Today, my special guest is Tima Z. Newman, whose new book, Elaine of Corbenic, is new take on an often overlooked character in Arthurian legend. I personally love the character of Elaine and can’t wait to read Tima’s book. Take it away, Tima!

—–

He opened the door.

A woman stood looking out the window, her back to him. She was clothed in blue and azure interfaced with rose, her black hair tumbling loose. It was not Guinevere.

She turned at the sound of the door opening.

“I had thought to find the queen here,” Launcelot began.

“No.” Elaine’s lips trembled as she spoke the single word. She wore no jewelry. The open neckline revealed the young throat he had once glimpsed wet in the stream from a distance. A quality like the moistness of dew lay upon her, yet in that moment he saw that she whom he had thought child was also woman….

Elaine of Corbenic is an Arthurian character that is often eclipsed in the shadow of Elaine of Astolat, immortalized by Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot” and John Waterhouse’s and Rosetti’s art, as well as overshadowed by the legendary passionate love of Launcelot and Queen Guinevere. Elaine of Corbenic only briefly appears in Malory’s account of the Arthurian saga. Yet she is the one who bears Launcelot’s son. And unlike Elaine of Astolat, Elaine of Corbenic does not pine away for Launcelot, to be carried down a barge, but goes to King Arthur’s court to fight for recognition by Launcelot, and when two years later he is discovered in his madness, it is the Grail of which Elaine was once bearer which brings Launcelot healing.

I found myself drawn to her character when I came across the tale some many years ago, and began writing her story – and my book has just now been released by Savant Books. Based on Malory’s account in Le Morte d’Arthur of the three brief encounters of Launcelot and the Fisher King’s daughter, my ELAINE OF CORBENIC is the chronicle of their poignant romance—and of Elaine’s journey through abandonment and despair to the finding of inner strength and deepening wisdom.

I have taken poetic liberties with Malory’s account, telling it from Elaine’s point of view, and leaning at times toward a metaphoric and symbolic interpretation. For instance, in Malory’s account Launcelot lay with Elaine thinking all the while she was Guinevere, both times drugged by a potent potion of Lady Breusen’s. It seemed clear to me that while the more magical an enchantment Launcelot might claim, the more efficacious an excuse it might have been, any such enchantment in reality was more like due to the close presence of the young Elaine than to any potion or brew.

Offering the poetry of medieval legend, for me the tale speaks to contemporary themes of love, betrayal, abandonment and the finding of identity—and also the deep longings of the spirit, the quest for the sacred, and the search for meaning in the mystery threading through our lives. My rendition approaches the grail legend in a way that reflects an evolving relationship to the mystery of the grail embodied in life itself. In the heart of the heroic Arthurian legend, it offers a deeply feminine spirituality, threading through the pain and joys of a young girl’s heart, a single mother’s hopes and broken dreams, and a fierce determination to find the grail’s meaning.

The novel wrote itself over the course of a few months the spring of the year of my arrival in the Bay Area, its first paragraphs emerging as I climbed among the gorse covered hills, my own young son in tow….

Corbenic’s valley lay hidden, in a corner of Lystenoys close by the sea, and it was not wholly by chance that any man found his way there, including Launcelot.

It was spring when he came; the hills of the valley were verdant, and the evening mists fragrant. Spring was short in that part of the country, except in the valley where the castle lay, where the mists rolled in from the sea, and a stream from the hill flowed into the river which bordered the castle’s south wall. The rains were meager and often did not come, so that the land surrounding the valley was barren and wasted, the tufts of grass dry and sparse over the rocky soil. What green did come from the winter snow quickly browned and withered in the summer sun. That week though, in the rocky barren seacoast land of Lystenoys, spring was in the air, the sky was blue and the gorse blooming yellow

She was not looking for love that day. It is true she had not passed through her youth without hearing minstrels’ songs and dreaming girls’ dreams of some noble prince bearing her away….. Though her father lacked wealth, and his land was no great lure, her blood was royal, and her face fair. There was, true, a strangeness about her family, the strain of mystery that hung about their lineage. Lystenoys lay sequestered far from the main thoroughfares of Britain, and Corbenic’s valley was hidden. However, that the strangers were few who came through was of little import, for there were worthy enough lords in the court of Corbenic itself.

Yet in the end, she had no thought for the knights of her father’s court. The aura of the grail that haunted her dreams was fullness enough for her. She was Elaine, daughter of the fisher king and of the lineage of the grail keepers, and the mystery of the grail, the sacred cup that lay within Corbenic’s walls, was in her very blood. Nothing else could find space in her heart. Until Launcelot came.

There is a short Youtube video produced by the publisher at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJUxyY_Y1yk.

The press release for the book can be found at http://www.prlog.org/12449579; and signed copies are available (with free postage in the U.S.) through my author website http://elaineofcorbenic.yolasite.com/ (The book may also be ordered directly from the publisher at www.savantbooksandpublications.com or from Amazon.)

Tima Z. Newman
Author of ELAINE OF CORBENIC (Savant 2015)
http://elaineofcorbenic.yolasite.com/

Zoe Newman, MFT, is a psychotherapist in Berkeley, California

Tima Z. Newman has written as far back as she can remember, and has always loved medieval times, fairy tales and legends, and brings an attunedness to myth, symbol and archetypal fairy tale motifs in listening to the narrations of those she work with. Originally from Minnesota, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she practices as a psychotherapist and dream group leader. She has written several children’s books, as well as the adult nonfiction Lucid Waking: Using Dreamwork Principles to Transform Your Waking Life, which explores approaching our everyday life as a waking dream, similarly as we might work with our night dreams, to find in it the same opportunity for guidance, insight and creative possibilities.

If you have any questions or comments for Tima, please leave them in the comments. She’ll be monitoring them and will respond as she can. Hope you enjoyed hearing from her and are interested in her book.

January 12, 2015Guest posts, Other Voices

Guest Post: HF Author Sarah Kennedy Talks City of Ladies and Christine de Pizan

Nicole EvelinaChristine de Pizan, City of Ladies, Guest posts, historical fiction, history, Sarah Kennedy 3 Comments

I am so excited to have as my guest today historical fiction author Sarah Kennedy, whose recent book, City of Ladies (second in the Cross and Crown series), was one of my favorites of 2014. (Here’s my review; still waiting for Historical Honey to post it. And here’s the related article I wrote for the Historical Novel Society.)

Today Sarah talks about her book, as well as the real-life inspiration for its title and main themes. Thank you for being here, Sarah!

Cities of Ladies by Sarah Kennedy

Sarah Kennedy

When I began my second novel, City of Ladies, I didn’t have a title in mind. I wanted to move my main character, Catherine Havens, forward in time: get her married, put her in charge of a large household. Catherine, however, is not the sort of person who would simply forget the convent that she grew up in, which was a community of women (despite the presence of a priest and the male hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church). She would, of course, keep women around her. She is comfortable with women. She respects their ability to reason and work.

As the novel evolved, Catherine’s newly-formed household seemed to draw to it former nuns, and Catherine wanted to protect them. The women have nowhere else to go—and yet they still have skills and knowledge that can help the girls and village women nearby. What else would Catherine do besides take them in and shelter them? This is part of her calling, as she sees it, even in a secular world, and it also becomes part of the problem of the plot, as the women begin to turn up dead.

At some point in the drafting, the original City of Ladies began to tug at my mind, both as a book that Catherine would have owned and as a metaphor for the world Catherine is trying to build under Henry VIII. The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) was written about a hundred and fifty years before my book’s time period, by a woman named Christine de Pizan. Christine was Italian by birth but spent much of her life in Paris. She was unusually well-educated for her time (like my Catherine), primarily because her father (like Catherine’s father) insisted upon it.

City of Ladies Christine was happily—and conventionally—married in her teens and bore three children. Her husband, however, died, leaving Christine to raise her family alone. This she did by writing, becoming the first woman in European history to earn her living as an author. Other women did write—and some of them were widely known—but they were nuns, who had the leisure and the status to circulate their work. Nuns didn’t have to make money, but Christine did. And she succeeded.

The authorial tradition was heavily against her, and The Book of the City of Ladies takes on the cultural and theological arguments against women in general. Christine writes in defense of women’s moral and intellectual worth, against the backdrop of “all manner of philosophers, poets and orators too numerous to mention, who all seem to speak with one voice and are unanimous in their view that female nature is wholly given up to vice” (6). As she becomes more and more despondent about being a member of such a flawed sex, she is visited by three ladies, who reveal themselves as Reason, Rectitude, and Justice. These three ladies encourage and assist Christine in building her “City of Ladies.”

This city is metaphorical. The book itself is the structure, and within it are the “lives” of many women, historical, biblical, and mythological, who have been exemplary or have done extraordinary things. They are mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives—and they show that women are resourceful, caring, intelligent, and moral. The entire book becomes, as Rosalind Brown-Grant notes, an example of the “biographical catalogue,” and it seems designed more for visiting than for a beginning-to-end tour. The three-part structure and multiple sub-headings and “arguments” within the text make for fruitful lucky-dipping. Christine’s City of Ladies may be old-fashioned in its emphasis on moral virtue in women, but her goal is not to provide a defense of what women should do but rather a defense of what women are.

My own City of Ladies is a metaphor, as well, but it’s also the physical house where Catherine Havens lives. She dreams of a world where women can read, write, think, and work. My Catherine does want to go out into the world and use her knowledge. She wants to hear her calling for herself—and then act to make the most of her gifts, which she believes are given to her by God.

And so Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies became the only choice when I sought out a title. My Catherine began life in a convent, and the historical Christine went to live in one as an older woman. In hindsight, it seems natural that Catherine claimed that book as one of her most prized possessions. It gave her something that Christine herself didn’t have—a foremother who showed her in writing what a woman, even under a harsh king, could accomplish.

Source:
Brown-Grant, Rosalind, editor. The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan. London: Penguin, 1999.

Do you have any questions or comments for Sarah? Please leave them below. She will be popping in and answering comments/questions as she can. And again, go read her books if you haven’t already!

May 12, 2014Everything else, Guest posts, Other Voices

Guest Post: Fiction: Making History

Nicole EvelinaGuest posts, historical fiction, Lisa Borja, TheSpiritWritings.com, women 3 Comments

A proper woman may have sat quietly in her rocker, but many, like suffragist Alice Paul preferred to live life a little more loudly. (Image by Edmonston, Washington, D. C. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

Please welcome today’s guest author, Lisa Borja. She is a woman after my own heart, who seeks out opportunities to restore women to their rightful place in history. Lisa, thank you for being here!

I’ve spent most of my life hating history. In my high school and college, history classes were all about the power of men. They filled every page, from “our founding fathers” in the U.S., to celebrated military generals, to brilliant scientists and inventors throughout the world. Women, meanwhile, were placed here and there in their bonnets and plain dresses, sewing flags, tending children, nursing soldiers, or standing behind their male counterparts.

So how does a post-Gloria-Steinem teenage girl relate? Years passed before I discovered history wasn’t all about men or only about women who were off (or seated quietly upon) their rockers. It wasn’t even entirely taught in school. I simply needed to look to different sources. The best source for me, and the most interesting by far, is historical fiction. I know these novels are rarely the most popular books out there. And I know, at first, it doesn’t sound like people can learn much history through fiction. Surely the truth has been sensationalized, amended, or stretched too far? And anyway, do I even want to learn when I’m reading for fun?

While it is true that some stories are not well-researched and that fiction readers mainly want to be entertained, not schooled, I stand by my creed that more people should read and write historical fiction – especially more women, specifically ABOUT women. Historical fiction books have done a great job overall in accentuating women’s roles in history as powerful and important. I actually read it for fun, but there’s more to it than that. When I read something, even a novel, I want it to make me think. All I could do while reading academic history was wonder how many talented women in the past could have “made history” if given the opportunity. The answer to that is something we can only guess. A better answer is: we should guess.

“Well behaved women rarely make history.” I used to see this bumper sticker everywhere. Maybe it’s just me, but the notion that women had to misbehave to get noticed is not empowering. It’s not that there weren’t many successful women in the past. They were there, and not always clad in skirts below their ankles straightening men’s ties and raising perfect children. I learned in school about a few women who were outstanding female leaders like Cleopatra and Joan of Arc, activists like Harriet Tubman and Mother Theresa, outlaws like Calamity Jane, outspoken first ladies like Mary Todd Lincoln, and various other women writers and artists. But did you, like me, ever get the feeling these women were depicted as unusual rule-breakers who were probably a little crazy?

“We can do it.” Now there’s a slogan I can get behind! We can, in a way, go back and give women the opportunities – possibly even just a spotlight – they didn’t have or haven’t yet been given. As women who read and/or write it, we can give ourselves more to believe in. What makes us think our history books are full of accurate, unbiased truth anyway?

I love to create a powerful female protagonist, so I gain more benefit from writing historical fiction than reading it. I have found no end to inspiration for creating her world from an already-existing cast of memorable historical characters (or character-types), mind-blowing challenges real people faced (not just women), and fascinating events that actually shaped our society. Through hours upon hours of ravenous study, I’ve also become somewhat of an expert in my research area of the Victorian and Spiritualist Eras. Well, if I’m not an expert, then at least friends tell me I’m a lot more fun at social gatherings and way more helpful on trivia night at the bar.

Prehistory. The love of historical fiction can start with something simple. For me, it started with books I didn’t even think of as historical fiction: namely The Clan of the Cavebear, by Jean M. Auel. This series is an excellent example, set in an era the author somehow researched exhaustively, despite its occurrence before recorded history. I loved Ayla, the heroine, who was depicted not only as influential and admirable but also as the inventor of some serious game-changers, from holistic medicine to domesticated animals to the use of soap for personal hygiene. No one really knows for sure where such ideas were first implemented, but doesn’t it just make sense that it would be a woman?

Art History. Another highly inspiring, similarly fictional character for me was Griet, otherwise known as The Girl With the Pearl Earring.Before I read Tracy Chevalier’s book, I didn’t even know I needed a different perspective on the male-dominated world of art history. No offense to former teachers, but my high school and college classes tended to celebrate visual art with very little attention to the often debatable accuracy of its social context. For example, if I had known Vermeer was probably kind of an ass, I’m certain I would have admired his work less. When I realized that some famous male artists may have had a talented woman like Griet assisting them, possibly even doing work for which they got all the credit, I was really depressed.

What got me over it was discovering the chance I had at rewriting history. Sort of. Okay, if not rewriting it, then at least reading what someone has written about our previous notions of what “really” happened, looking at some additional sources, and writing an alternative that could be just as believable. It is fun to read a fast-paced political thriller based on nothing in particular, or a romance or adventure that takes us to places we don’t get to be in daily life. But historical fiction can encompass all of those things, and add instant, real-world knowledge.

And the rest is . . . For me, reading historical fiction has been life-changing. Ultimately it’s because of the inspiration I’ve felt to write, but it’s also life-changing because I feel like I’ve gained a backstage pass to the roles and lives of women throughout history in events that have caused this world, and my life, truly to be changed for the better. If you’re like me, you just might like yourself and the world more if you choose a fun little read with a bit more research and unlimited inspiration from your very own, very real world. You, too, could shout out more answers during Jeopardy. You, too, might have more to write about than you ever had before. You, too, can make history.

———–

Lisa Borja is a writer with a background in psychology that extends to parapsychology and exploration of psychic phenomena. A new historian of Victorian America and Spiritualism, member of the Society for Psychical Research, and explorer of the development of psychic ability, Borja recently left her own Midwestern roots and followed the many signs pointing her in the direction of the Pacific Northwest. She lives in Oregon with her husband, dogs, and 25-pound cat, and can be found writing on TheSpiritWritings.com.

If you have any questions/comments for Lisa, please leave them in the comments below and she will respond.

March 20, 2014About the Author, Guest posts

This Writer’s Space: Nicole Evelina

Nicole Evelina

In case you ever wanted a little insight into my world…

October 14, 2013Arthurian Legend, Books, Guest posts

Guest Post by J. P. Reedman: Cups of Gold: Writing the STONE LORD Sequel

Nicole EvelinaArthurian legend, books, Bronze Age, J.P. Reedman, Moon Lord, Stone Lord, Stone Lord: The Legend of King Arthur

Today I’m thrilled to welcome back J.P. Reedman for her second post here at Through the Mists of Time. (Here’s her earlier interview and my review of Stone Lord.) Her new novel, Moon Lord, is now available on Amazon. Take it away, J.P.!

When I first began weaving tales of a Bronze Age King Arthur, I thought it might be difficult to fill a whole novel with this subject. Instead, little known, archaic versions of the legends leapt out at me from mouldering tomes, screaming to be included, and relevant archaeological finds seemed turned up in the landscape almost daily …and so the tale grew in the telling.

And grew.

So STONE LORD became book one of a two-part series, with MOON LORD the sequel (although a standalone book in its own right). In STONE LORD, we have a young “Arthur”-Ardhu the Stone Lord, rising from obscurity under the tutelage of the shaman known as the Merlin, high priest of the temple of Khor Ghor (Stonehenge) and driving back sea-raiders seeking to steal the precious British tin. The usual Arthurian elements are present, but in a more ancient form—The White Phantom, faithless bride but sovereignty of the Land; the Spearman, the mighty friend who betrays his lord; the Hawk of the Plain who fights the Green Man at Midwinter; the malign sister who seduces her own half-brother in revenge for status and love lost.

So what would be included in MOON LORD, how would it differ from its predecessor? Whilst the earlier part of the original legend is quite cohesive, traditionally the Arthurian myths tend to become more choppy and fragmented in the middle section of Arthur’s “reign”, with the king appearing less and less often while other knights such as Percival and Galahad come to the fore in various adventures for the glory of Camelot. It is a series of episodic tales rather than a straight narrative.

The Quest element, with its mysticism (both pagan and Christian) which is of course part of an older tradition, the Imram of the Celtic hero or saint, becomes a main area of focus, bringing with it a batch of new younger characters that replace or compete with the old… Such a shift of focus seemed appropriate for my purposes, since in the Bronze Age you were old by 30 and often dead by 40. So the setting was moved seventeen years into the future, and my first anti-hero was ‘born’– Mordraed, the King’s illegitimate son by his own half-sister, the Dark Moon who would be the foil to the ‘White Light of Arthur’ and the destroyer of the stability and rudimentary civilisation his sire had worked to create.

Mordraed leaped out, snarling, from my imagination but he was probably the most fun to write of any character I’ve created so far—beautiful but twisted, hard and bitter and yet vulnerable, driven by ambition and by his mother and yet, underneath, struggling to understand what he feels and what he does. He came to life for me; one of those rare characters that almost wrote himself.

The Quest that I set for my ancient warriors is a prehistoric version of the Grail Quest, starting with a trip to the Wasteland of the Maimed King and finishing up in the ritual complex that grew up around Newgrange in Ireland in the early Bronze Age after the great chamber-tomb had lost much of its original function. They seek a Cup of Gold that is rumoured to be the font of all fecundity—a primitive Holy Grail which is based on mythological vessels such as the Cauldron of Cerridwen and the Cauldron of the Dagda. The appearance of the Cup itself is based on several finds from the archaeological record—the golden beakers from Rillaton and Ringlemere. The latter cup obviously had a ritual use as its bottom was curved so that it could not be set down; hence it must have been passed from hand to hand in some kind of ceremony.

In MOON LORD there is no actual magic; the prehistoric ‘Grail’ is made holy by the mythic power of our imaginations, made sacred by the power of sacrifice…and like in the original Arthurian myth, the vessel is attained by the only one of Ardhu’s company ‘pure’ enough to accept it, but there is no resulting joy, no magical turning of the hands of Fate to spare Ardhu his final doom at his ‘Camlann.’

The Cup was a symbol of hope but when hope failed it was the steadfastness and the nobility, even if primitive, of a lost heroic society that echoed down the paths of time to us, from the Dark Ages and perhaps even from an earlier time– its more admirable qualities still flickering in our consciousness like ghost-dancers in a mist.

And though the Moon has set, and the great stone monuments of the ancient world lie bleached and ruinous beneath a hard sky…

We remember.

Do you have any questions for J.P? Leave them here and she’ll answer. What do you think of her new book? I know I can’t wait to read it!