Curva Peligrosa

That’s My Story – Lily Iona MacKenzie

September 21, 2018 Leave a Comment

With what do you write? A computer? A pencil? A ballpoint/biro? Rollerball? Quill and the blood of virgins (male or female is fine. We’re all about equal opportunity at Regal)? A fountain pen (people who use a fountain pen get extra credit points)?

Lily Iona MacKenzie Quill and the blood of virgins took me down a narrative path that I finally had to opt out of. It became too messy. Before computers became an essential writer’s tool, and when typewriters were my only other option, I wrote exclusively with a pen on yellow lined pads. I couldn’t imagine ever being able to write creatively on a typewriter, and I never did. But when computers seduced me into their world, I could no longer hold out. Previously, I not only hand wrote my drafts of poems and fiction, but I also typed them up afterward so I could then revise them. That involved further (multiple) rounds of typing and revising. Those of you who are writers know how many revisions are necessary before a draft becomes viable.

Once I had purchased my first computer, a Kaypro, I soon discovered that if I could teach myself to create directly onto a disc, I could save myself a tremendous amount of time and effort. However, I also lost whatever dynamic existed between my right hand and my brain (I’m right handed). At times, when I was having difficulty letting loose on the computer with right-brain activity, I had to stop and write with a pen until I could enter the narrative again. And yes, I did use a fountain pen. What else is there?

Do you use chocolate as an intrinsic aid to writing?

I wasn’t a chocolate fan until recent years. I haven’t a clue why. But since I’ve discovered this delectable delight, I’ve had to make a bargain with myself (and the chocolate devil!). Pre-diabetic, I can’t eat the real stuff since most chocolate treats have a strong sugar base. But I’ve discovered a fudge recipe (that I’ll reveal only if you tempt me with lucre) that uses a sugar substitute and satisfies my newfound craving for chocolate. Since I’ve made this discovery, I’ve found that my writing has not only sweetened up considerably, but it also has turned darker. I’m sure none of this would have happened without the assistance of chocolate!

What do you read that people wouldn’t expect you to read? What’s the trashiest book you’ve ever read?

Since most people who will likely read this interview won’t know me, they may wonder, after learning about my novel Curva Peligrosa and the main character’s main focus on sex and eternal life, why I would spend so much time each day on the New York Times and the Washington Post. I confess. I’m a news hound, always searching for articles that deepen my understanding of worldwide problems. Unfortunately, there are too many difficulties to mention them all here, but I’m a political creature, and I seek the truth. The Post doesn’t always hit the right notes, but it tries. The Times has its biases, too, but it does attempt to present multiple sides of an issue. As a writer, though, it’s the sub stories that intrigue me. I always try to imagine my way into the emotional dynamics involved in these scenarios. It’s part of my writing practice.

And the trashiest novel I’ve ever read would me a tie between Amboy Dukes and Blackboard Jungle.

There’s a fair bit of interest, scientific and otherwise, between creativity and insanity. How crazy must someone be to be a good author?

Since I’ve never been diagnosed as insane, I may not be the right person to try and answer this question. However, I do know that the persistence and commitment required to hang in there and create a novel is enormous. I suspect that an insane person may not have the wherewithal to do it. I also think there’s a fine line between creativity and insanity, depending on one’s definition of the latter. To me insanity means that you’ve really gone over the edge and are no longer available for rational dialogue. I have a half-brother, a visual artist, who is psychotic. And while I appreciate those brief moments when he is “himself,” in recent years, they have become few and far between. He lives in a world that only he can inhabit. I can’t follow him there, and I’m certain that this would be true for writers who have a similar diagnosis. I think we’ve romanticized insanity because those who suffer from it seem to enter a world we don’t have access to. But I believe that it takes a sane individual to enter the underworld and return with material that s/he can share with others.

We’ve all heard the advice that authors “should write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?

I think the key to this question is the last part, “what lives only in your mind.” It assumes that what we fantasize or imagine doesn’t have roots in the outer world, but from my experience, both inner and outer worlds are indispensable. They interact with each other constantly, even when we think we’re writing about people, settings, etc., that we’ve never experienced directly. We humans are namers, Adam (or maybe Lilith) getting the task of being the first to give names to animals and more. We can’t name something that we can’t visualize, and once we visualize it, the item comes alive. That’s the magic of language and our power as writers to do “novel” things with it. So even if we are focused more on themes that originate in our unconscious than those we’ve actually experienced externally, they still are things that we know.

Lily MacKenize, Regal House Publishing author of Curva Peligrosa

Lily Iona MacKenzie has published books, reviews, interviews, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays, and memoir in over 150 American and Canadian venues. She also has taught writing at the University of San Francisco for thirty years and was vice-president of USF’s part-time faculty union. When she’s not writing, she paints and travels widely with her husband. Regal House published Lily’s novel Curva Peligrosa in 2017, and Lily’s poem ‘God Particles’ was featured in Pact Press’ Speak and Speak Again anthology.

The Seeds of Curva Peligrosa

December 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

When six-foot Curva Peligrosa rides her horse into Weed, Alberta, after a twenty-year trek up the Old North Trail from southern Mexico, she stops its residents in their tracks. A parrot perched on each shoulder, wearing a serape and flat-brimmed black hat, and smiling and flashing her glittering gold tooth, she is unlike anything they have ever seen before. Curva is ready to settle down, but are the inhabitants of Weed ready for her? With an insatiable appetite for life and love, Curva’s infectious energy galvanizes the townspeople. With the greenest of thumbs, she creates a tropical habitat in an arctic clime, and she possesses a wicked trigger finger, her rifle and six-guns never far away.

Then a tornado tears though Weed, leaving all the inhabitants’ lives in disarray and revealing dark remains that cause the Weedites to question their very foundations. And that’s how the novel starts, with the twister hurtling Curva’s purple outhouse into the center of town, Curva inside, “peering through a slit in the door at the village dismantling around her.”

From then on, we follow Curva and the Weedites as they recover from the chaos that follows. As the above synopsis shows, a good portion of Curva Peligrosa’s narrative takes place in the fictional small town of Weed, Alberta, about twenty-five miles from what is now a major city, Calgary. When I, Lily MacKenzie, left the city in 1963, the population was two hundred fifty thousand. Today, Calgary, and its environs, has well over a million people.

While Curva Peligrosa doesn’t have autobiographical roots (I’m not Mexican American or six feet tall. Nor do I have a gold tooth!), it does have some parallels to historical moments in the province. When I was growing up in that area, agriculture was the main source of income. But in 1947, significant oil reserves were discovered at Leduc, Alberta, ushering in the oil boom that continues today. The excitement over extracting black gold from the earth brought job seekers and others to the area, eager to exploit the province’s riches.

I must have registered these developments subliminally, even though it wasn’t something I was particularly conscious of at the time. And as a young woman, I did secretarial work for Sinclair Canada Oil and other American petroleum companies. Impressionable, I thought the Texas accents signified power and prosperity and wanted to emulate them, faking a drawl whenever I could. It took me a while to realize that, in fact, many Americans were taking over our land and much of its oil.

My association with these (mainly) southerners fueled my interest in moving to America in my early twenties. Eventually I became an American citizen so that, as a single parent, I could take advantage of California’s university system and earn degrees (a B.A. and two Masters degrees) from San Francisco State. So while my early contact with these oilmen may not have been personally promising at the time, the experience propelled me into seeking higher education that wasn’t then available to me in Canada. However, the earlier image of American oilmen making off with our prairie identity had been planted. It stayed with me, surfacing in Curva Peligrosa and in Curva’s concerns over what she was witnessing in Weed, a town she had recently made her home. But none of this was intentional when I began the narrative. I had no idea then where it would take me.

In the novel, Shirley, an americano who is buying up nearby land so he can own all of the oil rights, represents the kind of southerner from my earlier experience. In Curva Peligrosa, he ends up being a villain in the old sense of the word where many readers will end up booing him. In turn, Shirley seems to embrace that identity and to enjoy the turmoil he is creating, not only in Curva, but also in the Weedites themselves. I had created a kind of Trumpian character long before Trump had brought chaos to America.

Like Curva, I’m not averse to some kinds of development, but I do recognize that the word can be misleading. In certain cases, it might represent growth and advancement for the people involved. For example, the Blackfoot tribe in Curva Peligrosa benefit from the oil wealth. It allows them to build a museum that highlights Native life and also to open their own university. Under the leadership of their chief Billie One Eye, the wealth gives them an identity they otherwise had lacked, even though they sold out to the americano in order to enrich their tribe.

But in many other instances, such development can deplete the land of valuable resources and drastically disturb the environment, improving a few lives but enslaving many, not unlike what we are witnessing today in America. The continued practice of mining and burning coal doesn’t make sense given its harmful effects on the environment. This imbalance becomes one of Curva’s concerns. She also hates how life’s pace has speeded up, not leaving time for the basics, such as enjoying leisurely meals with friends and loved ones, fiestas, and sex.I hadn’t set out to write a novel that harbored a political slant, but once I became involved in Curva’s quest, I didn’t have any choice but to follow along and express her concerns. In the process, I learned how seeds planted in our unconscious early on do sprout and bloom in our writing.

Lily Iona MacKenzie is the author of two novels, Fling and Curva Peligrosa, and a poetry collection All This. Her upcoming novel, Freefall: A Divine Comedy will be released in 2018. Lily’s poetry was also featured in the Pact Press anthology, Speak and Speak Again. When she’s not writing, she paints and travels widely with her husband. Lily also blogs.

Writing Times with Lily Iona MacKenzie

May 15, 2017 Leave a Comment

Most writers have day jobs and frequently have difficulty finding writing time. How do you manage it?

For me, it isn’t a matter of managing it. Writing is as essential to me as eating, so I must find time to write each day. I’ve discovered, amidst teaching writing part time at the University of San Francisco (USF) and other colleges , helping to raise two stepchildren, serving as vice president of USF’s part-time faculty union, and other responsibilities, that if I write a minimum of one hour a day, I can accomplish a lot!

How long have you been writing and do you perceive your writing to have evolved in any particular way that you would like to share?

I took on writing seriously in my late twenties. I started out focusing on poetry, and it still forms the foundation for my work. But I also am interested in short and long fiction, having written four+ novels and numerous short stories. I also love writing essays, from travel writing to book reviews, to critical essay

What appealed to you about being a part of the Pact Press Speak and Speak Again anthology?

Having grown up in Canada, a country that embraces social justice, I moved to America in 1963 eager to support the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the feminists who were addressing all the inequalities women and others had suffered for centuries. Participating in this anthology seems a natural outcome of my life-long interest in pushing for a just society.

What do you think is the responsibility of the writer in today’s polarized environment?

When I write, I don’t think about the polarized environment I live in. In fact, I never think about audience. As a writer, I try to dive below the social surface and capture some truth about what it means to be human. I don’t write for a particular audience or movement or particular ideology. I write to generate poetry, fiction, etc., that originates deep within myself and resonates with readers no matter what their backgrounds may be.

Do you think that self-revelation is part of the writing process?

I don’t think we can be serious writers without undressing completely, externally and internally, in our works. How else can we explore the vastness of life and its many dimensions? While we may be inventing characters and situations, fragments of our selves can’t help but be embedded in our work. Some writers are more autobiographical than others and therefore more revealing in that sense. But even in my novel Curva Peligrosa, to be released in 2017, which is not at all autobiographical, I reveal myself in the ideas I explore there. I am not at all like the amoral main character, Curva Peligrosa, but I do share some of her attitudes and beliefs. So the autobiographical gets intertwined with the fiction, and a writer can’t avoid being revealed in the process.

Lily Iona MacKenzie, a Bay Area resident who currently teaches memoir writing to older adults at the University of San Francisco’s Fromm Institute, has published poetry, short fiction, and essays in over 150 Canadian and American publications. Her poetry collection All This was published in October 2011. Novels: Fling! was published in July 2015. Curva Peligrosa will be published in 2017. Freefall: A Divine Comedy will be released in 2018.

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