Last week you heard from my fellow Ceaseless Way contributor Ada Milenkovic Brown. This week it’s our fellow contributor and friend Allegra Gulino. As it’s a longish piece, I’ve interspersed a couple of Snowdrop photos to add some visual interest. You can order the ebook here or order the paperback on Amazon this Friday at the sale price of $9.99 (good through the end of the year)
What are your stories in Ceaseless Way about?
Both of my stories in Ceaseless Way are excerpts from my novel-in-progress, Monsters Unbound, which is set in modern Romania, where Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and a Latina werewolf band together with others to fight an extremist group that wants to eradicate all the country’s monsters.
My piece Demon, He Called Me carries on the story from the ending of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Frankenstein – it’s a flashback section for the being that eventually takes the name of Theodore, and befriends Dracula.
Shelley’s book ends with the Victor Frankenstein’s unnamed monster having a final confrontation with his Creator aboard a whaling ship. The monster promises his Creator, who was dying of grief and strife caused by his Creation, to kill himself. Once Frankenstein dies, the monster oars away toward the North Pole, intent on keeping his promise. However, in my tale, his unceasing verve for life and appreciation of nature oppose his suicide. The monster encounters a wounded baby seal, and decides to save it from being crushed by an unstable ice shelf. This act convinces him that killing himself would be wrong because he is the only being who could have saved the seal.
My second story in the anthology, The Ortega Wolves Migrate North, involves a middle-class Mexican family that I invented for my novel. They opposed drug cartel members gaining political power in their home state. For that, the Ortegas were terrorized, until they fled for the US border. However, before that conflict, their long-term plan was to legally establish a new life in the US away from drought, corruption and poverty. With the drug lords on their heels, the family decides to meet with a bruja, a witch, in order to become werewolves and cross the border with ease. While the parents decided on that plan out of desperation, their middle daughter, Sonia is excited to have more power and a reason to better unite the disparate family members, while starting a new life.
What inspired them?
Demon, He Called Me, was developed for a few reasons. I knew I wanted Frankenstein’s monster in my novel because he and Dracula are a classic paring of mega-monsters, as established by the black-and-white films from Universal Studios. However, my take on Frankenstein’s monster is anything but campy. For me, the character of the monster is the best thing about Mary Shelley’s novel. He has a tragic combination of innocence and vindictiveness, that is very believable for a warped kind of ‘child,’ who is rejected by its parent and all of society.
I was taken by his love of nature and reverence for innocent people, especially young people – an endearing quality that Dr. Frankenstein lacks. Yet, I find the ending of her book unsatisfying. She set up this monster as immune to cold, so how could he kill himself, even in the North Pole? Also, I felt that he didn’t deserve to die. So, after re-reading her novel, I took as much as I could of the monster’s character and put him in a situation that would rekindle his better qualities and make him change his mind about killing himself. This sets him up for a long journey, in search of belonging, which he finds in Castle Dracula.
I wanted a werewolf character in my novel, as an homage to another popular monster pairing: Dracula and werewolves. However, because I’m all about embracing our inner monsters, I’ve never liked the usual portrayal of werewolves in movies; as victims who were bitten and transformed into monsters, which are either destroyed or somehow converted back into humans. Also, wolves are family-oriented creatures, so I wanted to write about a family that choses to become werewolves. Sonia, the rebel, fully embraces her identity as a werewolf, but the others treat that side of themselves as a mortal sin. The Ortega Wolves Migrate North is how Sonia and her family became werewolves. It sets up future challenges that Sonia will navigate, in order for her to appear at Dracula’s gate at age thirty-two, alone and hungry for answers.
Why should someone pick up a copy of Ceaseless Way?
Hopefully, they would pick it up because it is intriguing to them; the concept, the beautiful cover, the quality of the writing, the variety of situations, settings and genres within its pages. The theme of the anthology is universal, and therefore relatable. Journeys. Not only is travel important for any kind of story telling – plots must move through the action – it’s also key to immersing yourself in fiction. Authors take their readers on a journey – that of the characters within the worlds that they depict, but also there is the internal journey of the reader’s impressions, thoughts, feelings as they absorb the tales. Each person will have a different experience reading the same story. I’ve always found that fascinating.
What does “pilgrimage” mean to you?
To me, a pilgrimage is a special kind of journey. They aren’t only to get from one place to another or just to do certain things at the new location. A pilgrimage is undertaken for healing, understanding and transformation. Whether they are religious, spiritual or in the spirit of learning, self-actualization is on the menu for a pilgrimage. The path usually has danger, privation and hardship, but it’s worth it, at least that’s what pilgrims are lead to believe, because the destination is sacred place of transformation. While on a pilgrimage, we think about what we would like to change – perhaps we wrestle with ourselves, our past, our place in the world. We also may be pilgrims for causes larger than ourselves. A pilgrimage could be revolutionary.
How did you become a writer?
As a kid I channeled my creativity into drawing, dance, singing and playing piano. Sometimes my desire to express myself through art was overwhelming. In addition, I’ve always loved reading and writing. In college I majored in English Lit, with a Fine Arts minor. My writing focus at the time was literary criticism – the analysis of books through essay-writing. I steered my creativity toward my art classes, my dreams and wild ideas. After college, I hoped to write professionally. I didn’t consider creative writing, though I love story-telling and appreciate fine writing/movies/shows. Then we struggled with infertility for several years. During that existential gloom, I became a Yoga teacher. I loved creating sequences, based on what the students requested – I even taught pre and post natal classes with pleasure. It wasn’t until 2009, when I took my first Shamanic workshop with the Four Winds Society, that my inner story-teller came to the fore.
Suddenly Huascar, who is a Shamanic archetype and an Incan emperor spoke to me – through the guise of an animated sci-fi epic (of course). I started writing Huascar’s tale, making many character drawings, crafting a couple of solar systems, detailed histories of four races (no humans). I was driven to share the story of a progressive general in an oppressive, warring empire, trying to heal his people. Eight years later, I had completed the first book in the trilogy I named Convergence. It isn’t yet published.
As I worked on that, it became clear that sci-fi/fantasy writing provides me with endless fascination, development, learning and delight – it’s another calling, along with Shamanism. Since then I’ve expanded my skill, not only at creating worlds, but researching Earth history and fashioning fantasy scenes against realistic backdrops.
My short story, The Monkey In the Cove is set in California 1967 – the Summer of Love. I’m still submitting that one. I really got cooking with historical research for my novel Monsters Unbound, which was spurred by a dream I had while I was working on the second Convergence book. I thought, ok, this will be a short story, then I’ll get back to my epic. Well, in two years it’s blossomed into a novel – I’m about two thirds done. My trilogy characters are calling, so I need to finish this ‘brief’ interruption. One of the things I’ve learned is, write your newest inspirations otherwise you will loose the spark – in this case, it’s a raging fire that must be shared. I’m now learning Romanian and last summer we travelled there, to visit historical sites. The characters, setting and concepts are very rich and engaging for me – it’s really fun to work on. Stay tuned.
Tell us about your past stories.
Jezabel’s Escape is available to read in March 2020’s issue of N3F’s magazine, Eldritch Science. The story wasn’t inspired by a dream, unlike all my other work. The idea came while I attended a 2-day short-story workshop offered by the venerable Allan Wald at a Sci-Fi/Fantasy conference. After giving us guidelines, Mr. Wald and others on the panel let the participants loose, to create our stories. I crafted this tale of an unwanted child in a dystopic world. Jezabel is a ‘splicy,’ a mutant between human and cat (there are also dogs), who was conceived with tainted fertility medication. At the child’s birth, her father abandoned the family. Her mother’s struggle to raise Jezabel caused her to become an alcoholic who sometimes verbally abused her daughter. Jezabel runs away and finds a motley group of splicies who had also fled difficult homes. They establish themselves in an abandoned neighborhood, but are discovered by their distraught parents. What happens next could be described as a masterwork of negotiation.
Aquasphere, in issue 1065 of Bewildering Stories, is based on a weird dream. It concerns Maxine, a recently divorced woman in 1989, who moved into a new apartment and had to cope with loneliness. Her solution was to to buy a Betta – otherwise known as a Siamese fighting fish – and set up her new pet in a carefully constructed eco-system on her new kitchen countertop. She enters the aquarium shop, Aquasphere to buy her fish. Not having been in such a place in a long while, she browses the wares. Things turn strange by degrees, when Maxine finds that the specimens on sale are extremely rare, then biologically impossible creatures. The staff members change from welcoming to bizarre and creepy, as they undergo physical metamorphoses into aquatic life forms. Maxine also transforms, loosing her edges to become more gelatinous. While it’s disturbing, she also enjoys exploring her new way of being, but an inner voices tells Maxine to get out. As she reluctantly starts to leave, she encounters another customer, Calvin, who is undergoing his own transformation. He asks her to help him escape, and together they leave the enchanting, dangerous alternate reality that is Aquasphere. Just in time to witness its collapse into another dimension. That night Maxine and Calvin loose the opportunity to buy aquarium supplies and fish, but they find each other.
What’s your life away from the keyboard?
Outside of writing, I love to hike, lap swim, work out and do karaoke. In our wooded home, I care for our three rescue cats, a sixty gallon aquarium and a plethora of house plants and a garden. I look forward to our next trip, whether it’s another journey to Peru to support my Shamanic work, to see family in Northern Virginia, or to explore other parts of the US and the world. And, of course, I’ll be returning to Romania soon.
Cover by GetCovers, based on concepts from Arden Brooks
