TRAVELS (and more) WITH CECILIA BRAINARD: Southern Novelist, Eve La Salle Caram

The novelist Eve La Salle Caram and I did some catching up over lunch at El Caserio's in Silver Lake. I thought I'd share the beginning of one of her novels, Wintershine, which portrays the early childhood of Beatrice Merrill in the foothills of the Ozarks.

One day I will detach from the cord that connects me to my mother's voice, to all the voices and all the pictures, even from the steaming green that in summer makes me ache so; and in other seasons from the shimmering ground. "It was a cold spring when you were born," I can hear Lou saying. "I wore a coat to the hospital."

My mother often spoke of danger, of treacherous forces at work in nature; the 1914 cyclone which took her up in a whirlwind and killed the dogs she kept hidden in the basement when it came down, then two decades later the agonies of my birth and of caring for me without a husband or money; and then, after leaving me with grandparents in Arkansas, the hazards of teaching music in the schools of a crude South Texas coastal refinery town, of walking its dusty or muddy streets, and while working in flimsy frame buildings, of braving the hurricanes that often hit the coast.

"Yes, a cold spring." I hear her voice, see her rocking me in a brown wicker chair on the screened in porch of the two-room, tin-roofed shack we called The Little Green House, the Arkansas camp house my grandfather built for Lou after my father went away so she could have a place of her own. Lou wears a heavy sweater which scratches my cheek when I press my face against it. She has wrapped me in blankets on this chilly day in March or April and outside a fierce wind is blowing.

"Yes, like this one, a cold spring. I wore a heavy coat to the hospital. I stayed there ten day or maybe it was two weeks. I wore the same coat home. Just like this one, it was one of those cold springs that never got any better.

But I stayed out a lot, had to take the air. They said when I was a girl and had a breakdown I would have died without the air. Daddy, your granddaddy, took me all the way to New Mexico and kept me out of doors. We made flower boxes."

~end of excerpt from Wintershine by Eve La Salle Caram~

Here's information about Eve:

Eve La Salle Caram is the author of five novels, those in her new book TRIO, A CORPUS CHRISTI TRILOGY and the interconnected duo of THE BLUE GEOGRAPHY and WINTERSHINE. She is also the editor of PALM READINGS, STORIES FROM SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, a multicultural anthology of stories by Southern California women. She is presently working on fiction inspired by her recent trips to Italy. A collection of stories, EIGHT, as well as a novel written in her youth, RUSHES FROM GIRLHOOD, are also forthcoming.

Her books are available at Amazon.com and Plain View Press (www.plainviewpress.net).