Laurel Weeks

Back from my last out-of-town speaking gig, at least for a while. Last week I had a great time in Cleveland at the Mandel Jewish Community Center. It snowed, which was a treat for this Southern California native! I was in Miami Beach the following Wednesday at a wonderful luncheon at the Miami Beach Jewish Community Center. Eighty attendees, great audience, wonderful Spanish-themed meal–plus a great tour of Miami Beach afterwards with friends. I just got back this Wednesday, and on Thursday I lectured for two hours at UCSD Extension’s Osher Institute on The Convivencia and Ferdinand and Isabella, then spoke in the evening to a great book discussion group at Congregation Beth Israel. Came home hoarse and exhausted, and very glad I “retired” because my voice can’t handle this much strain on a weekly basis. I had to add the quotation marks because retirement has recently been as much work as working ever was. I am off lecturing in Southeast Asia for Silversea Cruises over the holidays, then in late January, I am headed for a cruise gig in South America and the Amazon. But now a lull, and a chance to appreciate all these wonderful opportunities. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

 

 

Sometimes you just need to rest.  In 2004, I started writing UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH, and almost without taking my fingers from the keys began my first novel, THE FOUR SEASONS.  On the heels of that I wrote PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER, followed by THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER, and a novel in draft, THE INTUITIVE.  My most recent publication, THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER, came out in early 2014, ten years after I first decided to give this writing for adult audiences a try.  Publishing five book in ten years is a pretty rapid pace, but actually, since I finished THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER almost three years ago, my pace was five books in seven years, with all five appearing in print between May 2008 and April 2014, a six-year period.

I guess you could say I was on a roll.  Life intervened when my beloved partner Jim died in April 2012,  only a few months after a diagnosis of terminal cancer.  I stopped writing altogether because i didn’t want to be living with my made-up characters when I had the last few months with the central character in my real life. And he was indeed, quite a character!  Then, after Jim died, I decided to just let my life float, not trying to focus on anything or accomplish anything in particular.  I had another important job to do–reinventing myself and making a new life.  I couldn’t do that buried in another world.  (I posted a lot about this period, so if you missed that you can scroll back in this diary to read about my world during his final illness and after his death). Then, once I was feeling  restored to life, I discovered I just didn’t want to go to that difficult place where novelists live when at work.  Reinvention just hadn’t pointed in that direction.

It’s funny how when I say I am not writing now, people generally respond with something resembling the hope, or assumption, that it is temporary.  I’ll get it back, they seem to be saying, as if that’s the correct trajectory for my life.  I don’t ever recall anyone saying the opposite when I was writing, patting me on the arm and telling me that I’ll get my non-writing life back on track eventually.  I guess we are so oriented toward concrete outcomes that we can’t find much to praise in anything else.  Even a fallow field implies that its real purpose is yet to come.

One of the key concepts in Daoism is wu wei, often translated as “effortlessness.”  This is not to be confused with the couch potato approach to life, but going with what doesn’t have to be forced.  The field with the weeds and butterflies is closer to wu wei, although any analogy to human life falls a little short.  When the time is right to work on a novel, that feels like wu wei too. But it’s not feeling like that time now.

Sometimes I am on author panels where people say they just don’t know what they would do if they couldn’t write, and I feel like looking down the table and saying, “Really?”  My life is very full without a work in progress.  In some ways it is fuller. There is nothing like the thrill of seeing a book come to life, but there’s also nothing like the best drive you’ve ever made down a fairway, or an awesome put away shot in tennis, or a glorious morning walking in the park, or time to read or visit with friends.  Sometimes the effortless path, the truly sustainable one, has no end product. Sometimes it does.  Like writing a novel, you just have to keep going and see what happens next.

 

I knew I had been remiss at updating my diary here, but I was shocked to see how long it has been since I last posted!  Apparently I didn’t even post on the launch day for my fourth novel, THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER. Can I even call it my new novel since it it now nearly six months old?

 

Let me list a few reasons (not excuses–I am beyond thinking I need those):

 

I am not writing anything at the moment, and in that situation, I think less often about the kinds of things I might write about.

 

I have been utterly swamped with appearances in connection with THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER.  In June alone I had around thirty–averaging one a day, which means some days I had more than one.  Not all were precisely on the book.  I also taught a four-part course for the local Jewish Community Center on the historical period in which the novel is set, the centuries of Convivencia, in which Jews, Christians and Muslims all lived together in Iberia.

 

I’ve been traveling a lot.  I was in New York and the San Francisco Bay area promoting the book early this summer,  and spent three weeks just a few weeks ago cruising the Baltic in connection with my utterly fabulous side gig, enrichment lecturing for Silversea Cruises.   here i am, lecturing on the Vikings somewhere in the Baltic Sea.

 

And the biggest one–I decided rather suddenly to retire at the end of the Spring 2014 semester.  I had been having worsening problems with projecting my voice over the last year or so, and it got to the point where even using a mike in a small classroom of 35 students, I was choking and hoarse and utterly exhausted at the end of every day.  It’s a chronic inflammation of the supporting structure around my vocal cords, and something I can best address through not trying to project my voice at all.

 

And one bonus reason–for those of you who followed me through my last months with my beloved husband Jim, you may be interested in how I am doing two and a half years later.  I have rebounded well.  I have a new man in my life who has given me some new directions for my energy, most notably golf, which I have taken up with a dedication that surprises me.  I am also playing in a tennis league for the first time this fall, and doing some more cruising.  Not ready to write yet, but I do love it, so I suspect something will eventually show up in my head with the kind of insistence the women of my books have shown in the past.

 

For now, breathe, smile, repeat….

 

NOTE:  THE VENUE FOR THIS EVENT HAS CHANGED AND A SECOND VENUE HAS BEEN ADDED!   Please join Jennifer, Zoe Ghahremani and me at the GROSSMONT CENTER BARNES AND NOBLE  Sunday May 4, at 2PM.  A Padres game made parking too difficult at the library, hence the move.   Or, if it is more convenient, join us for a Repeat Performance  at the MIRA MESA BARNES AND NOBLE Friday at 7PM.   The format will remain the same.  Bring your mom and/or daughter to celebrate motherhood on and off the page!

http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/_blog/The_ProsenPeople/post/immerse-yourself/

 

All week in honor of the release of THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER, I am blogging for the Jewish Book Council.  Check out my first post, about the ritual bath known as the mikveh and its role in my book, and my own life.

We’re down to the home stretch before the publication of THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER!  To sweeten the wait for me was the news that another major reviewer, Kirkus, has given the book a thumbs up. That’s all four of the biggest early reviewers, and four positive reviews.  I won’t post the entire Kirkus review here because there are a lot of plot spoilers, but here’s the other content:

“Corona’s latest historical novel is a sprawling saga of Jewish identity and religious freedom in 15th-century Spain.”

“The richness of this life is a revelation.”

“A rich, exhaustively researched portrait of Spanish Jews at the birth of the Inquisition.”

If you are local to the San Diego or San Francisco Bay areas, I have a number of upcoming appearances, as well as one in Kingston New York in June.  Take a look at the calendar section on this website for details.  Thanks as always for your support!

THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER comes out three weeks from today.  In celebration, here’s another excerpt:

We are not the only traveler to Lisbon that summer.   Nearing the city we hear rumors of people dying of plague in cities to the north, and on the outskirts of Setúbal, we see columns of people leaving the city.  “Don’t go in,” they tell us.  A man points to the haze on the skyline behind the city.  “They’re burning corpses. The cemeteries can’t keep up with the dead.”

I toss that night on a straw mattress in the sweltering attic of an inn, whose windows are sealed tight to keep out the disease.  The rats scurrying across the roof sound as big as squirrels, and the droppings on the floor make my heart pound at the thought that they have a way of getting in.  The vision of their yellow teeth, beady eyes, and wormlike tails is so unnerving that I sleep the rest of the night in a chair with my feet curled up so they can’t run across my toes.

By the next nightfall we have found only a deserted farmhouse, where we devour a bottle of wine, part of a round of cheese, and dry sausages we find in the larder.  The next day we leave a few coins to reassure ourselves that the owners must be briefly away rather than lying dead somewhere of the plague.

East of the fishing villages at the mouth of the Tagus River, we see a family huddled by the side of the road. The woman is slumped in her husband’s arms, while next to them a small girl holds a crying baby.  The man’s shirt has been torn away, revealing horrible black swellings on his neck and back. His eyes are haunted and wracked with pain.  His wife turns to me, and I see a bloody froth escape from between her pale lips.

Our guards cry out in horror and send their horses at a gallop.  I call out after them to stop. How can we leave children there, with their parents dying?  My father’s expression is a mix of revulsion, fear, and grief.  He makes a cutting motion across his throat and gestures to me to follow as he gallops away behind the guards.

He is right, I know. Taking the children with us will not save them, and I can’t comfort them without dooming all of us.  Still, I see the little girl’s terrified eyes and hear the baby’s wails for hours.

 

Less than one month until publication.  Thought you might enjoy reading a little passage.

 

“Senhorita Riba?” Judah Abravanel is standing a few steps away. “My wife sent me to see if you were all right.” I dab my eyes with my sleeve. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m not a very good guest.”

“You are the guest I expected you to be.” His eyes are solemn. “Does this have to do with what you started to tell me the other day?”

“I’m not sure what that was.”

“Perhaps I can help. I think what you pretend to be is not who you really are.” He gestures to the mosaic design in the fountain. “Like this,” he says. “You might say, ‘this is a fish,’ or ‘this is a flower,’ but they’re shattered pieces put together to look like what they’re supposed to be.”

“I am supposed to be a Jew,” I tell him, surprised that I have said it aloud. […] “My sisters don’t have any trouble believing in the Hanged One, but I can’t. I tried for a while, but it didn’t work.”

“And now you can’t be either a Jew or a Christian, while all around you everyone seems to care a great deal about which one everybody is.”

“I think I would like to live as a Jew someday,” I blurt out. “Openly, I mean.”

“Your father should live his remaining days in peace. He’s done everything he could to keep his family safe, and you should respect that.” “But when he’s gone?” I ask. “What about then?” “Don’t do anything drastic that you can’t take back.”

I feel as if he has stolen something from me, but then again he doesn’t know my secret. “Actually,” I say, “my baptism might not count. My mother washed it away in the mikveh, and then the church records burned. Maybe I can still choose for myself.”

Judah’s face is grave. “There are people who would drag you to church to splash you with their water the minute they hear this. You’re best off never mentioning it again.” He thinks for a moment. “The Holy One works in strange ways. Perhaps you have a different fate from what seems possible now.”

Chana and Rahel run into the garden. “Papa,” Chana says, her arms reaching only part way around his belly. “What’s taking you so long? We’ve been ready to sing for hours!”

“Well, then,” he says. “We won’t keep you waiting any longer.” The girls’ laughter is like music as they lead him into the house.

Another strong review of THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER, this one from Publisher’s Weekly:

Amalia is descended from a long line of famed Spanish cartographers, including her father, who has spent his life making maps for Spanish royalty. As the Spanish court in the 15th century moves to persecute those who live openly as Jews, Amalia’s family changes its name, attends church, and swaps its mezuzah for a crucifix, though behind closed doors, they continue to practice their faith. When her father receives a commission to help Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese prince, map the newly explored African coast, Amalia accompanies him to Portugal. As she grows to womanhood, Amalia’s Jewish identity is strengthened by her enduring friendship with the poet Judah Abravanel and his family, the birth of her daughter, and a passionate (but doomed) affair with a Muslim poet. When she returns to Spain as an old woman, the political climate has further shifted, as Tomas de Torquemada spearheads the beginnings of the Spanish Inquisition. Through persecution and exile, Amalia clings to her identity as fiercely as she clings to the family atlas—a unique and priceless book created by her family and passed down through the generations. Occasional reminiscences from Amalia as an old woman stall the plot a bit, and the thematic connection to mapmaking is sometimes tenuous. But Corona (Finding Emilie) depicts the time period in great detail, and a cast of richly drawn characters adds further depth to a fascinating look at an era rarely explored in historical fiction.

Just received a wonderful review for THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER, from BookList:

“It’s January 1492, and the king and queen of Spain have issued an order expelling all Jews who refuse to convert to Christianity. With one day remaining to comply, 67-year-old Amalia Cresques waits alone in a room empty except for the chair she sits on. She is waiting for her grandson to arrive. Together, they plan to go into exile. She cannot bring her most treasured possession, a handmade atlas created by her father. As she contemplates her imminent departure, Amalia reviews her long and varied life as wife, mother, family matriarch, and converso, hiding her Jewish faith and forced to live as a Christian. Corona (Penelope’s Daughter, 2010) brings to life one of the most tumultuous periods in European history. Her Amalia is the perfect character through which readers will experience these turbulent times as she spends a lifetime struggling to honor her faith and survive. Vividly detailed and beautifully written, this is a pleasure to read, a thoughtful, deeply engaging story of the power of faith to navigate history’s rough terrain.”

This on the heels of another wonderful review from Library Journal:

“In her fourth historical novel, Corona  (Penelope’s Daughter; Finding Emilie) imagines the life of a Jewish woman in 15th-century Spain. Starting life as a converso publicly living as a Christian while being secretly taught Jewish practices by her mother and grandmother, Amalia longs to follow openly the faith that she loves. She soon joins a Jewish community, but her life continues to be shaped by conflicts between religious belief and societal forces, first during a love affair with a Muslim man and then culminating in the Inquisition and expulsion of all Jews from Spain in 1492. VERDICT Despite the title, Amalia’s mapmaker father doesn’t play much of a role in the story, though one of Amalia’s most treasured possessions is an atlas he creates. The novel’s primary strength is Corona’s loving re-creation of the details of Jewish life during the era and the particular attention paid to the role of women in keeping religious rituals alive. Fans of C.W. Gortner’s The Queen’s Vow may especially enjoy getting a different perspective on Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand here.”