Lumberjacks, convicts, exiles, housewives, soldiers, sailors, concentration camp prisoners, Anna Karenina and the Ancient Egyptians all had bedbugs. The parasitic insects have pestered resters long enough for Americans to blame them on the British, for the Brits to blame them on the Americans, Asians and Africans, for cowboys to blame them on Indians, and vice versa. The Old World claimed bedbugs came from the New World, and the New World insisted they were brought over in boats from the old one.

In their travels, bedbugs acquired countless nicknames: wallpaper flounder, nightrider, red rover, red coat, bed goblin and crimson rambler, to name a few, with many of the names referring to the color bedbugs turn when they have just fed and are full of blood. Hungry or newly hatched, the wee vampires are translucent, flat and colorless, deflated like a microscopic used condom. Their knack for biologically changing costumes inspired early victims to believe bedbugs had the power to magically transform themselves, the better to disappear into cracks and crevices and surprise their hosts.      

People tried just about everything they could think of to get rid of bedbugs in the past. Mattress springs were “candled” with a candle or a blowtorch. Bodies were rubbed with tobacco, pepper or cedar leaves; beds were coated with sperm whale blubber, lard or whiskey. Pure mercury was poured straight into cracks in the floor, or kerosene was poured over the bed and injected into cracks and crevices around the bed (which significantly increased the number of house fires in America and England).  So many dangerous poisons were used in houses and tenements infested with bedbugs that it was often impossible to tell if someone who died from overexposure to the remedies had been killed accidentally or on purpose.

The hard-to-kill bugs flourished in spite of it all, their populations increasing with the Industrial Revolution and the global shifts to cities that accompanied transoceanic travel. It wasn’t until the discovery of the insecticidal properties of DDT in the 1940s and its widespread use in the 1950s that the problem was largely (if only temporarily) eliminated in the majority of the United States. Paul Herman Muller, who made the discovery, was awarded the Nobel Prize because of DDT’s potential to control insect-spread diseases such as typhus and malaria on other parts of the planet.

In the 1960s, the publication of Rachel Carson’s landmark anti-pesticide manifesto Silent Spring catalyzed a paradigm shift in the way the world dealt with pests, beginning with the banning of DDT, continuing with exterminators slowly switching the tools of their trade to be less toxic and more local, and culminating with the green-friendly, chemical-free products many of us use to clean our homes today. This predominantly positive detoxification of the American home and environment has had one unanticipated side effect—it has created a loophole that bedbugs have been able to creep through, steadily multiply inside of and recently explode out of. Gone just long enough for us to be caught completely unawares by their comeback tour, bedbugs have proliferated enough to bring major infestations to New York and Toronto, and are rapidly spreading to other urban areas in the United States like bumps on a freshly-bitten victim.

Unfortunately, there is a personal reason for all of this research into bedbugs.  Four years ago, when the parasitic insects invaded my home, fed off my flesh and infested my texts, I was working 60 hours a week in the New York office of Oxford University Press, editing online reference products that, not so long ago, were known as encyclopedias. I brought heavy boxes of manuscripts to happy hour after work in the evenings, and fell asleep in bed at night surrounded by the innards of some once-multivolume-soon-to-be-searchable-electronic-database, the corners of the tall piles of alphabetical entries forming jagged islands in my oasis of comforters and quilts.

The inkling that my private library had become a breeding ground for another species began with a series of small scarlet welts clustered around my wrists, neck and ankles. The arthropods living in my apartment were wingless and lazy, I would later learn, and thus attack areas on the body with the most pronounced veins. Once they have found one they will continue biting until their small bodies cannot hold a drop more, skulking slowly back to their hiding places amidst (in most cases) the seams of a mattress or (in my case) the pages of books, supposedly leaving rusty trails in the sheets after they arrive at their sixth and final life phase and have grown large enough to waste such precious food. “Breakfast, lunch and dinner” is the way this bite pattern is tagged in urban legend, the only legend in which my attackers were listed as I searched for confirmation of what was biting me from a more reputable source and found none.

Meanwhile, in the absence of an authoritative reference on bedbugs, I dredged the Internet hoping for clues on how to finally find one in my apartment and feel like I had earned the right to call an exterminator. The physician, dermatologist and, eventually, psychiatrist I’d consulted were convinced that my “chronic hives” were psychosomatic, and these professionals used their misinformation about bedbugs living only in old, dirty mattresses to advise me against what I later learned would have been the most reasonable, affordable and healthy thing to do. I should have contacted a reputable bedbug exterminator, if only for an inspection, which costs a mere $125. But I was convinced I had to find a bug before I called an exterminator, which is like waiting until you can actually feel a tumor before having a mammogram.

Alfred Barnard, the exterminator I later followed on his route around New York, would not be the first or the last person I spoke with to liken a bedbug infestation to cancer. Sanga, the exterminator who finally took care of my problem, and Lou Sorkin, the bedbug specialist at The American Museum of Natural History, agree that once the bugs have become big and dark enough to match the photos of them available online and pictured in newspapers as reputable as The New York Times, they have reached their final adult phase and are laying eggs all over the place, like a tumor left to metastasize.

Sanga was a delicate Trinidadian man with an accent that sounded British to my ears, aquiline features, two long French braids and a prison record he openly listed as one of the reasons he chose extermination as his profession. It didn’t matter to me however, after he came to my apartment and effectively gave  me my nights and life back. After three months of constant   searching for information, Sanga was the only person I’d talked to who had anything to say about bedbugs that made any sense or had any practical use.

As a thank-you gift, I offered to send Sanga any reference book he would like. He thought for a moment and then requested a famous book in his profession called Rodent Killer. He said it was a classic. He also said he wished there was such a tome about bedbugs, so that he could recommend it to his clients who bombarded him with more questions than he could answer as soon as he showed up at their door with his spray can.

It was then, and in the months that followed, that the idea and need for a print reference on bedbugs started to form in my mind. I wrote an essay about the epidemic in New York for Guernica Magazine, and, in the year since it was published, I’ve talked about five friends of friends per week, counseling them on what to do when they have bedbugs or other pests, how to insist their landlords operate within their legal obligations to exterminate, what to do when they refuse, and the answers to a million other questions fresh victims have when bitten by the foot soldiers of a global pandemic that keeps them up at night.

In 2010, The New York Daily News reported that one in 10 New Yorkers had dealt with bedbugs in their residence, and the number of bedbug complaints made by 311 callers in the Big Apple has increased from 537 in 2004 to more than 31,719 in 2010, according to the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. This year in Atlanta, the main pest control company, Orkin, reported a 300 percent increase in bedbug complaints in Florida and Georgia. The National Pest Management Association reports that Americans spent $258 million of their own money in 2010 to exterminate bedbugs, three times as much as in 2008.

However, contrary to what much of the sensationalist coverage of the epidemic would have you believe, the nationwide spread of bedbugs is not inevitable and bedbug victims are not doomed to an uncertain, unending future of sleepless, itchy nights. Most modern-day exterminators who specialize in bedbugs use a cocktail of three relatively safe chemicals that when correctly applied to a properly prepped home is effective in ending an infestation. The first two are pyrethrins and pyrethroids. Before the discovery of DDT as an insecticide, the most successful treatment for bedbugs was the use of a powdered form of pyrethrin and fumigation. Since the banning of DDT and other harsh chemical pesticides, pyrethrins, which are natural poisons made from the extracts of chrysanthemum flowers, and pyrethroids, which are synthetic replicas of those extracts, have come back into use.

The third ingredient in most bedbug specialists’ spray can is a brand name chemical called Gentrol, which exterminators often refer to as “the growth regulator.” Because bedbugs only eat warm human blood, it is very difficult to get them to consume enough pyrethrins and pyrethroids to kill them, which is a major characteristic that separates them from other pests like cockroaches that are comparatively easy to kill with baits and traps. Gentrol is crucial in controlling a bedbug population because it keeps them from reproducing. The founder of Zoëcon, the company that makes Gentrol and other hormonal insecticides that battle hard-to-poison insects by sterilizing them, is a scientist named Dr. Carl Djerassi. He is also one of the chemists credited with synthesizing the modern birth control pill.

Pesticide can be contraception as well as poison. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson argued for a reactionary approach to pests as opposed to a preventative one, writing with extreme conviction that it was immoral to spray chemicals where we live. While quite reasonably and necessarily fighting for the protection of outdoor spaces (which at the time were being indiscriminately sprayed with DDT from airplanes without the consent of the people who lived in or near them so wantonly that public swimming pools had to be closed because of contamination), Carson neglected to discuss the use of relatively safe pesticides such as pyrethrins in urban environments such as New York City, where they are most needed and least likely to affect the harmony she prized so highly in the outdoors. To be clear, this is not in any way an attack on Carson, who is a heroine in my book, both literally and figuratively. Nor is it an argument for the return of DDT and other harsh chemicals in the United States. (Carson never argued against their use anywhere else, and her critics who say she is responsible for the spread of malaria in other parts of the world are overreaching.)

But my weekly conversations consulting friends of friends and other victims of bedbugs have turned me into something of an unlikely activist. Though cities such as New York have recently passed laws requiring landlords and building management companies to pay for the extermination of bedbugs, these laws are not enforced and so not followed. Landlords and building management companies must be forced to pay for safe and effective chemical extermination by trained professionals before bedbugs (and all pest problems, for that matter) reach a point at which a home or apartment becomes unlivable and the infestation begins spreading to neighbors.

We should know better by now. Insects that live primarily indoors, have very few natural predators, feed exclusively on humans, infest our belongings, spread rapidly and indiscriminately, are able to live for 18 months without food and can lay up to 500 eggs in a matter of weeks should be exterminated as swiftly and safely as possible. It is an investment that makes sense for anyone who is at all future-minded, not just the unfortunate souls whose sweet dreams bedbugs happen to be stealing in the present.

In November of 1718, the colonial governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, received some disturbing news about an old nemesis.

The pirate known as Blackbeard was fortifying a beachhead in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The governor there had granted Blackbeard a pardon on the promise of good behavior. But Spotswood smelled a rat. Without telling his neighbors, he personally bankrolled a flotilla of ships to root out the threat he saw to Virginia’s southern flank.

In the ensuing bloody and brutal battle, Blackbeard was killed. Fifteen of his crewmen were tried on piracy charges in Williamsburg, and most went to the gallows. On Spotswood’s orders, Blackbeard’s severed head was perched on a tall pole on a point at the confluence of the Hampton and James rivers, where it stood for years as a warning to would-be buccaneers and marauders.

The clash marked the beginning of the end of what was considered the golden age of piracy, when the real pirates of the Caribbean plundered the Atlantic coast and other points.

But now, the pirates are back.

It’s July 2011. Three young men dressed in gray prison garb shuffle into a federal courtroom in Norfolk, Va. They stand accused of hijacking a U.S.-flag vessel a half a world away and summarily executing the four Americans aboard while the military was attempting to negotiate their release. The dead include Jean Hawkins Adam ’66 and her husband Scott, the owners of a 58-foot sloop they called the Quest, and two friends.

Dusting off a statute that dates to the early 19th-century, prosecutors have charged the men with “piracy under the law of nations,” as well as kidnapping, hostage-taking and murder. Eleven of their shipmates have already pleaded guilty to piracy, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison. If convicted, the three alleged triggermen could face the death penalty.

The prosecution by the U.S. is a response to an eruption in modern day piracy in the Horn of Africa, where young Somali men have since the mid 2000s largely succeeded at holding the world at bay as they prey upon unarmed merchant ships and other vessels. In the lawlessness of Somalia, piracy has become an organized industry, institutionalized to the point where syndicates sell shares in planned attacks in exchange for a correspondent share of ransoms paid.

Despite heightened international awareness, and patrols from navies across the globe, the scourge has continued, largely unabated. While international law and treaties give countries the right to try pirates they capture in their own domestic courts, they have shown little disposition to do so except in cases that involve their own citizens or ships.

Accused pirates appear before a federal judge. (Courtroom sketches by Alba Bragoli.)

A few have resorted to an old-style sort of summary justice. In a 2010 case, Russian authorities, after apprehending 10 Somali pirates who had seized an oil tanker, decided to cast the suspects adrift in the Indian Ocean, in an inflatable boat. Without navigational equipment, the men likely perished.

But in the vast majority of cases, captured pirates are returned home. Suffering few consequences, they try again and again, a cycle that the United States has until recently helped perpetuate.

As a result, piracy continues to escalate. Attacks on the world’s seas rose 35 percent in the first half of 2011 compared with a year earlier, with Somali pirates accounting for the majority of incidents, according to the London-based International Maritime Bureau. At mid-year, Somali pirates were holding 20 vessels and 420 crew members from around the world, demanding ransoms in the millions, the bureau said.

“There is this race between the pirates and the international community, and progressively that race is being won by the pirates,” said Jack Lang, United Nations Special Adviser on Somali Piracy, in an address to the U.N. Security Council last January.

WHY AND HOW THE QUEST CASE landed here in southeast Virginia, an area rich in pirate lore and naval history (the Civil War battle of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac was fought in the same waters that Spotswood’s men sailed a century before to go after Blackbeard) is in part an accident of history.

Two U.S. ships that pirates attacked in separate incidents in April 2010 while on patrol in the Gulf of Aden are part of the Norfolk-based Atlantic fleet, the largest naval operation in the world. The pair of attacks, nearly a year before the Quest incident and Jean Adam’s death, helped spur the U.S. government to get back into the business of trying foreign pirates on U.S. soil.

The federal judicial district that includes Norfolk has been the scene of a growing number of international cases in recent years, including a number involving alleged acts of terrorism. Because the district includes the Pentagon, it had jurisdiction over some of the first cases related to the 9/11 attacks. The district is also known as the “rocket docket” because of the speed with which judges move cases along, making it an ideal venue for a government looking to send a signal to the world that it is finally getting serious about piracy.

Last November, prosecutors here won the first piracy conviction in two centuries, against five Somalis in connection with the 2010 attack on the U.S. Navy frigate Nicholas. The last conviction under the federal piracy statute was in 1820, when Thomas Smith was convicted of plundering a Spanish ship from a private armed vessel he commandeered known as the Irresistible.

But the legal cases are not slam dunks. While it is one of the oldest laws on the books, the federal piracy statute is also one of the least used. That has lawyers on both sides plumbing the law books and ancient precedents in an attempt to discern the intent of Congress at a time when an infant U.S. Navy was trying to fend off pirate attacks on U.S. merchant vessels off the Barbary Coast of Africa. The two federal judges here that have had piracy cases have reached different conclusions about the scope of the law, and the issue is now before a federal appeals court.

THE ADAMS—she a dentist, he a film and TV producer in Hollywood—had retired and embarked and on a multi-year trip around the world. They were both highly skilled and experienced sailors, as well as people of faith. They delivered Bibles to residents of remote villages in the Fiji Islands and French Polynesia, among other exotic locales. After more than six years of roaming the globe together, however, they had decided to participate in an organized rally of ships for a leg of their journey from southeast Asia to the Mediterranean, in part for the added security it offered for the trek through the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden.

In January, the Adams joined the new group in Thailand, and took aboard two kindred spirits, Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle of Seattle, who had been on another boat. Together, they passed through Galle, Sri Lanka and Cochin, India, making a brief refueling stop in Mumbai before heading across the Indian Ocean.

Next stop: Oman. “I have NO idea what will happen in these ports,” Jean had written on a website she had created to chronicle the adventure, “but perhaps we’ll do some local touring.”

They never made it that far.

Organizers for Blue Water Rallies have said the Quest chose to take “an independent route” from Mumbai to Oman, leaving the organized rally on Feb. 15. But family members question that account. Bill Savage ’64, Jean’s first husband, points out that both Jean and Scott were highly skilled sailors.

“There is nothing that they did that was spur-of-the-moment … or not carefully thought through,” he says. “The notion that they would leave the protection of a professionally established routing service to go off on their own … is not credible to the family.”

“It is sad to learn that the family doubt our account,” says Richard Bolt, a Blue Water director, in an email. “We steadfastly maintain our true version of events that the crew on Quest left Mumbai on their own, on a route of their own, which was not recommended by Blue Water Rallies Ltd.” He adds: “There were no members of the company present in Mumbai when this occurred and we can shed no further light on why they took their decisions.” Blue Water announced in March that it was suspending operations, citing the economic downturn and rising piracy in the Indian Ocean.

AROUND THE SAME TIME the Quest departed Mumbai, court documents allege, 19 men pushed off in a skiff from Xaafuun in northern Somalia looking for a merchant ship to snatch. Like many before them, they were young, with little or no schooling, and little or nothing to lose. They were provisioned with bags of beans and rice, barrels of fuel and the tools of the modern pirate’s trade: ladders for boarding larger vessels, a cache of weapons including AK-47 assault rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

The onboard leader was a 33-year-old former Somali police officer, Mohamud Hirs Issa Ali, a first-time pirate looking for money to support his two wives, five children and a father in poor health, according to his lawyer, Jon Babineau of Norfolk. The ex-cop had approached a pirate boss in Somalia for a loan, but was persuaded to make a career change. “‘I will make you more money than you can imagine. You will never have to work again,’” Ali was told, Babineau says. “‘You can take care of all of your family. Just make one trip for me.’”

A motivated Ali assembled a crew and set out on his piratical voyage, the first order of business being to find a bigger boat. After two days at sea, he and his mates found one, hijacking a Yemeni fishing trawler.

Six days later, on Feb. 18, a few hundred miles off the coast of Oman, the paths of the Quest and the pirate ship converged. “My guy said he saw the big masts on the horizon and thought it was the mast of a merchant ship,” says Babineau. “They should have turned around and gone the other way. But they didn’t.”

The pirates commandeered the Quest, took their four hostages, and brought aboard their arms and equipment. They allowed the four Yemeni crewmates to take their trawler and leave. The pirates steered the Quest towards northern Somalia.

Defendant Mohamed Salid Shibin appears in court.

The first word of the hijacking broke within hours of the siege. Scott Adam had transmitted an emergency SOS to the other boaters in the rally, who apparently alerted nearby merchant ships. The U.S. Navy was soon on the case; news outlets around the world broke the story. A four-day, prime-time drama at sea began. Four warships from the Navy’s Fifth Fleet were re-routed to make contact with the pirates and try to negotiate the release of the hostages. According to court documents, the pirates insisted they would negotiate only when they had returned with the Quest to Somalia.

According to the Navy, on the morning of Feb. 22, a pirate later identified as “Basher” fired a rocket-propelled grenade in the vicinity of the U.S.S. Sterett, the lead ship trailing the Quest. The Navy said the move was unprovoked and a surprise, since two of the pirates had boarded the Sterett to negotiate. An eruption of small-arms fire from the yacht followed the rocket-propelled grenade. In response, a party of 15 Navy SEALs raided the Quest. Two pirates were killed. Two were found already dead, killed by fellow pirates as they attempted to shield the hostages from gunfire. Jean and Scott Adam and their two new friends from Seattle were found mortally wounded. Fifteen suspects were captured.

While not disputing that the pirates fired first, Babineau and other lawyers for the defendants contend that the Navy took steps that compounded the situation. They say the Navy refused to allow the two pirates who had boarded the Sterett to return to the Quest, which angered their cohorts. They also contend that the Navy SEALs were already in the water approaching the Quest as part of a middle-of-the-night rescue attempt when the pirates saw them and began firing.

“The Navy took them on the ship and said, ‘Now you are ours. We are not letting you guys go back,’” Babineau says. “Unfortunately, that started to escalate things.” A spokesman for the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command declined comment.

The suspects were jailed in a brig aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise, another Norfolk-based vessel, where they were interrogated by FBI agents and housed for two weeks while a decision was made where to send them and what to charge them with. One of the suspects, a juvenile, was returned to his family.

The bodies of Jean, Scott, Phyllis and Bob were brought to the Enterprise, where an honor guard watched over their caskets for three days, according to Savage. A memorial ceremony was held on the deck of the carrier attended by several thousand sailors and officers in full dress before the bodies were flown back to the United States. The 14 prisoners were flown on a U.S. Air Force plane to Norfolk. The next day, a federal grand jury indicted them on piracy charges.

FOR CENTURIES, PIRATES were dealt with not in the courts, but at sea, summarily executed or cut adrift in a boat.

“Pirates were considered beyond the pale. They were outlaws. You could basically string them up … and nobody was going to ask any questions,” says Lindley Butler, a historian and author of the book, Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders of the Carolina Coast. They were universally condemned as “enemies of mankind,” attacking outside the territorial waters of states, without regard to the nationality of ships or crews, he says.

Blackbeard himself got something of a raw deal, Butler says, because the preemptive strike Gov. Spotswood launched was illegal. While he cultivated a murderous reputation, there is no evidence the infamous pirate ever actually murdered anyone, at least outside of combat, says Butler, who has participated in dives that have located artifacts from Blackbeard’s flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, off the Carolina coast.

But due process for pirates also has a surprisingly long history.

In colonial America, accused pirates and necessary witnesses had to be shipped back to Britain for trial in admiralty court, as was the case with Captain William Kidd (who had made a fortune plundering French shipping as a privateer for the King of England until he got sideways with some of his colonial investors).

That changed in 1700 when Parliament authorized trials abroad before seven-member “commissions.” The statute provided explicit due process guarantees: commissioners had to swear an oath of impartiality, and defendants had explicit rights, including the right to produce witnesses. Under the law, any conviction as a pirate required either the testimony of two witnesses or a confession.

In 1819, relying on language in the Constitution that gave it the power “to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas,” Congress adopted a version of the British statute. The law authorized “public armed vessels” to seize “piratical vessels” and permitted trials of those who committed “the crime of piracy, as defined by the law of nations,” on the high seas, if they are “brought into or found in the United States.” This language remains essentially intact in the U.S. criminal code to this day.

Two centuries later, however, the scope of the law remains unsettled, in part because there have been so few piracy cases over the years. Before 2009, the last pirate trial in the U.S. involved the captain and 11 crew members of the Confederate vessel Savannah who were captured after attacking a Union warship in 1861 during the Civil War. The jury deadlocked.

Two judges here in Norfolk have come out differently on exactly what constitutes piracy in separate cases involving groups of Somali pirates that fired on the Nicholas and the U.S.S. Ashland, while the ships were patrolling the Indian Ocean in April 2010.

U.S. District Court Judge Raymond A. Jackson threw out the piracy charges against the group that fired on the Ashland, an amphibious landing ship, ruling that the definition of piracy in the federal law must be limited to the definition understood at the time the law was enacted—in 1819—when piracy was limited to robbery on the high seas. Since the attack on the Ashland was unsuccessful—no robbery took place and the pirate ship was destroyed after the Ashland returned fire—the judge dismissed the piracy charge.

But Judge Mark S. Davis of the same federal district court reached the opposite conclusion in the Nicholas case. He held that the original law was written in broad enough terms that Congress must have intended that the meaning of piracy would evolve over the years. Piracy today, he ruled, unquestionably covers attacks on the high seas that do not include the taking of hostages or goods.

Davis cited a 1958 convention adopted by the United Nations Law of the Sea that incorporates a sweeping definition of piracy to include “any illegal acts of violence, detention or any act of depredation.” Davis ruled that the attack on the Nicholas could be prosecuted as piracy. The five defendants were subsequently convicted in a trial last November, and sentenced to life in prison.

Federal public defenders representing some of the accused pirates have criticized Davis’s reasoning. By referring in the original statute to piracy “under the law of nations,” their argument goes, Congress meant to include only crimes that were rooted in natural law, and were thus immutable.

The idea that law comes from a transcendent authority has long been in disrepute. But the intent of the writers and thinkers of that era is still relevant in understanding what Congress had in mind when it came to piracy, the lawyers contend. They have cited such authorities as Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language and the works of 17th-century theorist and philosopher Hugo Grotius as proof that piracy had a limited meaning.

Other legal experts say both law and common sense militate against defining piracy narrowly. “A legitimate Somali fisherman might carry one AK-47 for protection,” says David Glazier, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and a specialist in international law. “But a legitimate fisherman does not carry boarding ladders, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and a dozen AK-47s.” Any vessel found in international waters with that kind of gear should be presumed a pirate vessel, and anyone on board should be presumed a pirate, Glazier says.

A federal appeals court in Richmond heard arguments on the Nicholas case this fall. A defeat would be a blow to the U.S. anti-piracy effort, although it would not be expected to affect cases such as the Quest where the perpetrators succeeded in actually commandeering a vessel and the people on board.

TRUE TO THE COURT’S “rocket docket” reputation, the government secures agreements with 11 of the defendants in the Quest case to plead guilty to piracy and hostage-taking, barely two months after they land in the United States.

The price is a steep one: the deals mean each faces a mandatory life sentence, but they also avoid the possibility of being tried on murder-related charges that could bring the death penalty.

The interrogations have already yielded one central figure, a man named Mohammad Saaili Shibin, an onshore operator based in Somalia and experienced negotiator in piracy cases, whose specialty is divining the ransom value of hostages on the Internet.

The government alleges that, the day before they were killed, Shibin was doing research on the Americans to identify family members he could contact about a ransom. He was also to have been the point man in negotiations with the Navy if the hostages had made it back to Somalia alive. Shibin was arrested in Somalia in early April, following a joint U.S. military-FBI investigation.

Besides piracy charges related to the taking of the Quest, Shibin is also charged with acting as a negotiator in the case of a German vessel that was pirated in May 2010, and with extracting from the owners of the ship a ransom that was dropped from an aircraft into the ocean for the pirates to retrieve. The charges related to the German hijacking are among the first the U.S. has charged against a foreigner for piracy where neither the hostages nor the vessel had connections to the United States.

On July 20, the three accused triggermen in the Quest case are arraigned on murder charges before a magistrate judge in a Norfolk courtroom that is filled with lawyers, the bulk of whom represent the defendants. A superseding indictment alleges that the three “intentionally shot and killed” the four Americans “without provocation.” Their 11 co-conspirators have agreed to testify against their fellow pirates in exchange for leniency.

Mohamud Hirs Issa Ali in federal court.

“We have 11 cooperating witnesses in this case,” Benjamin L. Hatch, the lead prosecutor, says at the hearing. One of them is the former Somali cop who convinced prosecutors that he was ousted as the leader of the group before the firing began and did not participate in the shootings. Hatch also reveals that the Navy has video of the events surrounding the hostage ordeal that could be introduced into evidence at a trial.

The Quest itself, the government says in a court filing, has returned to the United States after being sailed to Djibouti by the Navy after the attack. It is to remain in the custody of the Navy, a crime scene made available for defense lawyers to inspect at the Naval Base in Norfolk, until the end of September. After that, arrangements are to be made to return the yacht to the Adams’ family.

With little or no ability to read and write, the defendants have the indictments read to them by translators. Polite, clean-shaven and quietly defiant, they each profess their innocence.

“This is not a crime I have committed,” Shani Nurani Shiekh Abrar, at 29, the oldest of the three, says through a translator. “It is just an allegation. I have never killed anyone.” Abrar is also charged with firing a warning shot over the head of Scott Adam, and ordering him, through another pirate who spoke some English, to tell the Navy that if they came closer the Americans would be killed.

The prosecutors agree to put off further proceedings until April. Among other things, the government needs to go through a process at the Justice Department to decide whether it will ask for the death penalty if the men are convicted. The chances are considered good that such a request will be approved; the prosecution has recently added a lawyer to its team who won the last death penalty verdict in Virginia, in a murder-for-hire plot that resulted in the death of a Navy officer.

The defense lawyers—who will have the right to appear before Justice to argue against death—say they need time to prepare. Some have started contacting private investigators with contacts in Somalia who may be able to find out mitigating information about their clients they could use to argue against death. But for now the lawyers are operating with a blank slate.

“This case is so much different than anything we are used to facing,” says Stephen Hudgins, a lawyer for Abrar.

In his office in Alexandria, Va., Neil H. MacBride, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, says he hopes such prosecutions will send a message about the resolve the U.S. now has for dealing with piracy, as well as provide a degree of closure to families of the victims.

“It is our hope that stiff sentences will get the attention of would-be pirates, and stop the attacks,” he says in an interview. “Piracy is a dangerous, deadly business. My kids love Pirates of the Caribbean, but that swashbuckling, romanticized notion of Hollywood movies bears no resemblance to the cases that we are seeing today.”

SIDEBAR:

OFF ON ANOTHER ADVENTURE: a brief biography of Jean Hawkins Adam ’66

The day before she died at the hands of Somali pirates, Jean Hawkins Adam ’66 wrote a short letter to her two grown sons, Brad and Drew. On a sheet of yellow legal paper, Jean told them she didn’t know how the situation was going to turn out, but she wanted them to know that she and Scott loved each other, had had wonderful lives and were doing exactly what they wanted to be doing, according to their father and Jean’s first husband, Bill Savage ’64.

Having the presence of mind to pen that succinct letter was very much in character for Jean, who was always focused and had a tremendous ability to get things done, says Savage.

Born in 1944 and raised primarily in Indio, Calif., Jean made it through Pomona through work and scholarships. Savage remembers the time a classmate asked Jean how she was able to take part in all the social events while everyone else had their noses to the grindstone. “She very blithely looked up and said ‘I learned how to study and pay attention in class,’” recalls Savage.

The pair wed in 1965. While Savage finished his M.B.A. at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Jean took a position with an anthropologist studying early childhood cranial bone development, which sparked her interest in dentistry. The couple returned to California, and Jean went on to dental school at UCLA, establishing a practice in Santa Monica. She became involved in the California Dental Association, American Dental Association and the California State Board of Dental Examiners, for which she served as president for two terms.

Jean was widely admired and well liked, says Savage, adding that the one “exception would be people uncomfortable with women in positions of power and influence.” No matter: “She would just plow right through them like a steamroller,” recalls Savage. “That was Jean. Enormous focus. Enormous ability to execute.”

Even after they divorced in 1991, Jean and her ex-husband remained friends and spent holidays together with the boys.

Through the years, Jean also remained close with a group of four other Pomona classmates, who called themselves the Sagechicks. Her decisive, outspoken side was balanced by her “inclusive and caring and very giving” nature, says Jackie Showalter ’66, who recalls that Jean would provide free dental work to low-income kids.

Jean had taken up piano and she would host “talent nights” at her home to give friends a chance to perform. She had a distinctly ebullient laugh. “You knew it was Jean” when you heard it, says Showalter.

There was depth as well. “A key thing for my memory of Jean in college, religion was very important to her,” says Showalter. “She would do her devotional every evening.         I remember her sitting on her bed and doing her Bible reading.”

When Jean met Scott Adam in the mid-’90s, both were already avid boaters. After they wed, they took their journeys to more distant waters. Jean got her captain’s license and their 58-foot sloop, Quest, logged more than 200,000 miles as the couple sailed the globe for adventure and to deliver Bibles to remote places. Jean was constantly updating the Quest website (still at www.svquest.com) and emailing updates to friends. “You would open it with anticipation,” says Margaret Haberland Noce ’66.

Noce also recalls Jean’s enthusiasm when she joined the couple on excursions to places such as Catalina and Santa Cruz islands. “She would say ‘OK, we’re off on another adventure,’’’ says Noce. “And we were. You always learned something when you were with Jean.” —Mark Kendall

Rebecca McGrew '85 in the recreation of Tom Eatherton's "Rise."

First came the stories. Wild tales of artistic feats that transformed Pomona College’s tranquil campus into a hotbed of avant-garde action some 40 years ago.

Then curiosity took over. Could the stories be true? If so, why did all that creative energy explode at that particular time and place? And why was it extinguished? Rebecca McGrew ’85, senior curator of the Pomona College Museum of Art, could only listen to so many recollections before investigating a chapter of college history that had acquired mythic status in the minds of alumni artists. If nothing else, she had to sort out the facts.

The result was a four-year project that has culminated in It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973, the most ambitious exhibition ever undertaken by the museum. The three-part show, organized by McGrew and Glenn Phillips, a contemporary art specialist at the Getty Research Institute, will fill the museum throughout the entire 2011-12 academic year. Developed as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980—an enormous collaborative exploration of Southern California art history initiated by the Getty Foundation—Pomona’s exhibition will be enhanced by an authoritative catalog and a performance series.

Viewed from the mountain of research done by McGrew and her colleagues, Pomona’s flash of radical brilliance is astonishing. In the catalog, scholar and critic Thomas Crow ’69 writes that the art created and presented at the College from 1969 to 1973 may have been “as salient to art history as any being made and shown anywhere else in the world at that time. Then a quiet, socially conservative college … the Pomona campus attracted some of the most distinctive artists working anywhere in the world. It also gave them, for that brief historical moment, an exceptionally sympathetic platform and showcase that succeeded in inflecting the terms of serious art making across a vastly wider terrain.”

It’s a period when a confluence of sharply focused faculty, curators, visiting artists and students produced ground-breaking installations, performance art pieces and other innovative projects that paralleled or foreshadowed developments in Los Angeles and beyond. Mowry Baden ’58, a widely admired but under-recognized artist, chaired the Art Department, and two forward-thinking curators, Hal Glicksman followed by Helene Winer, organized exhibitions by young local artists who bridged the gap between Post-Minimalist and Conceptual art.

As creative forces in the art world, they were more interested in ideas, performances and experiments with light, space and sound than static objects. The work of luminaries such as Michael Asher, Lewis Baltz, Jack Goldstein, Robert Irwin and Allen Ruppersberg inspired Pomona students who would also become renowned artists, including Chris Burden ’69, Judy Fiskin ’66, Peter Shelton ’73 and James Turrell ’65.

But the aberrational moment ended without being fully recorded. McGrew’s primary source was a mental archive, mostly composed of stories. There was one about Burden tossing lighted matches at a nude woman in a performance watched on a video monitor; another about Asher reconfiguring the galleries into a mind-altering environment, open 24 hours a day; and another about Ron Cooper setting up an electromagnet to drop a heavy ball bearing on a sheet of glass. McGrew also heard about experiments with water, balloons and fireworks. But the most frequently—and variously—told tale concerned Wolfgang Stoerchle, who got naked and urinated during a performance at the museum. The event was said to have cost Winer her job, provoking the studio art faculty to resign in protest.

Students take in a light sculpture by Robert Irwin, similar to the one he installed at Pomona's Museum of Art in 1969.

“James Turrell, Peter Shelton, Mowry Baden and Barbara Smith all talked about this crazy time and the notorious performance that became such a big thing,” McGrew said, recalling conversations with artists over a decade or so during preparations for exhibitions of their work at the museum. “It was so intriguing; I thought I would dig into it. But when I started looking through files, there was a much bigger story about the radical art being made at Pomona and how that happened.” What she didn’t know was how complicated it would be to reconstruct. 

McGrew officially began her quest in the fall of 2007, when she applied for a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation. Her proposal was accepted, but before she began a three-month stint of traveling and interviewing, the Getty invited the museum to apply for a research grant for an exploration of Los Angeles art history. That program led to another round of grants, enabling dozens of museums and educational   institutions to develop the exhibitions in Pacific Standard Time.

“I was going to proceed with this project regardless,” McGrew says, “but Pacific Standard Time allowed us to expand. It gave us funds to assemble a research team, work with Hal and Helene, travel for interviews with artists, buy digital recorders and have the interviews transcribed. We talked to everyone we could. The catalog has texts for all 29 artists in the exhibition. Some of the interviews were 20,000 words. They had to be cut down to 3,000 or 4,000 words for publication, but we kept some of the more anecdotal stories because they are just fascinating.”

Hap Tivey ’69, for example, says that he “wanted to be an artist who didn’t make something that would be commodified. The whole idea then was that art was not a thing, art was an experience.” His Fire Arch, made with Turrell for a theatrical nighttime event dreamed up by Professor Dick Barnes ’54 and staged in the quarry east of the campus, was an enormous structure illuminated by red phosphorous flares and blue carbon arc searchlights. “You walked through a shimmering red fire and heard the amplified sound of all those flares hissing,” Tivey recalls. “It was like walking through the entrance of hell. Two thousand people wandered through an atmosphere of churning red light with this huge blue bar behind it, which was Jim’s two carbon arc searchlights, facing each other. There was about half a mile of beam across the top of the pit.”

Another artist, Tom Eatherton, muses about Rise, his meditative light environment consisting of incandescent bulbs, two layers of nylon diffusion material and a wood support structure, inaugurated at Pomona in 1970 and reconstructed for the first segment of the exhibition. “All we needed was a little negative air pressure behind where the lights were,” he says. “The air goes through the cloth front surface, which is this beautiful nylon, but it does not go through the plastic behind. It makes a big balloon, a big tube that goes all the way around that curve. Nobody can see that. All they can see is the quality of light, and people go up to that cloth and … it’s moving. I mean I wasn’t trying to trick anybody. But an old girlfriend of mine took her 6-year-old son to Rise, and he reached down to feel the floor he was standing on, to see if it was there.”

Throughout the project, McGrew often felt like a detective—digging up facts, comparing stories and finding artworks. And it wasn’t easy. Glicksman shared his rich archive of photographs and documentation of his year at Pomona, 1969-70. But Winer’s records were sketchier and memories fade. Even coming up with a comprehensive list of exhibitions and their contents was daunting.

“Our files were so slim,” she says. “In some cases there wasn’t a checklist of works in an exhibition. For John McCracken [who died in 2011], we could never verify. We know he had a show [in 1971] because there was a press release. We know that he showed three works, but he had no recollection of what three works. All we have is a photograph of a long, horizontal red piece, which we published in the catalog.” In the exhibition, the artist is represented by Black Resin Painting I, a polyester-on-plywood work borrowed from the Orange County Museum of Art.

Hal Glicksman's time as director of Pomona's Museum of Art, from 1969 to 1970, is the focus of part 1 of the exhibition.

She also had a hard time tracking down examples of work by sculptor David Gray, who taught at Pomona from 1967 to 1973 and died in 2001. “I finally found that his ex-wife, who taught art at Claremont High School for decades after they moved here from Wisconsin, was still living in town,” McGrew says. “She had a 12-by-16-inch sculpture, made around 1971, that had been in their garden for decades. It was completely rusted, with holes in it. But we found a conservator to refinish it. It’s just beautiful.” Another piece, made of welded steel, lacquer, chrome plate and flock, turned up at the Music Center in Los Angeles. And after the catalog had gone to press, a long forgotten trove of photographs of Gray’s work appeared. McGrew was distraught, but now she views the belated discovery as the beginning of another project. “One of our goals is to bring the work of the lesser known artists to light,” she says.

Locating the right paintings by another faculty member, Guy Williams, who died in 2004, was yet another challenge. Old friends remembered particularly beautiful works made during his Pomona years, but it took a long time to find a fine example in a private collection whose owner agreed to lend. Then McGrew got a call from the artist’s grandson, saying that he had found another one in a storage unit. It was too late to include a reproduction of the painting in the catalog, but it will be in the exhibition.

As for what actually went on at Stoerchle’s performance and how that event related to Winer’s departure, some questions have been answered and others remain.

McGrew thought she had struck gold when a videotape labeled Pomona Performance turned up in the Wolfgang Stoerchle archive at the Getty Research Institute. “We were so excited because people recounted different versions of the peeing thing,” she says. “John White remembers Wolfgang shooting diamonds out of his foreskin. Other people said he was standing there trying to get an erection. They were conflating different performances. We thought we had found this wonderful thing that would show us what happened. All there was on the video was footage of him urinating, but we are going to show that on a little monitor because it was such a pivotal thing.”

Phillips, the contemporary art specialist, provides a more complete account in the catalog. Stoerchle started his five-part performance in March 1972 with an illusion of levitation, thanks to a strategically placed mirror. Then an assistant pulled a rug out from under him, causing the artist to fall on the floor, where he shed his clothes and stuck a toothpick up his nose to provoke a sneezing attack. “With each sneeze, he moved closer to a vertical position,” Phillips writes. “Finally, he moved back to the edge of the carpet, and urinated on the carpet in a series of short spurts.”

McGrew discovered that tales of Winer’s dismissal as an immediate consequence of the performance were untrue. But at the end of the academic year, her contract was not renewed. Stoerchle’s night at the museum was one of several issues—including her refusal to pour at a faculty tea—“that caused the administration some discomfort,” as Winer puts it.

In a catalog essay, McGrew writes that “one of the common outcomes of the turmoil of the late ’60s was the desire to return to conservative and traditional values in the arts, as well as in the wider social context.” David Alexander became the College’s president in 1969, in a tumultuous cultural climate. “Almost because of the turmoil at the time, the Art Department could slip through and do a lot of things,” McGrew says. “I think David Alexander was fed up with the Art Department because the artists were pushing boundaries and taking advantage. It was difficult for Pomona, fundamentally a traditional place, to really embrace that.”

Lloyd Hamrol makes a few final adjustments to the recreation of his "Situational Construction for Pomona College."

The challenge of crafting a coherent exhibition on such a complex topic was probably greater than doing the research. After considering many possibilities, McGrew’s team came up with a three-part show: the first focusing on Glicksman’s program of artists’ residencies and projects; the second, on exhibitions during Winer’s curatorial tenure; and the third, on the work of faculty and students.

“This is a tiny museum,” McGrew says. “If we had the space of the Museum of Contemporary Art or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, we would do this as one big show. It would probably be better that way, but we didn’t want to cram it in. With a staff of six, it’s been a huge, huge project for us, figuring out what works to show and where they would fit. But all the artists, gallerists and collectors have been so helpful and generous in lending material.”

In terms of installation, the first segment of the exhibition was most difficult because Glicksman worked with artists who produced phenomenologically-oriented abstract sculpture and environments. Initially, McGrew hoped that Asher would recreate his piece, which would have occupied a large portion of the gallery space, but he decided to do a new, conceptually related work, which takes up no space at all. The untitled piece consists of leaving the museum open continuously until Nov. 6, when the first show closes. That called for additional security and adjusting light levels to avoid damaging works on display. But Asher’s plan left room to recreate Eatherton’s Rise and Lloyd Hamrol’s Situational Construction for Pomona College, an installation of balloons, lead wire, plastic sheeting, water and colored light.

Winer concentrated on artists who adapted experiences associated with Minimalist and Post-Minimalist sculpture to performance art, video and conceptual photography. Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona will include works by John Baldessari, Joe Goode, William Leavitt and William Wegman that grapple with meanings of art. Part 3: At Pomona will offer a broader view of the artistic community at the College and show how the programs organized by Glicksman and Winer contributed to a dynamic creative environment. 

In the end, McGrew says, an inquiry that started with stories shifted its emphasis to “honoring and recognizing the careers of Hal Glicksman and Helene Winer and their phenomenal achievements and then to the artists who were here, the great faculty and students, and how it all coalesced. It was one of those key moments when things just jelled.”

SIDEBAR:

It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973

This three-part exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art, running throughout the 2011-12 academic year, will document a transformative moment for art history that occurred on campus between 1969 and 1973. The exhibition is part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, a collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world.

Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona
Aug. 30–Nov. 6, 2011

Focusing on 1969-70, when Hal Glicksman was curator/director of the museum, this exhibition features works by Michal Asher, Lewis Baltz, Judy Chicago, Ron Cooper, Tom Eatherton, Lloyd Hamrol and Robert Irwin.

 Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona
Dec. 3, 2011–Feb. 19, 2012

This exhibition focuses on the cutting-edge curatorial programs that Helene Winer presented at the museum from 1970-72, including works by Bas Jan Ader, John Baldessari, Chris Burden ’69, Gervan Elk, Jack Goldstein, Joe Goode, Hirokazu Kosaka, William Leavitt, John McCracken, Ed Moses, Allen Ruppersberg, Wolfgang Stoerchle, William Wegman and John White.

Part 3: At Pomona
March 10–May 13, 2012

This exhibition focuses upon the vibrant atmosphere for the arts created on the Pomona campus by the exhibitions organized by Glicksman and Winer, featuring works by Mowry Baden ’58, Lewis Baltz, Michael Brewster ’68, Chris Burden ’69, Judy Fiskin ’66, David Gray, Peter Shelton ’73, Hap Tivey ’69, James Turrell ’65 and Guy Williams.

Performance at Pomona
Jan. 21, 2012, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

This Saturday afternoon event consists of three performance pieces by artists representing each of the three segments of the It Happened at Pomona exhibition.

• A Butterfly for Pomona: A new pyrotechnic performance by Judy Chicago (Merritt Field), based on her Atmosphere performances of the early 1970s.
• Burning Bridges: A recreation of James Turrell’s  flare performance (Bridges Auditorium).
• Preparation F: A 1971 performance by John M. White involving the College’s football team (Memorial Gymnasium, Rains Center).

More information: www.pomona.edu/museum

John Stephens ’94 grew up reading fantasy literature, devouring both the classics such as J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Hobbit and just about any well-worn, paperback sci-fi novel he could find. He read them all and dreamed of writing one of his own someday. So when Stephens decided to delve into the genre, pulling double-duty with his daytime job as a television writer, he knew the tropes of fantasy literature better than most. And he was determined both to tweak them and bring his own voice to The Emerald Atlas, the first novel in what will eventually become a children’s fantasy trilogy.

“Of course, tweaking those tropes is easier said than done,” Stephens says, laughing. “But you have to address that from the outset, particularly with the fantasy genre, because fantasy stories come from fairy tales and we all know the tropes of fairy tales—the evil queen, the damsel in distress—so well. Everyone grew up reading them and watching them in Disney movies, so they’re square in your mind the minute you start reading fantasy literature.”

Given the reception that has greeted Atlas since its April release, Stephens seems to have succeeded in contributing his own witty, modern sensibility to the genre. The Wall Street Journal praised the book, writing that a “great story is all in the telling, and in The Emerald Atlas the telling is superb.” The School Library Journal gave it a starred review, saying, “Echoes of other popular fantasy series, from Harry Potter to the Narnia books, are easily found, but debut author Stephens has created a new and appealing read that will leave readers looking forward to the next volumes in this projected trilogy.”

Atlas tells the tale of three children—14-year-old Kate, 12-year-old Michael and 11-year-old Emma—who discover an odd blank book which magically transports them back 15 years in time, plopping them in the middle of a battle royale between a beautiful, evil witch and a kind wizard. The children soon grasp that they have the power to change the course of history and find out the truth behind the sudden disappearance of their parents.

“I really tried to get to a different level of emotional reality for the three main kids,” Stephens says. “If you read the Narnia books, the emotions of the kids are really flat. It’s not like the Pevensie children are all that fleshed out, at least not in the way we expect today. You don’t get inside their emotions or how they really feel. Kids reading today want to really identify with children’s characters and you do that through the specificity of their emotions. That’s what I thought I could bring to the table.”

Stephens’ love for the otherworldly predates the decade he spent writing and producing television shows like Gilmore Girls, The O.C. and Gossip Girl, springing from the evenings when his father read The Hobbit to him as a young boy. During a leisurely conversation on the front porch of his American Craftsman home in Hollywood’s Beachwood Canyon community, Stephens recalls later re-reading the book on his own when he was 12, calling it a formative experience that shaped the rest of his creative life.

“Tolkien creates the kind of reading experience I like, one that takes you on a grand adventure into another world,” Stephens says. It’s mid-afternoon and 39-year-old Stephens, trim and boyish, his face framed by rectangular glasses, is enjoying a cup of fresh-brewed coffee, something of a necessity for a man who typically begins his work day at 4:30 in the morning. His wife, Arianne Groth ’94, and 13-week-old son, Dashiell, are napping inside.

After graduating from Pomona, Stephens spent a year abroad and then went home to Virginia, earning his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. But what he learned at graduate school didn’t mesh particularly well with his natural skill set. “Nothing will teach you not to want to write fiction like getting your M.F.A.,” Stephens jokes. Translation: His interest in writing grand adventure stories ran contrary to his program’s emphasis on focusing on life’s small epiphanies.

Shortly after graduating, as he was watching the NBC hit medical drama ER on television one night, Stephens thought, “You know … somebody writes this stuff.” And with just that one thought in his head (and a lifelong love for movies and TV), he packed the car and moved to Los Angeles. Stephens’ one contact in town set him up with a manager, and he spent a year and a half writing coverage—that is, assessing and grading scripts—and doing a bit of journalism. Stephens then wrote a couple of spec scripts, which landed him an agent and a meeting with Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.

“She asked me to tell her about my favorite shows and I spent the next 45 minutes talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Stephens recalls. “I walked out of there thinking, ‘Well, that was a disaster.’” Nope. Stephens wrote for the well-regarded comedy-drama for four seasons before moving over to The O.C. Around the time he changed jobs, Stephens read The Golden Compass, the first novel in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Getting caught up in this great fantasy-adventure reawakened his desire to create one of his own. “It was like that Proustian moment: ‘Oh yeah, this is it. This is the thing I like doing,’” Stephens says.

Stephens spent four years writing The Emerald Atlas in the early morning hours before leaving for his television day job. “John has a deep love of writing,” Stephens’ friend and Gossip Girl co-creator Stephanie Savage says. “It’s what he does. So for him to write in different forms—for different audiences—only makes sense. It wouldn’t surprise me if he wrote a Broadway musical, a true crime thriller or an epic poem someday.”

But his choice of children’s fantasy was fortunate, since the genre is still booming, even in the post-Harry Potter era. In 2010, a year before the book’s publication, Publisher’s Weekly reported that Atlas created “the biggest buzz” at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, the annual international event at which rights to children’s books are sold. (In Stephens’ case, there was such strong interest that Knopf had snapped up the rights to the trilogy in an auction just before the fair was held.) PW also noted that the book got a big promotional push, including movie theatre advertising, and Atlas landed on The New York Times children’s bestsellers list in the spring.

Bookstore owner Maureen Palacios “fell in love” with Atlas after getting an advance copy, and she recalls later reading the first two or three pages to a group of elementary school students visiting her Once Upon A Time bookshop in Montrose, Calif. When she shut the book, “you could hear a pin drop,” she says. And later “their parents were calling begging me for the book. We sold out that day.”

So Stephens has an audience—and two more books to finish. He’s been working full-time for the past year on the second book, which is set to be published mid-2012. “The first book, you write for yourself,” says Michelle Frey, Stephens’ editor at Knopf. “Now you’ve got a bunch of people waiting for the next one. It’s a big difference.”

And, at times, Stephens says, a pretty big struggle. Before writing The Emerald Atlas, Stephens sketched an outline for the entire trilogy. He marked the big signposts, but he didn’t want to fill in too many details, fearing that too much planning would result in flat, programmed writing. “You read books that feel too outlined,” Stephens says, “books that read like screenplays. I wanted to know where I was going, but I like the journey to be part of it, too.”

However, Stephens found that as that journey progresses through three books, it becomes more about “getting the math right” and less about the thrill of discovering the characters. “With the second book especially, I’m conscious of what’s happening in the third book and not wanting to paint myself into a corner,” he says. “I have to make things happen where I’m not up against the eight ball in the third one and have to fight my way out.”

When he finishes writing the third book next year, Stephens would like to return to his old job, believing there’s a “great, balanced career out there,” one in which he could both develop television projects and write novels. “I’m not temperamentally suited to spend the next 15 years by myself in a room,” Stephens says. “At a certain point, you can take a year off a show business career fairly easily. People figure, ‘Oh, a creative hiatus.’ You take two or three years off and people wonder if you’re in a Tibetan monastery or a really intense rehab program. So, yes, it’s a big commitment. You hope the books work out and, if they don’t, that the career is still there when you get back.”

SIDEBAR: Time travel in Theory and Practice

After John Stephens ’94 finished the first draft of The Emerald Atlas, he handed it to his agent, who immediately asked: “So what theory of time travel are you using?” Stephens’ reply: “Well … uh … the one I’m making up.”

That answer didn’t pass muster, so Stephens began to research the different time travel theories frequently used in fiction. He found three common models. In multiverse time travel, featured recently in the mind-bending, sci-fi TV show Heroes, those going back and changing the past create a new branch of time.

At the other end of the spectrum is what’s called the predestination paradox, where a time traveler’s action in the past can wind up causing the historical event they’re investigating. J.K. Rowling employed that method in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third novel in her blockbuster series.

And then there’s the theory that Stephens wound up using in The Emerald Atlas, the idea of a single, changeable time stream that ripples and shifts every instance a time traveler visits the past. Example: Marty McFly goes back in time and alters the circumstances surrounding his parents’ first kiss in Back to the Future, and, when he returns to the present, mom and dad are well-adjusted and successful.

“That model is the most fun,” Stephens says. “You can watch things change. And you get to feel like you’re in on a big cosmic joke. Like I remember watching the end of Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox plays guitar at the prom, thinking, ‘Yeah, I know who Chuck Berry is.’”

But while mutable timelines might be the most fun, they’re also the most demanding on writers because of all the rippling changes. Since Stephens has always been the kind of reader who looked to see if writers were obeying the rules of the worlds they created, he was scrupulous to make sure his constructs held up, keeping elaborate flow charts on the wall of his office while writing Atlas.

“He was extremely meticulous about the time-travel elements of the story,” says Michelle Frey, Stephens’ editor at Knopf. “I couldn’t poke a hole in anything and, believe me, I tried.”

The strangest store in Los Angeles was born of a brainstorming session between two Sagehen smart guys.

Just two years out of school, Mac Barnett ’04 was the executive director of 826LA, the Los Angeles chapter of a national nonprofit that runs tutoring centers fronted by quirkily-themed retail shops that help pay the rent. Put in charge of opening a new 826 center in L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood, Barnett needed a clever concept, and he knew just the man to call.

Jon Korn ’02 and Barnett had met while both were performing in Without a Box, Claremont’s beloved five-college improv comedy troupe. Kindred comedic spirits, the two shared an offbeat intellectual humor that Barnett sensed would be perfect for his new venture.

So he asked Korn, who was working as a programmer of independent film festivals, if he’d help toss around some ideas, just like in the good old days.

“The answer was immediately ‘yes,’” says Korn, who laughs almost as easily as Barnett does.

After throwing out a few wacky ideas, such as a detective store and a submarine supply outlet, the pair settled on a truly bizarre concept: a Time Travel Mart. The “mart” aspect was meant as an homage to L.A.’s strip mall culture. The time travel theme simply tickled their mutual funny bone.  

This was in keeping with the 826 shopping schtick. Founded a decade ago by respected author Dave Eggers, the organization’s first tutoring center at 826 Valencia St. in San Francisco had added on a “pirate store” to meet the locale’s retail zoning requirements. The format stuck as 826 opened new centers, bringing a spy store to Chicago and a superhero supply shop to Brooklyn, to name a few.

For the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, Barnett and Korn decided that, rather than sell genuine artifacts from other eras (an expensive and uninspiring undertaking), they would create their own humorous and cheaply produced versions of historical and futuristic relics to fill the store’s shelves.

A plastic bottle of water was repackaged as “Anti-Robot Fluid.” A single white glove was boxed and labeled a “Duel Starter Kit.” Dog food became “Caveman Candy.” A ball of steel wool? “Robot Toupee.”

For the lawyer who has everything, Barnett and Korn decided to sell “dead languages,” such as Latin, in amber medical bottles. A favorite Father’s Day gift is an “ism” in a bottle—there’s Reaganism, Socialism, Optimism (bottled in 1967), Romanticism and, of course, Antidisestablishmentarianism.

With the help of the highly-sought-out designer Stefan G. Bucher, these simple oddities became lovely, meticulously crafted objects that appeal to aesthetes, hipsters and history buffs alike. Korn says the products’ quirks did present some vexing questions, such as: What should a bottle of elixir of eternal life cost? (Answer: $8.)

Barnett and Korn also wrote lengthy and often ludicrous copy for each item that went far beyond the necessary product information. They seized every bit of knowledge gleaned from fulfilling their Pomona PAC requirements and respective majors— Korn’s was history and Barnett’s was English with a concentration in Viking poetry—to create packaging rich with historical and literary inside jokes.

Take “Van Warwijck’s Dodo Chow,” which is really just a bag of birdseed.

“It’s a Dutch brand of dodo feed,” explains Barnett, who now works as an author of children’s books. “In the list of ingredients, ‘dodo poison’ is in there. That’s the only reference to the fact that the Dutch killed the dodos. You would have to both know that the Dutch exterminated the dodos and read the entire 50-name ingredient list to get this one joke. It’s about rewarding that one person.”

They’re esoteric, but the jokes work. “Every day people come in, they walk around the store, they pick stuff up, they read it and then they laugh,” says Shannon Losorelli, a manager at the store. “And they always say, ‘Whoever wrote this is brilliant.’”

Barnett credits their training in Without a Box for fueling their freewheeling imaginations. “A big part of improv is saying ‘yes,’” he explains. “That whole theory is drilled into you. If somebody puts out an idea, you agree with it and build on it. That’s the way we worked on this.”

In the end, the duo’s unorthodox approach to retail development worked. Three years after opening on Sunset Boulevard, smack in the heart of one of L.A.’s most up-and-coming neighborhoods, the Echo Park Time Travel Mart is a hit. The store has sold out of almost every product at least once, and each month a new item hits the shelves.

The mart’s quirky, ’70s-style aesthetic has made it an unlikely local landmark. Its burnt orange signage and brightly lit interior bring a kind of strip mall chic to an otherwise ordinary block. It’s not uncommon to see passersby stop in their tracks as they gaze up at the store and its dizzying slogan: “Wherever you are, we’re already then.”

Most importantly, the mart yields enough revenue to pay the rent, which keeps the backroom tutoring center running. As many as a hundred kids show up every day after school, and a roster of thousands of volunteers rotate in and out of the center, helping students complete their homework and school projects, write stories, and even publish books.

“The most fun I’ve ever had is going to the publishing parties,” says Korn. “Thirteen-year-olds do a book signing, their parents come, everyone eats cake.”

Thanks in part to the connections of 826 founder Dave Eggers, the Echo Park tutoring center has scored major support from celebrities including comedy kingpin Judd Apatow, ex-Lakers coach Phil Jackson and writer-director J. J. Abrams, whose production crew designed the caveman-meets-robot display in the storefront window.

But the Time Travel Mart’s customer base remains as diverse as the neighborhood itself. The other day, a priest who works at the church down the street stopped in and bought “Elixir of Eternal Life.” When Losorelli, the store’s manager, told Korn about the sale, he jokingly chided her: “You should have tried to upsell him on Latin.”