Another great review of The Renaissance Club came in this week! I’m excited whenever a reader connects with the layers in the story. Reviewer Seana Graham understood the two main female characters and their quests to become fulfilled, creative people. In one case, young May Gold is trying to unfold her innate creativity. In the other case, elderly Eva is trying to regain her lost momentum as a painter. Graham describes how their stories revolve around their historical heroes, Bernini and Michelangelo. Thanks to time travel, these heroes can act in the present as their real life muses, helping the two women shape their creative lives anew, with more awareness. I love the way Graham also considers the time travel trope in fiction.
Escape Into Life, an arts and culture magazine, posted the review here.
Included with the review are links to my author interview by Fiery Seas Publishing, and another interview I did for the book blog TooFullToWrite.com. I discovered that I really enjoy talking about my writing process and influences, because I’ve given it a lot of thought, and like any writer’s, mine are quirky and probably not like most other writers’.
Creativity & Making Choices
A big part of the story of May Gold in The Renaissance Club is about her discovery of her own creative process, and how that will shape her decisions in life. Discovering my way of being a creative person affected everything, even the way I do my job as a fundraising consultant. In my job, after all, I’m a writer too — grant proposals and direct mailings — and once I began to treat myself as a writer while wearing my fundraiser’s hat, I became better at innovating and coming up with better written materials.
Creativity and love are the two major things I write about, and often they seem to me like the same thing. When you open to the flow of ideas and imagination, it’s the same dizzying wonder as the feeling of being in love. And it’s the same in any kind of love — you expand to a wider feeling of self, a more generous, outward-reaching feeling. You grow and change. Those are the stories that fascinate me and that I want to tell. How that transformation happens.