Works in Progress

(a novel for young adults)

This much is in the history books: On October 24, 1593, a Filipino soldier named Gil Perez was found wandering the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City. He claimed he had just been on duty in the governor’s palace in Manila, and brought news that the governor had just been murdered. He had no idea how he came to be in Mexico. He was promptly arrested for desertion and on suspicion of witchcraft.

When the Internet cast this story up at my feet, I knew I had to write it. I resisted for a while — the research required is overwhelming. But in the end I gave in.

I couldn’t help it. I’m in love with poor Gilbert, bouncing backward through the 16th century, falling in love and losing his mind. History has given me the battles in rainswept darkness, the hidden ships and flower-lined causeways — but what interests me is Gilbert’s struggle to grow up as the world grows younger, his struggle not to fall in love with a sorrowful future.

Is a tragedy a triumph if you tell it backwards? Does a love story become a tragedy? Is Gilbert ever going to get a decent pair of boots? I can’t wait to find out.

The photograph on the right is Caída de Tenochtitlan (2) by Jesus Guzman-Moya and is used with kind permission.

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(all-ages picturebook)

One Christmas my dear husband bought me a copy of W.S. Merwin’s translation of the middle-English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I was knocked over by the weird and wonderful story, the great-hearted failure of the young hero Gawaine.

I would have loved it when I was, say, ten. So I wrote a new version for my child self.

The result is 400 rhymed quatrains. Possibly unpublishable. But a marvel, a marvel. I wrote it under a spell that lasted for months.

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(poetry for adults)

The great poet Basho kept a journal of his Narrow Road to the Interior, his thousand-mile walk to the remote and dangerous north, punctuating his traveller’s tales with haiku — a form called haibun.

This book is my narrow road — a road through grief and illness and through strangeness and joy. The death of my sister, the birth of my daughter. The narrowing of my life by degenerative illness, the slow blossoming of a long marriage.

yellow bird is a series of haibun sequences. It’s my first autobiographical book of poems, and it scares me to death. But I think it might be my best work.

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