During the psychedelic 60s I fled from the smoggy brown of Southern California's deserts to the brilliant haze of San Francisco. I lived amid a swirl of day-glow color on Haight St. and attended the San Francisco Art Institute. After graduating with a degree in Fine Art, life got in the way and I found myself working in a large corporation and married with a daughter. But despite that, I never lost my love of art even though the process of creating it myself became more and more difficult. Finally, my passion for painting and drawing was taken over by a passion to write and I am now in the middle of the fifth draft of an historical novel.
Cutting Room Gem: The Pennsylvania Countryside
Mary Cassatt sat on the window seat in her bedroom, wrapped in a blanket against the predawn chill. The countryside lay below in silvery inkiness; the sky just above the horizon beginning the transition from black to pewter. Her cheek rested against the cold glass as she thought about her childhood in Europe. The family lived in Paris for two years and in Germany for another two. The children attended local schools and she remembered the wonderful whirl Europe was then, a magical place of beauty and art. But when her older brother Robbie died the magic faded and they all returned home, pieces of their hearts left behind in a foreign cemetery.
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Gem From the Cutting Room Floor About Mary Cassatt
Mary and her mother, Katherine walked through the glittering gold and red lobby of their hotel. A carved, white marble fireplace mantle reigned over a cheery blaze and supported Christmas angel decorations. A pianist serenaded the guests with Silent Night and a spicy aroma drifted through the smoky air. Gentlemen dressed in tailored black tie and tails with silky vests chatted over brandy snifters filled with dark amber cognac. Ladies in satin and lace posed with fluttering fans on tufted chairs, their heads demurely bent toward companions. As the two women approached the mahogany and brass front doors, Katherine said in French to the doorman as he opened the massive portals and bowed.
“We need a taxi.”
“Certainment, Madame,” he replied.
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A Writer's Labor of Love
Titled, A Luscious Illumination my historical novel is set in 19th century Paris and is about a woman, Berthe Morisot who is an actual person and one of the four founders of the Impressionist art movement.
She is stunningly beautiful and comes from a wealthy grande bourgeoisie family who overcomes the severe limitations put on women of her class to mold herself into a painter of soaring talent. She uses the healing power of the sun to battle debilitating bouts of depression and to capture in paint some of the most shimmering visions of light created by the Impressionists.
The great masters Renoir, Degas, Monet, Pissarro were her good friends and learned to view her as an esteemed equal. She was also linked closely with Edouard Manet and married his brother, Eugene. She managed to blend a professional art career with marriage and motherhood, a feat unheard of in her class and era, so is an archetype for today's women.
The novel was named as a semi-finalist in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Writing Competition for 2010 in the novels-in-progress category.
Gems From the Cutting Room Floor
It's one of the marvels of the creative process - characters take on a life of their own and grow way beyond what the writer originally intended. While the author's fingers fly across the keyboard, the villains, protagonists and just plain common folk that populate the story vie for attention like the children of too busy parents. They grow in dimensions never consciously considered by their creator, they say and do things totally unexpectedly and they sometimes take over.
The following are scenes that were deleted from A Luscious Illumination for just those reasons but are still interesting in their own right. Some deletions were removed because of my proclivity for pendantic ramblings about history...
A Luscious Illumination
New Orleans - the Crescent City, The Big Easy, the home of Laissez les bonnes temps rouler is coming back with a vibrant, jazz-filled French Quarter and way too much luscious and fattening food. It is also the home of the yearly literary festival, Words and Music, put on by the Faulkner Society. Rosemary James and Joseph DeSalvo, Jr. are owners of the house on Pirate's Alley where William Faulkner wrote his first novel, Soldier's Pay. They live upstairs in true New Orleans historical surroundings and operate a bookstore downstairs where they have put together a writer's conference extraordinaire for the last 20 years.
