Tag Archives: spirituality

Magic Realism Blog Hop 2016: Mortality and eternity in writing

by

mr bloghop small 2016Magic realist novelist Evie Woolmore ponders the permanence of words and the distillation of ideas.

I have lost two people very dear to me this year, and have suffered two more bereavements of a different sort. And as so often follows witnessing the mortality of people and situations, I found myself planning my own funeral and the things I wanted to remember. Yes, that I wanted to remember, not that I wanted others to remember about me.

My personal beliefs are, in a sense, irrelevant in this context but when I lose something important, I always end up back with my writing again to remind myself of what still belongs to me and is unaltered by the passage of what others do and are or don’t and aren’t. So I re-read all my books and a lot of my other unpublished writing, and picked two passages that I want to be read at my funeral, not because I want to impress, depress or profess to others, but because they crystallise what I feel the greatest sense of possession over: my ability to capture what I most want to say in my writing, and how magic realism allows me to do that.

Magic realism is, for me, the opportunity to go beyond the limits of others’ imagination and test only my own. Can I capture the potential of an idea without constraining it? So here is a single paragraph that I think shows what magic realism does best, and what I think it has allowed me to do best: to catch the most nebulous and intangible of ideas in a fleeting moment of sense.

This extract is from the first chapter of my novel The Salt Factory, about a little girl who has extraordinary healing powers. Thelonia Jones, reluctantly returned to England to face up to her past, has just observed the girl bring a dying seagull back to life. The extract I’ve chosen however is not the healing itself, but what happens shortly afterwards as Thelonia’s worlds of wintry Colorado, an English summer, her past and her present begin to coalesce around her. Thelonia has just met the little girl’s protective relative, and the hostile reception has disorientated her.The Salt Factory by Evie Woolmore

I shiver in the baking heat of the yard, slow to notice that the little girl is tugging at my hand. I bend down quite in spite of myself, and feel the girl’s lips brush my cheek. The smell of the sea and the cry of seabirds blossoms and fades like a night-flowering cactus, and for the briefest of moments I wonder if this is what the gull felt like when the little girl put her hand on it.

 

There is nothing strikingly magic realist about the sentences in this paragraph. It could be taken quite literally that a rush of blood to Thelonia’s head has augmented her sense of reality, her senses themselves, much as I outlined in last year’s blog hop post. But for me, magic realism often relies on that very conflation I described when introducing the paragraph. It is about the layering of one thing on top of another, images, senses, ideas. Thelonia shivers in the heat. The sensations of being beside the sea remind her of something altogether more exotic from the dry heart of the America she has come to call home. She dislikes children but she allows the little girl to kiss her cheek. It is the promise innate in the contrast, in the space between the two extremes. And in magic realism, the ‘extremes’ are reality and magic, the actual and the possible. They push each other further away and pull irresistibly towards each other.

In this short paragraph from another of my novels, Equilibrium, Epiphany – an Edwardian medium – is about to conjure up the physical form of her spirit guide Rosina in front of a packed theatre and several close witnesses.

equilibriumThrough the strands of her loose blonde hair that fall in front of her face, she can see the conductor’s beady gaze peeping over the edge of the orchestra pit. He has watched her a dozen times already but still his eyes widen when he glimpses her ankles, so distracted by this enchantment that he is oblivious to what he really sees. But that is at the heart of Epiphany’s success and she has learned to be glad of it.

 

Do our eyes widen when we read magic realism because we want to be distracted by the enchantment? Do we wish to be confounded, transported, challenged, thrown out of our imaginative literary comfort zones into some place we have never been before? And are we willing co-conspirators in our own oblivion, determined not to see the joins between the magic and reality?

I think so. In fact I depend upon it. I relish it, love it, respect it and cannot really live without it in my writing. I’m playing a game with reality, I suppose. But that game is ultimately about contrast. It is about the eternity of ideas juxtaposed with the very temporaryness and mortality of words. There is a theory in creative analysis (I think) that suggests that art works or pieces of music only actually exist when they are seen or heard by someone. I am certain that my writing will cease to have relevance after I have died. But the ideas will live on, and for a fleeting moment when my words are read, the magic in them will become real.

***

Evie Woolmore is the author of three magic realist novels, available through all Amazon sites. To find out more about Evie and her writing, have a wander around the allonymbooks website searching by the tag Evie Woolmore or magical realism, or download some free samples for your Kindle. You can also find some great novels by other allonymbooks authors here too.

And if you follow this link, you can read fellow allonymbooks author Cadell Blackstock’s magic realist blog on Northern Exposure.

This post is part of the Magic Realism Blog Hop. About twenty blogs are taking part in the hop. Over three days (29th – 31st July 2016) these blogs will be posting about magic realism. Please take the time to click on the frog button below to visit them and remember that links to the new posts will be added over the three days, so do come back to read more.  Zoe does a great job curating this every year, and the blogs are always worth reading!  

 

 

LIMITED SPECIAL OFFER! Download Evie Woolmore’s Rising Up for free today and tomorrow!

by

smaller_ru

“A highly enjoyable novel, a blend of historical and contemporary fiction with a dash of spiritualism and magic realism” ~ Spiritual Wisdom Magazine

“One of the best books [on the Holocaust] I have ever read” ~ Katharina Gerlach

“Simple and beautiful, haunting and poignant” ~ Leigh Podgorski

To coincide with the Magic Realism Blog Hop 2014, download Evie Woolmore‘s haunting novel of the Warsaw Ghetto for free from Amazon , for two days only – 3rd and 4th August.

Tom Macindeor is an itinerant English teacher, spending the summer in Warsaw in the hope of finding out the truth about his grandfather, a Polish resistance fighter. But when he hears the voice of Ela, a young woman trapped in the Jewish Ghetto of 1942, a window opens not just on his past but the future of the ghetto and all those who live in it. Should he share what he knows of their fate, or will Ela’s search for the truth about her own family doom them both?

Find out why the Historical Novel Society’s reviewer recommends Evie Woolmore’s magical realist novels “to readers who enjoy historical fiction with spiritualist influences”

Find out more about Evie on her webpage, read an opening extract, or find out about what influenced Evie to write Rising Up.

Indie Book Reviews (12): British Indie Authors (3)

by

This week, allonymbooks author Evie Woolmore reviews Alan Williams’ novel The Blackheath Seance Parlour (available from Amazon)

My own interest as a writer in the spiritualist world of the Victorian and Edwardian eras drew me to this novel, but if you are looking for a good historical novel with plenty of authentic detail then there is much to appeal here. Middle-aged sisters Judy and Maggie Cloak have inherited a shop in the windswept, weather-beaten village of Blackheath on the outskirts of east London, but it is doing badly in its current incarnation as a sweetshop and the Cloak sisters are getting desperate. Judy has ambitions to escape both literally and metaphorically through a gothic novel she is writing, while Maggie seeks solace in drink from her sense of abandonment as a daughter and a prospective wife. Their lives change with the arrival of the rather mysterious Mrs Walters, a woman of some spiritual ability, who soon helps the sisters transform the shop into a focal point for many contrasting things: gossip, hope, faith, belief, mystery, and all the trappings of the occult. But the initial success of tea leaf reading is not enough for Maggie, Judy or Mrs Walters, and the story explores how the paths of each woman diverge as they seek their own resolutions with the past and the future. The novel is also intercut with long extracts from Judy’s novel, through which she explores certain aspects of her own reality and the society to which she imagines belonging.

The other main character in this book is the village of Blackheath, and Williams notes at the end of the book that he wanted to do justice to the community and its history as part of his aim in writing the novel. He captures very effectively the bleakness of the heath as it must have been in the Victorian era, and with a subplot around the murder of two girls, he infuses a certain chill in the already atmospheric spiritualist action. He has also done great justice to what must have been substantial research of spiritualism in the Victorian era. In the scenes where the sisters and Mrs Walters are reading tea leaves and the glass ball, and later the seances themselves, he has drawn very authentically on reports of the time, both of the fake and the genuine, and that level of accuracy will please readers of historical fiction and those interested in spiritualism.

It’s interesting too that he has essentially focussed on three middle-aged women, and he explores the social confinement these women must have felt in being unmarried while also seeking to be independent. Each woman is seeking something different as a consequence, and while their stories are interesting I wasn’t always as convinced by the historical authenticity of their actions and particularly some of their dialogue. Without giving too much away about how the story develops, some more spiritually-inclined readers might think it a shame that the most talented character spiritually was also the least attractive personality. It also might be seen by some readers as not doing much for a feminist agenda: the social emancipation and independence each of these women is seeking is in a way undermined by the lengths they go to to achieve what they want, and in some ways none of the women comes out of it very well. I was also a bit disappointed by the way Mrs Walters’ storyline resolved itself and not entirely satisfied with what happens to Maggie. But to discuss that at any length would be to spoil it for those who haven’t read the book.

As in my own spiritualist novels (search for Evie Woolmore), there is some discussion about the science vs religious faith vs spirituality conundrum, and this appears in the last part of the book only. It would have been interesting to do more with this much earlier in Maggie’s arguments with Father Legge, although it makes a very fitting climax dramatically in other respects. The book – though quite long – is generally well-paced, although I personally didn’t engage as much with the extracts of Judy’s novel. I think there could have been fewer of them and shorter ones too, without detracting from the part they played in reflecting some of the real-life action and the issues that arise for Judy as a consequence of writing the book.

This is a historically detailed novel, which I’m sure residents and those familiar with Blackheath will much enjoy for its local portrait, and which will provide a good escape on a wintry evening or two.

*****

Evie Woolmore is the author of historical novels with a spiritual twist. If you enjoyed The Blackheath Seance Parlour, you will probably enjoy her novel Equilibrium too, available at Amazon.

Indie Book Reviews (8) – British Indie Authors (2)

by

This week, allonymbooks novelist Evie Woolmore reviews novels by two other British authors.

Salvation by Harriet Steel (Amazon UK and US)

How historical does a historical novel have to be? From the dramatisation of facts and characters to stories simply set in the past, the challenge for any writer is to balance authenticity with narrative drive. It might be historically accurate but is it a good story? Harriet Steel’s novel Salvation, set in the England of the first Queen Elizabeth, does a pretty good job of balancing these two aspects, and gives us a romance, a spy thriller, and a history lesson in one.

Tom Goodluck, a clerk with ambitions to be a playwright, is having an affair with Meg, a lady of reasonable wealth whose husband is thoroughly unpleasant. But when Tom’s employer is found dead, Tom is charged with the murder and must leave the love of his life to save himself. Meg too is soon forced to run away and the novel is, in one sense, a weaving of their respective stories as they try to survive in the harsh social and religious realities of Elizabethan England. But Tom has also met Alexandre Lamotte, who not only puts on Tom’s play in pre-Shakespearean London, but has a double life as a spy for the Queen’s main agent Walsingham. Ms Steel uses the stories of these three main characters to show many complexities in England at that time: the persecution of the Catholics, the tensions between England and Spain, and the brutalities of being poor.

The novel is peopled with a large number of minor characters and it covers enormous ground geographically and in the passing of time. We are reminded of how long news took to travel in the sixteenth century, and how violent that era was. There are a couple of quite brutal scenes which may make those of a tender disposition feel a little pale, but many would argue that it is the responsibility of a historical novelist not to shirk that responsibility. On that same point, for this reviewer there was perhaps a bit too much historical information at times: while Ms Steel’s dialogue and description are extremely well crafted, there are quite a lot of descriptive passages, particularly in one historically significant section near the end (which I won’t spoil by naming) and this is perhaps where the ‘historical’ overtakes the ‘novel’ at times. For in doing justice to Ms Steel’s excellent research, the pace is sometimes slowed. Nonetheless, this is a really good read, and I couldn’t help thinking at the end that it could have made an excellent first novel in a series featuring Tom and Lamotte.

~~~~~~~

These Fragile Things by Jane Davis (Amazon UK and US)

These Fragile Things is an essay on survival: what does it mean to survive? How do we define successful survival? And when one’s life has changed dramatically, how are those around us dragged in to our experience of surviving? When teenager Judy is almost killed in 1982 by a falling tree, her parents respond in very different ways. Her mother, Elaine, is bogged down by the practicalities while her father, Graham, makes a pact with God. In this intense, emotionally complex novel, we witness (in the Biblical sense as well as the literal narrative sense) how Judy’s survival impacts not only on her parents, but those around her. And we wonder – along with all the characters in the book – whether and how that pact with God has manifested itself in the deeply spiritual visions Judy then has.

This book could be seen as an exploration of the impact of the embrace of religion on routine domestic life, but that would be to oversimplify what I think the author is trying to do. This book is more about our desire to explain what happens to us, to justify the tipping of the scales of existence to one side or the other, and our desire to maintain an equilibrium when everything changes. For me, the novel became particularly interesting once Judy began to experience her visions, and the author has done a clever balancing act herself by showing the impact of these extraordinary claims by Judy on two religious figures, Sister Euphemia from Judy’s new convent school, and Father Patrick, Graham’s priest. Their negotiations of their religion with the tensions of the real world are an interesting counterbalance to Graham’s absorption in Catholicism as the means of his salvation and Judy’s.

Without giving away the plot of the novel, what becomes apparent in the last part is that Graham’s initial evaluation of what it means for Judy’s to survive is challenged. Just as the novel explores in great detail the dynamics of a marriage under pressure, and the pervasive influence of memory and the past in shaping our present choices and how we remember what is happening to us right now, it also explores the dynamics of guilt about that survival. When Judy is labelled the Miracle Girl, she becomes the focus for everyone else’s grief and trouble, not to mention the focus for some equally faithless and lurid speculation about her family. Judy is positioned as responsible for the fates of others because hers seems to have been decided by God.

I would like to have read more about what Judy herself thought about that. We learn quite a lot about Judy’s experiences of her visions, but less about the impact of their consequences on her, such as what she feels about all the people who flock to her door. And while the author has evoked the social and cultural atmosphere of 1982 very effectively, for me there is a bit of a muddling in the narrative voice between the subjective stream of consciousness of Elaine and Graham in particular, and the omniscience of the writer, which occasionally makes Elaine and Graham sound a bit too objective about what is happening to them.

This novel will be about different things depending on who is reading it: about the internal pressures on a family in a crisis; a meditation on how teenagers and their parents negotiate changes brought on by growing up; about the difference between religion and faith and the sheer power of belief. The claustrophobic emotional intensity of the characters makes this novel unputdownable at times, but whatever you believe about Judy, this book will make you think.

Love letters

by

This week, allonymbooks novelist Evie Woolmore reflects on a theme which has emerged from the books she reviews.

Although I tend to review indie-published novels with a magical realist and/or spiritual theme, there is another quality that runs through many of the books I read for review: the desire by the author to share knowledge or experience that matters deeply to them. It is not surprising that these qualities surface: after all, how often are we told as writers to ‘write what we know’? But recently I have come away so much more often than before with this feeling, that I thought it worthy of discussion.

I’ve written and published as a ghostwriter for some years, but all along I have been writing my own novels – Equilibrium, Rising Up, and most recently The Salt Factory – because I had something specific I wanted to say. The wide-ranging aspects of spirituality – from ghosts and mediumship to faith, healing, and other ‘psychic phenomena’ – have not been particularly well explored in fiction, at least not in the realm that sits between the believer and the cynic. I wanted to write in that middle ground, exploring how characters deal with spiritual phenomena, how they respond to them, what questions they ask and what questions are raised in the reader. And certainly several of the novels I have read echo my particular intention to some degree: Leigh Podgorski’s Desert Chimera and Tahlia Newland’s Diamond Peak novels do the same thing although in rather different ways, exploring their authors’ own interests in other ways of seeing the world, other ways of living and existing if you like, through their fiction.

But there’s another type of fiction which I mentally sub-categorise as the Love Letter, in which authors share a different kind of passion. This is where authors draw on themes, ideas or facts they feel provide a rich ground on which to build their fictional development. Many times these work very effectively and provide an atmospheric backdrop to a book: Kirsty Fox’s Dogtooth Chronicals (reviewed here) is a novel which succeeds very well in this way. But I find at times it can go beyond the mere use of research and the incorporation of authentic detail. The novel becomes a voice for something, often marginalised, highly academic or controversial, that the author feels is important. These are themes which perhaps might not survive a commissioning editor’s inbox or an agent’s perusal, for they become so much the foundation of these novels that a commercially-minded editor or agent is bound to think that the novel will not appeal to a wide enough audience. These themes appear too specialised and the novel is too specifically built around the idea to have a broader attraction to the generalist reader, who is reading for entertainment.

All of which has led me to wonder to what extent indie publishing has enabled people to write more novels of this type.  Indie publishing is a marvellous and powerful way for every writer to find their voice, to say what is important to them. Indeed, these novels can be analogous to collections of matchboxes or candlesticks, thoroughly beautiful in the eye of the owner, appreciated, valued and understood in all their intricacies, intricacies which the owner/author is only too glad to share with you. But as with any craft – a painting with too much of one colour, a chair with one arm longer than another, a play where the actor keeps breaking the fourth wall – while this particular feature of a novel can be very successful as s device, at times the passion can obstruct the story and the pacing. It takes a fine balancing act to engage the reader enough to take them on a journey into an unknown, afresh area they may not be that familiar with, while keeping them engaged enough in the real reason for the story: the characters and their own journey. The characters’ journey can, in books that are more Love Letter than novel, become secondary to the journey the author wants to take the reader on, and in those instances the book becomes bigger than the novel, as it were.

Is a novel’s purpose to educate? At times, perhaps yes. Is it written in order to open our eyes to something new? In the case of science fiction, magical realism, and fantasy that is certainly true. But it is also written to entertain. And while just as in the collection of matchboxes, there are always sellers as well as buyers, other fans and enthusiasts to share the fascination, no conversation can ever survive on one topic. A novel is a conversation between writer and reader. But at times it can become a love letter, sent out into the unknown, so passionate and devoted in the hope that the reader will respond in kind.

If you are interested in reading any of Evie’s books, please visit her page or download samples from her pages on all Amazon sites.

Indie Book Reviews (7)

by

The books reviewed by allonymbooks author Evie Woolmore this week share strongly imagined worlds.

Demon’s Grip by Tahlia Newland (Amazon UK and Amazon US)

DPeakDG2.2The third novel in the Diamond Peak series by Tahlia Newland is a somewhat different book to its two predecessors. Perhaps that is not surprising, for over the course of a series of books, the pacing will vary, and the narrative will bend and flex as it moves towards its concluding volumes. Unlike other serial novels, like the Harry Potter books, Ariel is on a long linear journey, and so the books will vary on that journey. Continue reading →

Indie Book Reviews (5)

by

We mark the reopening of the book review list with a review of Leigh Podgorski’s novel, Desert Chimera.

Desert Chimera by Leigh Podgorski (Amazon UK and Amazon US)

Leigh Podgorski’s biography notes “her scholarship and fascination with the diverse cultures of the Earth” and her novel Desert Chimera is a testament to both that attention to detail and her desire to do justice to the beauty and complexity of those cultures. Set over a period of less than twenty four hours in the evocatively named Desert Wolf Café located “on a lonesome slice of highway” in Death Valley, four characters are brought together to witness another two fight for control of their entwined destinies. These six very diverse individuals with lovely names – café owner Eppie Falco, handyman Leo Monroe, travellers Mack Starr and Consuelo Vasquez, and the two central characters Luke Stone and Armand Jacobi – are well painted by the author and their natural, well-rounded dialogue plays a significant part in drawing the reader in. Continue reading →