In today's Indie Spotlight, Lily Iona MacKenzie discusses her newest novel, Curva Peligrosa, and the struggles of discovering who your characters really are and helping them find a life of their own.
Giving Birth
To a Fictional Character
My novel Curva Peligrosa opens with a tornado that sweeps through Weed, Alberta, and
drops a purple outhouse into the center of town. Drowsing and dreaming inside
that structure is its owner, Curva Peligrosa—a curiosity and a marvel, a source
of light and heat, a magnet. Adventurous, amorous, fecund, and over six feet
tall, she possesses magical powers. She also has the greenest of thumbs,
creating a tropical habitat in an arctic clime, and she possesses a wicked
trigger finger.
When Curva had ridden
into Weed on one of her horses two years earlier, she was like a vision from a
surrealistic western, with her two parrots, a goat, glittering gold tooth,
turquoise rings, serape, flat-brimmed black hat, rifle, and six-shooters. After
a twenty-year trek up the Old North Trail from southern Mexico, she was ready
to settle down. Her larger-than-life presence challenges the residents of Weed,
who have never seen anything like her. I must admit, I hadn’t either.. I am
neither 6-foot tall nor as buxom as Curva. In my external life, I’m pretty conventional.
I’m happily married, teach college-level rhetoric to freshmen/women as wells as
memoir workshops to seniors, and have never backpacked. Nor have I traveled
hundreds of miles by horse with a travois.
Unlike me, Curva is
amoral and not bound by the usual codes that restrict many middleclass women
not only in terms of their relationships but also in the daily choices they
make. She lives fully in her senses, bedding with multiple men if she desires,
enjoying what she refers to as walking marriages where a woman invites a man to
spend a sweet night with her, but he must leave by daybreak. She also pursues
her dreams, no matter what hardships she encounters in doing so (as in trekking
the Old North Trail for twenty years with horses, dogs, a goat, and parrots).
Given that I was a
high-school dropout and single parent at sixteen, my options were severely
limited. I had a son to raise on my own and received no child support from his
father. A quick learner, I parlayed the typing skills I had learned in my high
school commercial course (it was assumed then that most women would end up as
clerk typists or some versions of that role) into a variety of office jobs
after starting out as an office girl. Consequently, in Curva Peligrosa,
I wanted to create a female character that was fully feminine but not as
restricted as I had been either by self-imposed limits or by society’s
boundaries.
Curva didn’t fully come
alive for me until I discovered her name. Originally, I had called her Lupita,
yet I was having trouble getting inside her character. But then my husband and
I visited Cuernavaca, a small town two-hours’ drive from Mexico City. On our
way there, I kept seeing signs along the side of the road with the words curva
peligrosa, which means dangerous curve. The name itself
released this character. Suddenly, I could hear her speak, I could see her
interacting with others, and I knew her. She seemed to emerge full blown as
Athena did from Zeus’ head, and Curva also has a mythical quality.
Was Curva based on anyone
I know in actual life? No. I wanted to create a character that was not like
someone we’re likely to run into. But she does reflect elements of various
goddesses. Curva’s love of nature and willingness to travel solitary in the
wilderness reminds me of Artemis, goddess of the hunt. She also can be
associated with a kind of Eve figure who creates her own Garden of Eden that
she would like to establish in Weed. Curva wants the northerners to be able to
experience this more idyllic state that her lush greenhouse represents.
Finally, Curva has an earth-mother dimension. She’s a kind of Demeter figure,
associated with animals and the earth, and doesn’t do well in chronological
time.
Have I succeeded in
midwifing Curva’s birth? Will she find a home in readers’ imaginations? In
September 2017, the paperback edition of Curva Peligrosa was
released, and now you, dear reader, will join in this creative process.
Together, we’ll give Curva the opportunity to continue her explorations.
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Lily Iona MacKenzie has published reviews, interviews, short fiction,
poetry, travel pieces, essays, and a memoir in over 155 American and Canadian
venues. Her novel Fling! was published in
2015. Freefall:
A Divine Comedy will be released in 2018. Her poetry collection All This was published in 2011. Lily taught rhetoric at
the University of San Francisco for over 30 years and currently teaches creative writing at USF’s Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning. She blog sat http://lilyionamackenzie.wordpress.com.
