"Penina's Letters" takes place in the beach cities along Santa Monica Bay, with a fictionalized beach town named Refugio squeezed in between El Porto and Grand Avenue. The town of Refugio replaces the iconic towers and power plant between the water and the dunes of El Segundo. The style includes epistolary writing, bildungsroman, and satire and irony. The time of the setting is not explicitly stated, nor is the war involved given a specific name, but readers may think the story takes place in the 1960s and the early 1970s - in any case, it's not a history book. The main characters include Salvador (Sal or Salty) Persequi, the first person narrator, just returned from the war; his girlfriend, Penina Seablouse; and their two friends Puck Malone and Henry Killknot - all of whom have known one another since high school, and in the present time of the story are in their twenties. Draft segments of "Penina's Letters" appeared in The Boulevard (Summer 2012), a publication of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. Parts of the "How to Surf" chapter appeared in different form on Berfrois on September 29, 2015. "All the fuss and hullabaloo, and a war just peters off. But none of that matters here. This isn't going to be about the war. I don't have any gory stories, nothing painting war as hell. Hell is an ocean with no waves. This is going to be about surfing and how I paddled out to live on the water after throwing Penina's letters off the end of the Refugio jetty" (from the "Separation" chapter). File Under: Ocean Surfing Love Letters War Epistolary Bildungsroman Santa Monica Bay Beach Cities School Work Family Friendship Self-deception Literary Fiction Folk Song Narrative.