Featured Interview With Rene’ Donovan
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I live in my “Enchanted Cottage” on Cape Cod where my studio is filled with canvases, an easel, bookshelves, computer and printer, and a table covered with manuscript pages and folders. My days are filled with words and colors, paints and the sea. Cape Cod, the most magical of places, is conducive to solitude and creativity.
My novels and canvases begin with one thought: “What if…” Both are filled with light.
I wrote my first book, “Me ‘n God in the Coffee Shop” at a local coffee shop. At the time I ran a graphics studio from my home and would take breaks from work to sit at the coffee shop with a notebook. I had no intention of beginning a novel. I was just jotting down ideas like “What would ‘God’ say if He/She walked in here and sat beside me?” God, to me, is all creation, manifested in matter. (That means us too!) And so—unknown to me at the time—I began my first novel.
When finished, even before it was accepted for publication, I began to meditate on the next book, “The Stone Children.” In my meditation I saw marble eggs lying in nests of straw in a barn. I’ve leaned not to question the images that come to me. I follow them as I begin to write and the story unfolds in the process. I don’t make outlines, don’t know where the story will take me or how it will end.
Whatever “whispers” in my ear leads me to places I would never think to go with my logical mind. I’m always surprised. For instance, in “The Stone Children,” I had no idea how marble eggs lying in beds of straw could ever be a story. But I listened and heard the music of babies lying within those eggs and saw statues of children being carved. That music took me to the horrors of Nazi Germany and to the children in the concentration camps and, as the story unfolded, to butterflies and beauty and hope.
I began my third book, “The Daughters of Time,” when I was visiting friends in Virginia. We drove by an abandoned and neglected house, once a grand eighteenth century home. I began to imagine who had built it and who had lived in it. Had the home been filled with children and laughter and love? Why had it been so neglected over the years? Does a houses hold the energy of those who once occupied it and if I were to walk into that house would I be able to hear it speak to me? These questions, like breadcrumbs dropped on a forest floor, led me from the first sentence to the book’s conclusion.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
My mother read to me when I was a small child and that gave me my love of books. That also gave me the delight of creating my own stories. My first book was published in 1998 by a traditional publisher. My next two books were published by my imprint “Enchanted Cottage Publishing” through Amazon “Create Space.” I’ll never go back to a traditional publisher because with Create Space I have total control over the book’s cover and content. It required a long and difficult learning curve to publish but I’m glad I had the tenacity to do so.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I have so many favorite authors, both fiction and nonfiction. In fiction, Alice Hoffman, Ken Follett come to mind. In poetry, Mary Oliver delights me. In nonfiction…I have an avid interest in spirituality and quantum theory so I suppose my favorite authors are Gregg Braden, Fred Alan Wolf, Wayne Dyer, Joel Goldsmith, among many others.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
“The Stone Children” opens at the end of World War ll in Germany. Uriel, a young soldier among those liberating Buchenwald Concentration Camp, sees not only the horrors but also sees images of butterflies, the symbol of transformation, drawn on the floors and walls of the barracks by children who had been imprisoned there. He learns that these images are in every camp and is deeply effected.
When the war in the Pacific ends Uriel returns to his Cape Cod village, marries his childhood sweetheart Marra and begins his career as a children’s book illustrator. Their home is filled with love but Uriel’s nights are tortured by nightmares of the horrors he witnessed at Buchenwald. Marra, a sculptor, also begins to dream. She dreams of eggs. She dreams of children:
“Eggs, at first. Her dreams swam with the images of smooth-shelled eggs: brown, white, blue, speckled. From deep within the eggs came songs as if their interiors held choirs. She felt the sound in her belly like something growing inside her, something that wanted to be born into the world. A force had entered Uriel at Buchenwald, a something that wants to be known. It wants to communicate through him and Marra, guiding their art and bearing a healing message for all humanity. It wants to prepare the world for the children to come, the Lumins, the compassionate children who had died in the Holocaust.”
This story takes the reader from World War ll through all the years that followed up to the infamous morning of September 11, 2001. Intertwined amid the turmoil and confusion of those years are wonders and changes that raise humanity’s awareness. “There is a noble fragment within us, a kind of beginning, a small secret…coiled love in fluid stone.”
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It’s difficult to say how long it took me to write “The Stone Children” because I set it aside for a while to paint. I was in a Cape Cod gallery for several years and that required most of my time. When I returned to the manuscript I spent about six months editing it for publication. I was writing this story when the tragedy of 9/11 happened and I knew that the story would conclude with that event. As with all my books, I feel “guided” and often believe that something outside of my conscious self is writing. The characters that appear in my books come alive for me. In my mind’s eye and in my emotions I can see them and the scenes I create.
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