Things We’ve Handed Down.

by Susanna

My great-grandmother Cleo lived in simple, wood-framed house on her family’s farm. During her lifetime the road running in front of her home wasn’t paved or even named. Her mail was directed to a rural route number. Behind her house was a large barn filled farm equipment, feral cats, and towers of hay that were as close to mountain climbing that a kid from the sandy, flat lands of South Georgia could get.

When I asked my father about my great-grandmother, he shrugged and said she was an orphan and came from people named Hornsby.

She died when I was around ten. Being a selfish child, I coveted the upright piano that sat on her back porch. Yes, she had a piano on her porch that weathered the harsh heat and electrical storms that built up in the afternoons. The keys looked like old, yellowed, chipped teeth and made an awful twangy sound when pressed. I was so upset when my father came home with his grandmother’s inheritance: a stack of old quilts. Practical things that were made from unmatched scraps and intended for warmth. (Keep in mind these were the years before quilting became chic.) I was a disappointed little girl, no piano for me, just ugly, useless, old quilts.

Two years ago, when visiting my childhood home in South Georgia, I found the quilts rotting in a closet. I pulled them down and examined them again. This time, I didn’t see the ugly scraps, but the beautiful patterns and the slightly uneven stitches done by my great-grandmother’s own hand. Maybe from my years of writing in silence, I felt this odd sorrow that her work should be stowed away and forgotten. So I bundled the quilts in my car and brought them home. I washed them on the gentle cycle and let them air in the sun. Now they are displayed on the chairs and bed in the guest room where I write. Maybe I’m a little woo-woo, but I like having my great-grandmother’s art around me, keeping me silent company as I write my stories – my own art.

Liz Fichera discusses CAPTIVE SPIRIT

Today Liz Fichera is stopping by the Mojito Literary Society to answer some questions about her awesome book Captive Spirit. Liz’s vivid prose captures the culture and surroundings of the Hohokam, a tribe of Native Americans that lived in the desert around modern day Phoenix. Her book is a fabulous coming-of-age/ adventure / love story that is suitable for both adults and young adults. I gobbled her book up in a day and a half. The pacing is exhilarating as Aiyana and Honovi escape Spanish traders and outwit Apache tribesmen.

Your book Captive Spirit is set in the lands around Phoenix in the sixteenth century. Can you tell us about the archeological evidence that shaped your story?

First of all, thanks for having me on your blog today! It’s fun to take a break from our usual Facebook discussions about chocolate, wine, and Italian food—although not always in that order.

It wasn’t the archeological evidence as much as it was Hohokam history that shaped and inspired CAPTIVE SPIRIT. The Hohokam Indians lived in what we now know as southern and central Arizona from approximately 300 BC to 1500 AD. They traveled to the Sonoran Desert from the ancient Mayan and Aztec cultures and existed peacefully as farmers and master canal builders until around 1500 AD when they vanished for reasons unknown. It was the Pima Indians who called them “Hohokam” which means “Those Who Have Gone.” That, specifically, is the nugget of information that intrigued me to write the novel.

Regarding archeological evidence, my Phoenix neighborhood literally sits upon what was once Hohokam land. Archeologists have found traces of their pit houses, pottery, and bits of jewelry and clothing, most of it is catalogued and housed in the Phoenix Heard Museum where I spent a lot of time doing research. You’ll find petroglyphs on rock faces in lots of places in the desert. I’ve included some of them in the CAPTIVE SPIRIT book trailer, which will also give you a flavor for the terrain. Much of it is still very rugged today.

Did you draw inspiration from other Western writers or Native American myths when writing Captive Spirit?

I am so intrigued by Native American culture and legends, not just the Hohokam. It’s hard not to be inspired and awed by it when you’re surrounded by so much of it in Phoenix. As far as I know, I’m the only person who’s written a novel about the Hohokam. Given their cool history, I cannot for the life of me understand why.

The story moves across many miles. Did you drive or hike Aiyana and Honovi’s journey?

Oh, yes! Aiyana and Honovi’s journey covers not only the Sonoran Desert but the mountains known today as the Mogollon Rim. I travel to the little mountain towns of Payson, Forest Lakes, Overgaard, and Heber on a regular basis as we have a cabin near there.

Can you describe your writing process? Do you outline your entire story, or do you plot just a few chapters ahead? Do you write an entire rough draft, or do you polish each chapter before you progress? Do you use note cards or a flowchart?

I wish that I were that organized but I am not. Generally, I start with an idea in my head and take it from there. While I might jot down little bits here and there, most of it stays in my head. So, usually my first draft is horrible. I spend a lot of time on rewrites and editing. That’s really the hardest part. Getting the story on the page and seeing it come to life is pure fun.

How did you learn that Carina Press wanted to publish Captive Spirit? A.K.A “The Call”

Last January, I saw a tweet from Angela James where she said, “We’re hungry for historicals! Our editors want historicals!” So I shipped off CAPTIVE SPIRIT and hoped for the best. In March, as I was having coffee with a couple of my girlfriends, I got “The Call.” Much hyperventilating ensued and I think I may have choked on the scone that I was noshing. The rest is history.

Thank you so much for stopping by! You can read an excerpt of Captive Spirit at Liz's website: http://www.lizfichera.com or buy it at Carina Press and other booksellers.

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About Liz:

Liz is an author from the American Southwest by way of Chicago. She likes to write stories about ordinary people who do extraordinary things, oftentimes against the backdrop of Native American legends. Her debut historical romance novel was published in June 2010 by Carina Press. Don’t hesitate to connect with her around the web and especially at her web site because it can get real lonely in the desert. http://www.lizfichera.com/

Susanna Ives Interview

One of the founding members of The Mojito Literary Society is interviewed on Book Lovers Inc. Find the interview here and learn more about Rakes and Radishes, her FIVE-STAR reviewed historical romance and literary sensation.

In Memorium: Barbara Parker

If anybody ever asks me to trace my development as a mystery writer, I'll plant a big X on the spot marked by Barbara Parker. Her "Suspicion" series featuring Miami lawyers Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana showed me what crime fiction could be -- intelligent, sharp, laced with tension. She grounded her plots securely in the motivations, secrets, and desires of her characters, who were flesh and blood on the page, fully alive in the reader's imagination. I could smell Miami, feel the salty money-drenched heat of it. Most importantly, she created a relationship between her characters that was real and flawed and seismic. And hot. Pyrotechnic.

I didn't know she'd died until this morning, when I was researching her for a piece I'm writing on the craft of the short story. I was lucky enough to participate in a contest she was judging, luckier still to be a finalist and receive my manuscript back along with her notes in the margins, and a five-page letter offering some of the most spot-on feedback I've ever received. I retooled the piece as suggested, like the other finalists, and when I won, I knew it was because I'd received a master class crash course in the art of short crime fiction.

And today I learn that she died last year. I read her guestbook, filled with praise and glowing tribute to the person she was, the writer she was. I can attest to both.

So I'm lifting a mojito to you, Barbara Parker, a real one with yerba mate and cane sugar and muddled lime. I still have a crush on Anthony Quintana. I'm convinced he's in Miami right now, tangible and warm, reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, smoking a fine cigar, his dark curious eyes casing the boulevard.

Her Face is a Map of the World

OK, I am not a billboard fan. There they are, large and ugly, trying to make you buy stuff you really don't need. Occasionally, there are a few entertaining ones, and the odd one that distracts you from your driving as it reminds you not to text because that will distract you from your driving. But I have a dark sense of humor. The only ones I tolerate are the South of the Border ones because they occupy my children for a good 40 minutes on the highway.

Still, the other day, I saw one which just got under my skin. Which is sort of what the advertiser wanted, but in a whole different way. It was a for a plastic surgery outfit, and it promised that with some Botox, a little stitching, and a couple other procedures, I could reveal the “Real Me.” You know, I'm just not certain that the real me is skinny, perky (but numb) boobed, and incapable of expression. The real me scrunches up my face a lot, from laughing, from frowning, from being puzzled, and from just trying to make kids laugh. The real me has had and nursed 3 kids, you can imagine where my breasts are. And let's not even discuss the skinny thing.

I know I am not supposed to love my body. I know there is a whole industry devoted to making me feel bad about it, and offering reassurance, or solutions. My body is fat and old – or at least old as defined by a popular culture that put female obsolesce at about 30 -- and sometimes it doesn't work that well. But here a little secret for you: I love my body. I really do. It lets me walk about, it made me a bunch of babies, it breaths, it eats, it lets me do fun things that I think my parents would rather not read about but which do require full sensation, and it gives my soul a place to live.

It shows the real me, the real me is not an airbrushed image that stand still and looks pretty. The real me has rough hands from washing dishes (try as I might to avoid that.) The real me has eaten far too many meals, but I enjoyed them for the most part. Not to mention the odd drinking bout. I'm not going into any details here, but academics like to pack it away and get pickled. So don't bother, I can drink you under the table. I'm sun burnt and wind burnt and scared in odd places. That's the legacy of traveling to all sorts of places and falling off a wide variety of things. I've been sun burned in India and the Outer Banks. I have scars from falling off French rocks, and since I didn't die from these adventures, I'm pretty pleased with my souvenirs, even if my most recent sunburn was at the playground minding my children. And them, boy howdy, they have given me the waist length breasts and a wide variety of lines around my face. A friend of mine's mother refers to her wrinkles as battle scars and wears them with the same dangerous defiance as a viking warrior with one eye and giant gash. The real me, at least part of the real me, is a mother and I'm OK with showing that.

What I would not be OK with, is erasing all that. In a sense one is remaking one's image, but in another one is removing one's physical history from one's body. And that is a sad thing. I've always loved Harrison Ford's face and all those rugged men who look like they have seen places and done things. Why is that so wrong for a woman? Why can't “her face be a map of [her] world?” (And her still a beautiful woman?) Why are we so encouraged to unmake our histories and stay in a perpetual teenage-hood? True there is pressure for plastic surgery, hair implants, and girdles for men, but not the same as there is for women. Is it a reflection of societies disquiet with powerful women, an urge to keep us young and compliant (with pliable skin)? Or is it that we so worship youth; equating it with vigor, vitality, and above all healthy fertility? Is society's compulsion due to convention or genetics? Or is it simply marketing? We can remake you and make money, so let's do it? Much like Listerine and halitosis. First came the cure, then came the defect.

Still I love my body, and I'm good with it being part of the real me.

I'll wait for the paperback...

I've spent a lot of time in bookstores. Wandering from shelf to shelf. Touching the books. Taking in the smell of the paper. And occassionally reading. I've taken friends who say they "never liked to read" into my favorite bookstores and helped them find that one book that will spark a love of reading. I've watched new parents try to find their babies first book. Laughed when someone had put copies of the Bible in the Science Fiction section. Is it just me or are the chairs in bookstores the most comfortable chairs in the whole world? Yes, I've spent a lot of time in bookstores, and one question I always ask never fails to get a few odd looks.

"Well, when does it come out in paperback?"

Ask this question, and atleast one person will look at you like you're the strangest creature they've ever seen. It's usually the one with a stack of brand new hardcover new releases in his or her arms. They can't fathom why someone would want one of those icky little pocket sized books. They don't look serious or intellectual. In fact, you find them abandoned on airport benches across the country. They don't look neat and tidy wedged onto a jammed bookshelf. They don't keep that "brand new" look for very long. Does she buy them because they're cheaper??? Does she have something against cardboard???

No...

She...I mean I...buy them for the same reason a lot of people don't. They bend quickly. You get those lines down the spine from holding the book open in one place too long. the corners start to tatter from shoving it in your purse, or backpack, or pocket, or glovebox too many times. There are smudge marks from your coffee spilling on the edges of the pages. Vaguely Cheeto colored fingerprints under certain lines. By the time you've reread the book 5 times page 65 is missing, but you already know it by heart anyway.
I buy paperbooks because you can tell they are LOVED. That book becomes more YOURS than any mint condition hardback book ever will. Those unbent, untattered books depress me. They don't look like anyone has ever really loved them. Ever fallen asleep on them and bent the pages back too far. Ever left it out in the rain for a minute or two because they were reading in the sun. You know a book is beautiful, and well written, and inspiring, and funny...when it's falling apart.

That's why I always wait for the paperback.

The Day the Brownies Made Me Think

by Abigail

I'm a foodie. The crazy kind. I think of parmesan reggiano as a staple. I keep assorted colors of quinoa in my pantry, and think it amusing to make tri-colored quinoa dishes. I use whole grains and flax meal. I have opinions of butter (West Country with Maldon sea salt, thank-you.) I cook things from scratch and rant about why o why would anyone ever buy those god-awful meals kits? (Seriously, doing the same thing yourself with real ingredients takes about 10 minutes more and makes a 10 times the difference. Ask and I will tell you how. At length. With arm gestures.) Indeed, I claim to despise all sorts of nasty frankenfoods, or edible food type substances. Naturally my children hate my cooking.

Still, I get cranky with some of my kind. They do so like to prate and babble about natural as the be all and end all of good. Esp when it comes to food. But sadly, key phrase repetition is all most of them grasp. Subtlety is a concept as far removed from them as what natural really is. Natural is simply natural. It can be better, say beet juice instead of possibly-hyperactivity inducing red-dye #40. On the other hand cancer is completely natural. Being eaten by wild animals is completely natural. Plutonium is natural. I'd really rather you didn't use it in my food, thank you very much. Cheese puffs and hair dye are completely unnatural, and by golly, I do so like them. Unnatural preservatives, on the other hand, actually do have their uses. Sometimes you need things which can last unnaturally long times. And sometimes, those preservatives are less bad for you than dipping things in salt, or make things tastier than a long lye bath. My problem, mind you, comes when everything is preserved to a fare-thee-well and beyond, as apposed to special cases. And while were are chatting about preservatives, let me just add that the dreaded sulfites that people get so worked up about are as natural as they come. Sulfites are pretty much sulfur. You know, the really stinky mineral. I can't help but think that if something has a box on the periodic charts it's even more natural than cracked wheat or broccoli. Allergies are natural too, btw.

Don't get me wrong. I still – mostly – despise frankenfoods. And one day I will get around to bashing McDonald’s and the Fast-food crap dispensers (and I mean that quite literally considering what ends up in the burgers) as they so richly deserve. I mean quite apart from asking us to eat a mix of ground up cow parts and cow poop, one has to take a moment to ask why on earth they need 17 ingredients in a “Chicken-ish Nugget.” Or why they have to treat the fries in such a wide variety of poly-syllabic chemicals. (And now, just to piss people off I will point out that a potato is made of many poly-syllabic chemical compounds all by itself). Or the awfulness of meals in a box. Or the pseudo spaghetti sauce that Prego and it's nasty ilk serve. Right there, that alone is enough to justify the Italians declaring war on us. But they are clearly an easy going people. That and we have a giant army and rich tourists.

Still, I must confess those frankenfoods have their uses and their virtues and to be a fair and decent person one must acknowledge them. And to acknowledge them one must first acknowledge that human beings come in wide varieties with a wide variety of needs. It's easy to despise artificial sweeteners until one becomes a diabetic. The purists dismiss the diabetics desire to have a candy bar, and not make themselves sick. The purists believe they should just learn to live without, or have only a tiny taste. Of course, the purists don't approve of candy bars in the first place, so they don't really get what the lose means. Likewise, the vegetarian. Now someone full of the militant rigidity of a teenager might be willing to eat lentils and greens. But I actually like meat. I just feel bad about making animals suffer for it. So I enjoy a lot of products that were once much like beans, until a wide variety of chemicals and a laboratory/factory process that would make Dr. Frankenstein himself blanch, turned them into something much like sausage patties, or burgers. (Avoid the fake bacon, sometimes only pork fat can play the role of pork fat.)

And then there were the brownies. I love brownies. I love to make brownies, the simplicity of chocolate, butter, flour, sugar, eggs. The way you can play with them by adding cocoa, or nuts, or spices, or a dozen other things to create all sort of variety (One day, if you are good, I shall tell you of the cherry, cream cheese, and peach brandy ones.) Still, I have friends for whom such things are sickening. I don't mean in the the moral or dietary outrage kind of way. I mean in the roiling gut, auto-immune kind of way. For them butter isn't something to be slathered on warm bread, it's a prelude to bloating. Wheat means their immune systems will attack their intestines. Which sounds kind of painful. Eggs, can mean swollen lips and trouble breathing. I think we can all come together on agreeing that breathing is really rather important.

Which brings me to the brownies that made me think. One day I was sitting around, drinking tea and eating brownies with a friend. This is not a radical act, but in this case it was an act of defiance against an almost religious view point. Why? Because I was eating brownies with a friend who can't eat my brownies. My brownies would harm her. We were eating frankenfood brownies. Wheat, egg, dairy free. Simple, ordinary, everyday, taste-like-brownie, brownies, with the exception of the fact that they simply weren't. One wonders how they are made. However, they are made it is very much not natural. Strange and bizarre alchemy must be done to turn things not of wheat and gluten to taste just like things of wheat and gluten. The binding of the eggs replaced by clever chemistry, the richness of butter, likewise.

So one must inevitably come to the conclusion that frankenfoods, at least some frankenfoods, have their uses and virtues. It's not the frankenfoods which are the problem. It's the zombification of food, when all the food offered is strange and unnatural. When it's not broccoli and potatoes, but broccoli essence turned into a vitamin and shoved inside a potato which has been dehydrated and reformed into a stick which is then coated in potato flavoring and deep fried. Just eat the damn broccoli and potato. Stop mucking about with that. But know that sometimes, you have to have a brownie, which is in no way except taste and texture, a brownie. But, like regular brownies, it should be a rare and special thing.

Long Live Complexity.
And Brownies.