“All I knew was, Tara, wanted to sing. At first I didn’t know her name, but I knew what she wanted. When she looked out to the limitless blue sea, she knew she did not want anyone to hold her back. She did want someone to hold her, someone who would wrap his arms around her at night and hold her close. He could love her, and she could love him, but they would never own each other.
This is how the first glimmerings of my novel came to me, and this is my postcard for Searching for Persephone, which includes my first pitch to literary agents. Set in the Greek islands and in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, the novel is richly textured with music, food, love and yearning. It is a reinterpretation of the Persephone myth, when the young Persephone is abducted to the underworld, the place of wildness, where we must face our unfulfilled yearnings and untapped passions, and we must harness them.
In that myth, Persephone makes two yearly migrations. Each fall to the place of wildness, each spring to the place of belonging, where she is returned to her mother and the abundant earth. My thought in creating this tri-generational story is that when it comes to art, when it comes to love, when it comes to finding your voice, we need both places—the divergence into wildness, the return to relevance and constancy. We need room to explore—to search, each one of us, for Persephone.
This myth gave me the motif for what is a very contemporary novel that deconstructs what relationships are in our turbulent times. I also wanted to understand how a woman can have art and love, solitude and intimacy…”
Full story available in the book Postcards to the Universe or follow the live readings on IG or Tiktok.
“Searching For Persephone” ~ Carolyn
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