Hi. My space is for words and ideas that merge past and future with the present to make each moment last, to sing to your heart. Take a minute and read on. And don't forget to check out my website www.pamelaewen.com.
Female
101 years old
New Orleans, Louisiana
United States
Family first. Then writing, reading, travel. I love to exercise; it helps me think.And music--all kinds.
Music
I'm a flower child of the sixties (ignore the age thing above. I can't figure out how to get rid of it). I love 60's music, especially Janis Joplin, and I love blues. I also love classical music, mostly piano sonatas, and mostly Mozart, followed by Chopin, Liszt, and Bach.
Movies
I love movies with great stories, which I have to say is somewhat rare lately. Recently: No Country For Old Men was intense, but really good. The movie Chicago was great. Amadeus was one of my all time favorites, not only because of the music, but because it inspired my search for truth--a search for faith that took fifteen years to complete. And that is why I wrote my book, Faith On Trial. It was the juxtaposition between the strange, limited personality of Mozart and the exquisite music that seemed to flow right through him from some other place. I also have a special place in my heart for GiGi, which I saw with my grandmother in my book The Moon In The Mango Tree, being released in May, '08. Believe it or not, for technique and style (not content) I really liked Pulp Fiction. Movie technique can teach writers a lot, and this one helped me shape the action in Walk Back The Cat.
Television
I'm a news junkie. Also like the History Channel and Discovery Channel. I'm not much on sitcoms, plus I can't ever find them when I want them with three hundred thousand television channels to choose from, and I dislike reality shows.
Books
Besides The Moon in the Mango Tree. (Surprised?) And Walk Back The Cat. And Faith On Trial. (Okay, Okay.) I love anything written by Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham. I love Bev Marshall's Walking Through Shadows and Right As Rain. To Kill a Mockingbird may be my all time favorite. James Lee Burke--he is a beautiful writer. Andre Dubus - I loved The House of Sand and Fog. Phillipa Gregory - her books are bon bons, great to read on a rainy afternoon and she has clever technique. And I cannot put Erica Spindler's books down--they are so much fun to read. Water for Elephants was fantastic, so unusual. And so was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night. A Passage To India, The Ginger Tree....I could go on and on and on.
Heroes
There are so many. The firefighters, police, and everyone else who rushed into the World Trade Center Towers during 9/11 to save others, and the people on Flight 93. They are proof to me that good is intrinsic to human nature, and evil is only a deviation from that 'default' state. Everyone who has fought for this country, with a special place in my heart for my father who was a PT Boat Captain in WWII in the Pacific, where President John F. Kennedy also served. His boat was sunk by the Japanese and he spent the night in the water with his men, all hanging onto a life raft because it was too small for everyone and so no one would get inside. His family joke was that he's the only PT Boat Captain in WWII whose boat was straffed and cut in half by the Japanese, and who spent the night all night in the water with his men--and who wasn't President of the United States! But by the way, I believe the men and women fighting for our freedom right now in Iraq and Iran are the NEW GREAT GENERATION and my prayers are constant for them all.
About me: ..
I'm a reformed lawyer, a retired partner with a large international firm...now a writer. Charles Dickens got paid by the word--lawyers get paid according to hours billed. I figure with all I've got to say, Dickens had the better idea.
I love to create fast-paced stories full of suspense and puzzles and ideas and characters that make you stop and think long after you've finished the book. Love, Hate, and Ideas---philosophy, religion, psychology--these are the great motivators, the chief drivers of events in history and today. With fiction those ideas come to life in the passion and struggles of the characters and the twists and turns of the story.
My writing explores 'women's issues', the nature of good and evil, heroism...questions like this: what is it exactly that caused strangers to stop to help strangers in the collapsing WTC Towers on 9/11 when every second counted? When no one would have known if they'd walked on; when there was absolutely no personal advantage to stopping and they could have saved themselves instead?
Or...how does a shimmering love fake out our judgment? How does power corrupt...and hate and revenge?
Does a moral compass exist for us--do good and evil exist outside our 'selves'?
And what happens after death--is there something more, something that endures?
But don't panic--these questions are universal themes that touch all of our lives, and in my fiction they are raised through the story that I hope you won't be able to put down, and the characters that I think you'll come to love...or hate.
I write with a worldview of my own, I admit it, but there's no imposition on the reader. No preaching, no judgment, no testimonials. Nevertheless, our worldviews, our belief systems, make us what we are. I'd love to hear your views on some of the questions that I'm raising. There seems to be a huge disconnect today between the belief systems of ordinary people like us and those of opinion leaders who control communication in this country. So I hope my writing will spark an uncommon dialogue about this paradox, and about how power, entertainment, celebrity glitz, and sometimes personal charisma, can confuse, mislead, and undermine the values that made this country great.
My first novel, Walk Back The Cat, is the tense story of a powerful Archbishop driven by revenge, while in parallel time centuries before, a young girl is determined to stop him. Shifting time and space they're linked by the secret of the Shroud of Turin, the purported burial cloth of Jesus...and by something more. You'll find the most up-to-date information on the Shroud in this book. Regardless of your religious or non-religious beliefs, this artifact is fascinating. Science today has no explanation for the image of the crucified man on the cloth.
The Moon In The Mango Tree is my second novel and it will be available everywhere this spring, on May 1, 2008. But you can preorder it now in bookstores and from on-line booksellers. This book is close to my heart because it's based upon the true story of my grandmother's life in the 1920's in the Far East and Europe. She was dazzling--beautiful, smart, a suffragette, a jazz baby. You'll see a picture of her on this page. This is a tale of a deep, enduring love, and a search for faith and adventure. I had the fortune to grow up with my grandmother, but didn't realized until she'd passed on and I found her letters and journals that in her youth she was a free spirit--a woman torn between a fierce desire for a musical career, the new independence that the glittering twenties now offered to women--and her love for her husband. All those years ago she faced the question that many women still face today: Can we have it all? Or do we have to choose. But...if you choose between two things you love, must one be forever lost?
Faith On Trial, a non-fiction book, is for those who want to believe in Christianity, but just can't quite get there. I was agnostic for most of my adult life, even though I wanted to believe. But the heart can't accept what the mind rejects. I needed a rational foundation for belief, like doubting Thomas. Finally I decided to research the non-biblical evidence available today--archeology, science, even medical evidence, and contemporaneous historical writings--to see if the claims of the four Gospels could be supported. In Faith On Trial, each piece of evidence is linked to the next one to create a chain of proof, just as this is done in a trial. In this book, the reader is the jury. YOU decide.
(Okay, I'll stop. I told you lawyers love words) For more info on my writing, books out and books to come, visit my web site at www.pamelaewen.com. Thanks for visiting me in my space. Let's talk! Pamela
Who I'd like to meet: Einstein so he could explain to me the theory of relativity which is fasinating and which I cannot understand no matter how many books I read (including The Theory of Relativity for Dummies), but which I suspect, if understood would explain many other mysteries in the world, like the possibility of parallel time.
And Oliver Sacks, because he writes about such fasinating twists of human personality and psychology.
And Tolstoy, if he'd sit down and teach me some of his technique, and also explain how a thousand page novel can hold so many millions of people in thrall for all those years!
And Mozart, because the juxtaposition of his music and his personality (as you might recall from the movie, Amadeus) is so interesting.
And most of all, Jesus Christ, because I love him so much.
Just flying through to say...... Whoa, what a night! Glad to see you made it out of the celebrations safely and are ready for the "real world"..... hahaha!
May your day be relaxing, rejuvenating and reminiscent of yesterday's pleasures!
Hope all is going well and your getting ready to celebrate the holiday in a big splash way! My computer went down three days ago and I am having withdraws from my myspace friends! Always know your in my heart! Have a fun, yet safe weekend!!
Ahhh the 60's and Einstein, and you love to write... very cool. I'll spare everyone and not say Groovy... Oh I did... sorry :O) So have you read much of Hawking or Greene to answer some of those unanswerable questions that make up the Grand Unified Field Theory?
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