LUCHA CORPI
Arte Publico. 2009. c.240p. ISBN 978-1-55885-547-2. pap. $15.95. M
Detective Gloria Damasco has a "dark gift", an extrasensory prescience that underscores her investigations and compels her to solve numerous cases.
In Death at Solstice, Gloria is asked to help the owners of the Oro Blanco winery in California's Shenandoah Valley, the legendary Gold Country. She can't help but wonder if the ever-more persistent visions--two pairs of dark eyes watching her, a phantom horse and rider, the sensation of being trapped underwater--might foreshadow this new case that involves the theft of a family heirloom, a pair of antique Diamond and emerald earrings rumored to have belonged to Mexico's Empress Carlota.
But Gloria learns that there's more to the case than stolen jewelry. Mysterious accidents, threatening anonymous notes, the disappearance of a woman believed to be a saint and a ghost horse thought to have belonged to notorious bandit Joaquín Murrieta are some of the pieces Gloria struggles to fit together. Soon a gruesome murder sends Gloria on a fateful journey to a Witches' Sabbath to find the final pieces of the puzzle before someone else is killed.
Corpi weaves the rich cultural history of California's Gold Country into this suspenseful and engrossing mystery, the latest adventure in the Gloria Damasco Mystery series.
About the Author:
For Lucha Corpi, art has always meant activism. As a woman, a Hispanic, an immigrant and a mother, she has always found herself breaking down barriers in both life and literature.
Corpi was born in 1945 in Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico, a small tropical village on the Gulf of Mexico into a community that fostered creativity, performances and an appreciation for music, poetry and storytelling.
In 1964, she married and moved with her husband to Berkeley, California, a city in the throes of the students’ Free Speech Movement, which ignited the most turbulent decade in the history of the University of California-Berkley campus. It also coincided with the inception of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the southwestern United States.
Following an emotionally devastating divorce in 1970, Corpi found herself alone and in pain, with no family except her young son and very few friends. She turned to writing simply to get hold of her feelings, to face her contradictions and keep chaos at bay.
Her initial writing forays led to the exploration of poetry in Spanish as an outlet for her creativity. In 1970, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for poems later included in Palabras de mediodia / Noon Words(Fuego de Aztlán Publications, 1980; bilingual edition Arte Público Press, 2001). Her first collection of poems appeared in Fireflight: ThreeLatin American Poets (Oyes, 1976), and a third poetry collection followed: Variaciones sobre una tempestad / Variations on a Storm(Third Woman Press, 1990).
During that same decade, Corpi resumed her university studies, which had been interrupted by her marriage and supporting her husband while he studied. The UC-Berkeley campus provided an excellent forum for her political activism. Among other pursuits, Corpi was one of five founding members of the Aztlán Cultural, an arts service organization that years later would merge with Centro Chicano de Escritores (Chicano Writers Center). She also joined the Comité Popular Educativo de la Raza, an organization of parents, students and teachers in Oakland that sought to establish bilingual child care centers and other programs in the city's unified school district.
After her first collection of poetry appeared, Corpi experienced a long and personally worrisome poetic silence. To ease the tension, she turned to prose, penning several award-winning short stories. In 1984, she wrote her first story in English and her first English-language novel, Delia's Song, was published by Arte Público Press in 1989.
In 1990, Corpi was twice honored: she was awarded a Creative Arts Fellowship in fiction by the City of Oakland, and she was named poet laureate at Indian University Northwest.
The publication of Eulogy for a Brown Angel: A Mystery Novel (Arte Público Press, 1992) was the culmination of a life-long dream. The novel won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Best Book of Fiction. Corpi’s second mystery novel featuring Chicana detective Gloria Damasco is Cactus Blood (Arte Público Press, 1995), which was reissued in paperback in 2009. Black Widow’s Wardrobe (Arte Público Press, 1999) and Death at Solstice (Arte Público Press, 2009) are the two most recent editions to The Gloria Damasco Series. In between the publication of these works of fiction, she compiled and edited Máscaras (Third Woman Press, 1997), a collection of essays on writing by prominent Chicana and Latina authors.
Fans can also turn to Corpi’s first mystery novel in a new series, Crimson Moon: A Brown Angel Mystery (Arte Público Press, 2004). Weaving the student movements at Berkeley, a serial rapist within the government’s ranks, a militant Chicano brown power group in Denver, and even the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, Corpi has once again penned an intriguing thriller that revisits one of the most disturbing chapters for the American psyche: the civil rights struggles and student revolts during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In addition to poetry and mystery novels, Lucha Corpi also writes for children. In 1997, she published her first bilingual picture book, Where Fireflies Dance / Ahí, donde bailan las luciérnagas (Children’s Book Press), and The Triple Banana Split Boy / El niño goloso (Arte Público Press) was published in 2009.
Corpi holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from UC-Berkley and an M.A. in World and Comparative Literature from San Francisco State University. A tenured teacher in the Oakland Public Schools Neighborhood Centers Program for 30 years, she retired in 2005.
I had the wonderful privilege of interviewing Lucha Corpi for BronzeWord Latino Book Tours. Although at the time of this post, I have yet to finish editing our interview, it will be available soon for your listening pleasure at www.LatinoBookTours.com
I interviewed Lucha Corpi nearing the end of her two week Virtual Book Tour, where she was an active participant daily at hosts' blogs. Although she had spent the last eight days answering questions and providing material for the tour, Lucha Corpi offered deep and insightful answers to my questions. Her soft and gentle voice, as well as her thorough commentary delivered with an elegant demeanor, made this interview a true pleasure to experience.
The following is an abbreviated transcription of our interview:
nb: Death at Solstice has an amazing setting of California's Shenandoah Valley, the legendary Gold Country. In your previous novels, the setting has also played an important role. How do you create your stories? Are you attracted by a setting and then mold a story around the setting, is it historical events that grab you, or does an idea start with the main character's personal journey?
LC: Well, in a way it's a combination. My novels tend to have a historical background so obviously that is something that attracts my attention immediately, when I think of something that could be highlighted and become integral part of the plot, but it's also Gloria Damasco's personal quest. In some ways she tells me where she wants to go for Death at Solstice, I actually visited the Gold Country a long time ago. The first time I went I was really captured by the whole era because it seemed to be such a turning point in the history of California of Mexican-Americans in California because of the war of the U.S and Mexico, in 1848, (after)which the U.S. annexed the whole North-Western part of Mexico after Mexico lost the war, and became the South West of the United States. By that time, 1848, gold had been discovered in California and a lot of people just flocked to San Francisco, in particular, because it was the Golden Gate, the entrance to the gold country and so I think that's when California became the multicultural, multi-ethnic state that it is.
And so that captured my attention and I read a little bit about it, visited, but I never thought that it would be the actual setting for one of my novels until about two or three years ago, when I went back and I saw how it had changed since the time i had visited about eighteen years ago and then it just stuck with me but I had no idea that Gloria had something to do with it, and that she wanted to explore that in her next adventure, so in some ways it's interesting. I waited for her to tell me. That's basically what I do. I go to many places and research and then she tells me where she wants to go. And so it happened that she wanted to explore the Gold Country. I didn't know what exactly was going to happen there or how it was going to happen.
nb: How do you describe your personal writing process?
Thanks for stopping by Musings today and visiting with Lucha Corpi!
To win a signed copy of Death at Solstice leave a comment and you will be entered the amount of times indicated below!
+1 Comment with a valid email address
+2 for asking the author a question in the comments
+2 for linking to this contest (tell me where)
+1 for being/becoming a follower
BONUS GIVEAWAY! The person that comments the most blogs on each blog in this tour will receive a collection of all four books in the Gloria Damasco series at the end of the tour.
Musings is the last stop of Lucha Corpi's Death at Solstice Latino Book Tour. Her book tour has been fascinating though, with a little bit of everything. Make sure you go back and check out all these fabulous blogs which include interviews, essays by Corpi, reviews and more wonderful insight to this fascinating author and "killer" series!
Nov 30 Richard Unloaded
Dec 1 Mayra Calvani Latino Book Examiner
Dec 2 Terri Behind Brown Eyes
Dec 3 Lara Rios Julia Amante
Dec 4 Anna The Sol Within
Dec 7 Misa Chasing Heroes
Dec 8 Monie Reading With Monie
Dec 9 Carol Book-luver Carol
Dec 10 Tasha Heidenkind's Hideaway
Dec 11 Nilki Musings
To find out more about BronzeWord Latino Book Tours visit www.latinobooktours.com
As always, thanks for stopping by. I love to hear your comments!
Inhale love, exhale fear...
xoxo
For Lucha Corpi, art has always meant activism. As a woman, a Hispanic, an immigrant and a mother, she has always found herself breaking down barriers in both life and literature.
Corpi was born in 1945 in Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico, a small tropical village on the Gulf of Mexico into a community that fostered creativity, performances and an appreciation for music, poetry and storytelling.
In 1964, she married and moved with her husband to Berkeley, California, a city in the throes of the students’ Free Speech Movement, which ignited the most turbulent decade in the history of the University of California-Berkley campus. It also coincided with the inception of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the southwestern United States.
Following an emotionally devastating divorce in 1970, Corpi found herself alone and in pain, with no family except her young son and very few friends. She turned to writing simply to get hold of her feelings, to face her contradictions and keep chaos at bay.
Her initial writing forays led to the exploration of poetry in Spanish as an outlet for her creativity. In 1970, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for poems later included in Palabras de mediodia / Noon Words(Fuego de Aztlán Publications, 1980; bilingual edition Arte Público Press, 2001). Her first collection of poems appeared in Fireflight: ThreeLatin American Poets (Oyes, 1976), and a third poetry collection followed: Variaciones sobre una tempestad / Variations on a Storm(Third Woman Press, 1990).
During that same decade, Corpi resumed her university studies, which had been interrupted by her marriage and supporting her husband while he studied. The UC-Berkeley campus provided an excellent forum for her political activism. Among other pursuits, Corpi was one of five founding members of the Aztlán Cultural, an arts service organization that years later would merge with Centro Chicano de Escritores (Chicano Writers Center). She also joined the Comité Popular Educativo de la Raza, an organization of parents, students and teachers in Oakland that sought to establish bilingual child care centers and other programs in the city's unified school district.
After her first collection of poetry appeared, Corpi experienced a long and personally worrisome poetic silence. To ease the tension, she turned to prose, penning several award-winning short stories. In 1984, she wrote her first story in English and her first English-language novel, Delia's Song, was published by Arte Público Press in 1989.
In 1990, Corpi was twice honored: she was awarded a Creative Arts Fellowship in fiction by the City of Oakland, and she was named poet laureate at Indian University Northwest.
The publication of Eulogy for a Brown Angel: A Mystery Novel (Arte Público Press, 1992) was the culmination of a life-long dream. The novel won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Best Book of Fiction. Corpi’s second mystery novel featuring Chicana detective Gloria Damasco is Cactus Blood (Arte Público Press, 1995), which was reissued in paperback in 2009. Black Widow’s Wardrobe (Arte Público Press, 1999) and Death at Solstice (Arte Público Press, 2009) are the two most recent editions to The Gloria Damasco Series. In between the publication of these works of fiction, she compiled and edited Máscaras (Third Woman Press, 1997), a collection of essays on writing by prominent Chicana and Latina authors.
Fans can also turn to Corpi’s first mystery novel in a new series, Crimson Moon: A Brown Angel Mystery (Arte Público Press, 2004). Weaving the student movements at Berkeley, a serial rapist within the government’s ranks, a militant Chicano brown power group in Denver, and even the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, Corpi has once again penned an intriguing thriller that revisits one of the most disturbing chapters for the American psyche: the civil rights struggles and student revolts during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In addition to poetry and mystery novels, Lucha Corpi also writes for children. In 1997, she published her first bilingual picture book, Where Fireflies Dance / Ahí, donde bailan las luciérnagas (Children’s Book Press), and The Triple Banana Split Boy / El niño goloso (Arte Público Press) was published in 2009.
Corpi holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from UC-Berkley and an M.A. in World and Comparative Literature from San Francisco State University. A tenured teacher in the Oakland Public Schools Neighborhood Centers Program for 30 years, she retired in 2005.
I had the wonderful privilege of interviewing Lucha Corpi for BronzeWord Latino Book Tours. Although at the time of this post, I have yet to finish editing our interview, it will be available soon for your listening pleasure at www.LatinoBookTours.com
I interviewed Lucha Corpi nearing the end of her two week Virtual Book Tour, where she was an active participant daily at hosts' blogs. Although she had spent the last eight days answering questions and providing material for the tour, Lucha Corpi offered deep and insightful answers to my questions. Her soft and gentle voice, as well as her thorough commentary delivered with an elegant demeanor, made this interview a true pleasure to experience.
The following is an abbreviated transcription of our interview:
nb: Death at Solstice has an amazing setting of California's Shenandoah Valley, the legendary Gold Country. In your previous novels, the setting has also played an important role. How do you create your stories? Are you attracted by a setting and then mold a story around the setting, is it historical events that grab you, or does an idea start with the main character's personal journey?
LC: Well, in a way it's a combination. My novels tend to have a historical background so obviously that is something that attracts my attention immediately, when I think of something that could be highlighted and become integral part of the plot, but it's also Gloria Damasco's personal quest. In some ways she tells me where she wants to go for Death at Solstice, I actually visited the Gold Country a long time ago. The first time I went I was really captured by the whole era because it seemed to be such a turning point in the history of California of Mexican-Americans in California because of the war of the U.S and Mexico, in 1848, (after)which the U.S. annexed the whole North-Western part of Mexico after Mexico lost the war, and became the South West of the United States. By that time, 1848, gold had been discovered in California and a lot of people just flocked to San Francisco, in particular, because it was the Golden Gate, the entrance to the gold country and so I think that's when California became the multicultural, multi-ethnic state that it is.
And so that captured my attention and I read a little bit about it, visited, but I never thought that it would be the actual setting for one of my novels until about two or three years ago, when I went back and I saw how it had changed since the time i had visited about eighteen years ago and then it just stuck with me but I had no idea that Gloria had something to do with it, and that she wanted to explore that in her next adventure, so in some ways it's interesting. I waited for her to tell me. That's basically what I do. I go to many places and research and then she tells me where she wants to go. And so it happened that she wanted to explore the Gold Country. I didn't know what exactly was going to happen there or how it was going to happen.
nb: How do you describe your personal writing process?
LC: I think that I start my research for this novel almost a year before I begin writing because it involved a lot of history. I had to research all these things thoroughly before I sit down to write so that I feel comfortable writing them. In a way, I over-research. That means that when I sit down to write it I will feel comfortable writing about facts, about things that are part of history. Then, when I actually start the process, I write every day. Except when I travel. When I travel I don't even take my lap-top.
nb: As writers, we know we aren't always in full control of our stories or characters, and many times, things just happen that we weren't planning on. What was the most surprising thing that any of your characters did in this book, Death at Solstice?
LC: Well, I had no idea there was going to be a mountain lion in the midst! Although from the very beginning, Gloria told me, but I thought it was just because Gloria has these visions, extrasensory perceptions. She calls them her "dark gift" because they come to her in dreams, these visions can be about smells and sounds and all kinds of things that bombard her dreams and so I kind of have some kind of idea of what some elements might be down the line, but she just told me she heard an animal growl, and I thought, well it could be a dog...then little by little the whole thing of the mountain lion comes into being into the novel. So, I was surprised about that. And I was surprised at the way it came about, that chapter in the novel, but it was very organic and I liked that. It was a surprise, but it was wonderful to work with it.
And then the other thing was the whole thing with Joaquín Murrieta and El Zorro, which to me, yes, it was completely possible because Joaquín Murrieta was considered a hero by Mexican-Americans and a bandit by Anglo-Americans and his legend was over the whole country. But the way it happened in the novel was a surprise.
In my first novel (Eulogy for a Brown Angel) it was the death of Gloria's best friend. I even had nightmares the night before I had to write that part. I was in mourning. I felt grief, and I didn't know exactly why I was feeling that. The next morning I got up and wrote the chapter where her best friend dies, and I was just torn apart. I cried for days.
So there are always surprises!
nb: When you finish a book and are now sharing this particular novel, where are you in terms of the next novel?
LC: I really don't know. You know, I become obsessed with something, for some reason, I never question why, I just go with my obsession but there's a line that keeps coming back to me, and keeps recurring when I least expect it, when I'm doing the dishes, driving some place, especially when I'm quiet and my attention is not taken by so many different tasks at once, I have a line that keeps coming back and it says "There won't be a happy ending".
nb: Uh-Oh!
LC: And I somehow know that that line belongs in a novel but I don't know yet what else. And I'm trying to keep track of my obsessions these days because I know they're all related and when I will start the research depends on when it's clear to me what I have to research. So that will be the beginning of the novel. But I just don't know when or where it's going to happen, or how it's going to happen.
Thanks for stopping by Musings today and visiting with Lucha Corpi!
To win a signed copy of Death at Solstice leave a comment and you will be entered the amount of times indicated below!
+1 Comment with a valid email address
+2 for asking the author a question in the comments
+2 for linking to this contest (tell me where)
+1 for being/becoming a follower
BONUS GIVEAWAY! The person that comments the most blogs on each blog in this tour will receive a collection of all four books in the Gloria Damasco series at the end of the tour.
Musings is the last stop of Lucha Corpi's Death at Solstice Latino Book Tour. Her book tour has been fascinating though, with a little bit of everything. Make sure you go back and check out all these fabulous blogs which include interviews, essays by Corpi, reviews and more wonderful insight to this fascinating author and "killer" series!
Nov 30 Richard Unloaded
Dec 1 Mayra Calvani Latino Book Examiner
Dec 2 Terri Behind Brown Eyes
Dec 3 Lara Rios Julia Amante
Dec 4 Anna The Sol Within
Dec 7 Misa Chasing Heroes
Dec 8 Monie Reading With Monie
Dec 9 Carol Book-luver Carol
Dec 10 Tasha Heidenkind's Hideaway
Dec 11 Nilki Musings
To find out more about BronzeWord Latino Book Tours visit www.latinobooktours.com
As always, thanks for stopping by. I love to hear your comments!
Inhale love, exhale fear...
xoxo
