AN EXCERPT FROM “THE ASH GIRL”
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When your child finishes her first novel, you feel compelled to tell the world, or at least to guide potential readers to become followers of her work. In this case, we're talking about our daughter, Lisa, whose pen name, A'Lis Bly, is, in itself, a great story!
You can follow her work as it unfolds at:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/331929435038494324/
and at her website:
In case you are not intrigued yet, allow me to share one of my own favorite excerpts from The Ash Girl. I just keep thinking, how does anybody even write like this!!
Here goes:
Speaking from the voice of the narrator – a tree, Lisa (A’Lis) describes how the stories of the characters in her novel were already contained in the lives of their ancestors, “just as the oak is contained in the acorn.” “We trees,” she writes, “are quite interested in our own biology, our own origin myths, and thus I can assure you that seeds have lain dormant for thousands of years until the right elements converged to spurn stagnant matter to fruitful life. A pick axe breaks ground to make a bed for a casket unearthing a seed dropped there by a bird in the previous epoch. The hoof of a deer grazes the shell, exposing the inner layer to sun, wind, and water. A tiny green shoot appears, growing to an orchard in two hundred short years in a land where that kind of tree had never been seen. To the uninitiated in the way of seeds the orchard may seem to have sprung out of nowhere, as if by magic. Once hearing its story some would call it a series of splendid coincidences. Some might call it destiny or divine intervention.
What could we know of our birth or our death? What is truth? What is myth? What is memory? What is the difference between magic, coincidence, destiny, and divine intervention? In the end (that is also the beginning), does it matter much?”