Penelope's Odyssey

Friends and Readers,

I am delighted to announce the publication of my novel Penelope’s Odyssey. The book is available from all the usual sources in paperback and hardcover editions. You should be able to order it from your local bookstore and if not let me know and I’ll help you get a copy. This is the last of the large, full-length novels I have spent decades writing during my life. While I have some other book projects in the works, I doubt I will ever write another large novel. I hope you have enjoyed Memories from Cherry Harvest and Guardians of Water and that you will find something of value in my latest endeavor. I wish I could give each of you a complimentary copy but I can’t afford to do it.

 

I want to share the amazing story about the extraordinary book cover that my daughter-in-law Anjelica designed. She told me she was sitting in silent meditation at a retreat when the vision for the cover art came to her. As we looked at her first sketch of the cover, I asked her where she had been (geographically) on the retreat. When she replied Kelseyville, I nearly fell off my chair. I explained to her that Kelseyville is named after Andrew Kelsey, the colonizing rapist and murderer responsible for the subsequent Bloody Island Massacre that annihilated hundreds of Eastern Pomo in the very area where Anjelica had been on retreat. A fictional version of this historic event is central to Penelope’s Odyssey. (Anjelica had not known that.) I thank the ancestors for sending these beautiful, evocative images to Anjelica for the cover art.

 

About Penelope’s Odyssey:

This modern day Penelope wastes no time weaving and unweaving tapestries while awaiting news of her disappeared husband. Instead, she struggles to strike a path to her future as a single mother of two small children, living in poverty, and wrestling with undefined demons. Penelope charts her course of self-discovery to learn the hard truth about her family and her Native American roots in a telescopic odyssey of stories-within-stories featuring women in search of identity and meaning. Her journey takes her to the history of the tragedy suffered by her Tribe and the imposed assimilation that robbed her of her culture. The fictional tribal history portrayed in the novel is based on the little-known true history of an Eastern Pomo Tribe that dwelled on the shores of Clear Lake, California for thousands of years until the Tribe was annihilated in 1880. The narrative loosely follows the plot and more closely follows the themes of the Odyssey, remaking Homer’s classic in a modern setting and telling the story from the point of view of the wife Odysseus left behind. Penelope’s Odyssey explores themes of oppression, displacement, survival, forgiveness, loss, hope, love, righting past wrongs, and, ultimately, what it means to come home in the world.