I feel passionately about my debut novel, The Last Shade Tree. It shares my roots. I grew up surrounded by Northern California’s live oak trees and golden wild-oat grass, but abandoned what was left of that idyllic beauty to live in New York City. I am a retired musician who plays the viola da gamba and founded and directed New York University’s Teares of the Muses, a consort of viols. After years of playing Renaissance and Baroque music, I believe my novel has a definite musical lilt.

A few summers ago I discovered more roots—the graves of my ancestors in the Jewish cemetery in Tarnowskie Góry, Poland. As my book characters search for self-knowledge, I realize that authors, too, never end that quest.

My mind runs naturally to myth and fantasy. Impelled to tell a story about extraordinary people intensely bound together on a journey to unknown places, I intertwined many episodes that feel like edgy folktales. I love to balance deadly serious and darkly comic writing, as my characters see the worst humanity has to offer.

Letting the characters speak for me, I voice my dismay that people seem incapable of learning from past atrocities. But I didn’t want to preach, so I imagined a scenario that would be fun, romantic, and sometimes tragic—angry, too. It’s an intimate tale enclosed in an epic adventure.

***

I’m delighted that my sequel to The Last Shade Tree—titled Day of the Jumping Sun—is complete and awaiting publication by All Things That Matter Press. I simply couldn’t bear to leave my beloved characters hanging in a creepy future world with life stories that needed still to be told.