivory Coast, Tanzania and Zanzibar, I’ve never visited Sudan, so I determined to find out everything I could about the country," says Hammon. " I made lists of plants, animals and birds, what people ate and how they dressed. I even drew a gigantic map of Sudan by hand so I could locate the characters on it to ensure the distances traveled and all the times stacked up. And it’s important to note that every one of the atrocities in the book came out of my research, not my imagination. Every awful thing that happens to the characters in Sudan actually happened to somebody there and was reported in news accounts."

Hammon soon followed Sudan with the novel The Memory Closet. "I wrote The Memory Closet to speak in my own literary voice with a plot and characters of my own creation," she says. "Apparently, I didn’t just speak, I yelled. My son said that reading the book was like listening to the made-up stories I used to tell him and his brothers every night to get them to stop throwing pillows at each other and go to sleep."

The plot of The Memory Closet is based on a heart-breaking true story Hammon covered as a journalist in Kentucky. A four-year-old child vanished out of her front yard near Fort Knox and was never seen again. "The huge brown eyes that looked out at me from the picture her parents provided haunted me. I even dreamed about her. A decade later, when the missing child’s older sisters were teenagers, they went to police and told a gruesome tale, describing in horrifying detail what had really happened to their little sister. I dedicated the book to those children."

Hammon is married and has six grown children and eight grandchildren. She is currently contemplating her next novel. "I have so many books swimming around in my head, the ideas compete with each other—something like Survivor.  Whatever story is left after all the others are voted off the island wins," she laughs. "Current contenders are stories about a class reunion, the Kentucky coal fields in the 1930s, and the Mau Mau uprising.

To purchase your copy of Sudan or The Memory Closet, visit
http://www.atlasbooks.com/Kingstonemedia/

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