Here and Gone

At 4:44am, on 4/11/11, Monica Wilson passed beyond the veils. Monica was the great, majestic friend who showed me her Han Dynasty jades and told me the story of her life and tragedy in the Chinese Court more than 2000 years ago ... and I knew this was a story that was mine, too, and I had to write it as a novel.

She touched thousands of people in the Pacific Northwest with her energy and charisma; she steered her complicated, extended family as matriarch and anchor of passionate good sense;  she bore and raised four exceptional human beings, helping each of them understand their exceptional past lives; she guided children of the Sakya Monastery sangha through the beginnings of Dharma practice in Buddhist Sunday School.

She read cards and astrology charts for a huge clientele, helping people find balance and hope, while divining the World's Changes in their struggles.  She was a glutton for information (oh, Gemini!) and snacked on conspiracies. (We got off on challenging each other.)

Monica's wild intuitive talent was grounded by expert critical thinking, and her leadership of spiritual discussion groups (aimed at really raising consciousness) transformed the strange into the straightforward. For so many people, hanging out with Monica raised our tolerance threshold for weirdness into the stratosphere.  

She changed us, her friends and clients, collaborators and onlookers.  The space left empty by her passage out of this world into the Other is large.  

We will fill it, by becoming the people she taught us to be.

Vale. 

 

Who's That Girl?

A new review of YU is up at the blog "Culinary Carnivale," a delightful melange of reviews, recipes, and reflections.  And the reviewer, who it turns out lives here in my town, is the wonderfully-named Dhympna DuMaurier.  I just had to say.

Book Promotion and So Much More ...

Today, YU and I sponsored a day of the Spring Fund Drive for WFHB Community Radio in Bloomington, Indiana -- my home town, and current place of residence. See www.wfhb.org for live online streaming.

Is this something more than a way to get my book mentioned twice an hour, all day and night, heard in six counties? Well, yes. I have volunteered with WFHB since 2007 in the News Department, and its accomplishments in service to the six-county area are astonishing.

As a full-power FM community broadcasting non-profit, WFHB is is run and programmed entirely by volunteers, more than 200 of them, plus four paid staff members. This makes the station's content, format, planning and administration fully accountable to the community -- its volunteers and listeners.

With local news and election coverage, a free-form music mix, free publicity for service non-profits, and generous focus on local bands and venues, WFHB does more with its under-$250,000 budget than other community stations do with twice the money and more paid staff. I hope YU readers can tune in or log on, enjoy, and support a leader in community media!

On the Road Again

I am confirmed for a reading of YU at Village Books in Fairhaven, WA (just south of Bellingham) at 4 pm on Saturday, August 20.

The Prince's Speech

I had one of those “the world is full of holes” experiences last night while at my fourth viewing of the movie “The King’s Speech.”  It was generated by my having gone completely fangirl over Colin Firth two months ago, after seeing this movie for the first time. 

Firth is an actor I hadn’t noticed much until “The King’s Speech” (not every female goes bonkers over “Pride and Prejudice” or “Bridget Jones”). Two factoids, one from a magazine article and one from a fansite, connected in my brain this time when Bertie, the Duke of York, finally plays that record he made in Lionel Logue’s studio … and hears himself speaking Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech without hesitation or flaw.

Factoid from article: Firth’s performance of “Hamlet” while studying at the Drama Centre “was the stuff of drama school legend.”  I can believe that.  Factoid from fansite:  Firth was set to finally, finally perform Hamlet professionally in 2001 for a new theater company headed by a former Director of the Drama Centre.  Then Firth had to withdraw because a film’s shooting schedule was moved up.  He wrote a very nice apology to the theater company and the ticketholders, but Lord, I can just imagine what life was like around his house for the next month or so. 

Now to “The King’s Speech.”  When the Bertie’s recitation of “To be or not to be” played on the gramophone, it struck me that this is the first time the public has heard Colin Firth speak those lines. 

The significance of this is that we, the movie audience, only heard Bertie’s reading – because there is no “Colin Firth Hamlet” shading our reception of the words.

Call me over-particular, but that was such a critical moment in the story, any tiny thing that could have prevented the audience from being wholly involved with Bertie would have warped the experience of the rest of the movie.  If a memory of seeing “Colin Firth’s Hamlet” had intruded, the performance would have been compromised.

(Sure, they could have used a different passage of Shakespeare, but it wouldn’t have fit the story, the characters, or the theme even half as well, would it?)

In YU I have Ross Lamos pause, astonished by a realization of the details and choices that led to him to stand in the Albert Jarro gallery holding a tray of exquisite, dangerous jades.   As Shakespeare said through Hamlet, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends / rough-hew them how we will.”

Holes in the world open up, and it feels like we're being torn open, sometimes. But what future might be pouring in? We certainly can't know at the time.

I remember some great actor, maybe Albert Finney, years ago, playing Hamlet as being age fifty or past, with a production interpretation built around that.  Never say never, Mr. Firth!

Another Rave Review for YU

Alan Chin is a well-known GLBT novelist and blogger. His review of YU: A Ross Lamos Mystery is now online and will appear in four publications under his byline.

Give it a look!  He makes me blush with happiness.

Oh, and -- ads for the book are in the current issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, now on news stands through April; and in both print and online versions of The Other Paper, an alternative weekly out of Columbus, Ohio.

On the Page Again

Just got notified that my short story, "The Stronger," will be published this Spring in the 2011 edition of the Bacopa Literary Review, a print journal out of Gainesville, FL. 

"The Stronger" is the title story of my 4-story collection that I privately call the Papaw Project.  Back in 2007, I found stashed carefully in a trunk several short memoir story-sketches my grandfather had written in the 1930s, sketches which thinly fictionalized his family legends and his own experiences growing up as a bookish farm boy in Southern Indiana just before World War I.

Some quality of half-seen treasure in these sketches called out to me, the middle-aged granddaughter.  I chose four of them and took the fictionalizing further.  Fiction is not only the lie that tells the truth, it is the lie that reveals the truth.  I have now finished 2 stories, am rewriting a third, with the fourth in outline, waiting.

And now the title story will see the light of day!  Thank you, Bacopa Literary Review!  I will be back here with more information about where this journal can be purchased.