Ask the Author: Lorena Cassady
Answered Questions (6)
Lorena Cassady
Hi Cathy, I've been writing and just recently surfaced to get ready to publish in January. Amazing to hear from you! We may have met years ago at a Neal Cassady tribute in Santa Cruz. If you are his only daughter, I believe I met you and your brother. No, we are not related. At a point in my life when I was laying down one life and starting on a new journey, I decided to name myself after your father. Long story about why, which I'm happy to share sometime. I actually spoke to your mother on the phone and told her I had taken his last name, and of course she was mystified!
I named my daughter after Edward John Trelawny who for me was the 19th century version of your dad, a muse for writers who in many ways lived vicariously through him. With Trelawny as her first name, she pretty much had to learn the alphabet before she could write it.
My feeling of connection with your father started when I was very young, 13, because of my boyfriend. But I took his name much later not because of his connection to the beats or his crazy antics. It was his autobiography that moved me very deeply. His ability not only to survive that childhood, but to do it with energy and intention and at times, joy.
I am 70, almost 71. It has been many years since my exposure to the beats and I have a more critical perspective. Artistically, I have no argument. They changed the world. But as a woman, looking back at that young girl I was, I personally experienced the rather extreme dismissal (I am searching for a better word, but can't find one) of women, and how women were used mainly to support their needs. Henry Miller, Kerouac, Burroughs -- they all saw women as an appendage. And because I was thrown off my own life because of this attitude, which took me decades to see clearly, I have moved on into many other more worlds more spiritually profitable.
I don't presume at all to have known or understood your father, but I do know something about spending a lifetime trying to understand my own. He is still living, but has forgotten me due to his dementia. And it's just as well.
So though we are not related by blood, we are related in some way. And it was wonderful to hear from you. I am still living and writing in Oaxaca, Mexico. Come visit! I'll be moving back to California in a couple of years when my name comes up on the Sr. Housing list in Aptos.
What do you write?
Saludos and abrazos,
Lorena
I named my daughter after Edward John Trelawny who for me was the 19th century version of your dad, a muse for writers who in many ways lived vicariously through him. With Trelawny as her first name, she pretty much had to learn the alphabet before she could write it.
My feeling of connection with your father started when I was very young, 13, because of my boyfriend. But I took his name much later not because of his connection to the beats or his crazy antics. It was his autobiography that moved me very deeply. His ability not only to survive that childhood, but to do it with energy and intention and at times, joy.
I am 70, almost 71. It has been many years since my exposure to the beats and I have a more critical perspective. Artistically, I have no argument. They changed the world. But as a woman, looking back at that young girl I was, I personally experienced the rather extreme dismissal (I am searching for a better word, but can't find one) of women, and how women were used mainly to support their needs. Henry Miller, Kerouac, Burroughs -- they all saw women as an appendage. And because I was thrown off my own life because of this attitude, which took me decades to see clearly, I have moved on into many other more worlds more spiritually profitable.
I don't presume at all to have known or understood your father, but I do know something about spending a lifetime trying to understand my own. He is still living, but has forgotten me due to his dementia. And it's just as well.
So though we are not related by blood, we are related in some way. And it was wonderful to hear from you. I am still living and writing in Oaxaca, Mexico. Come visit! I'll be moving back to California in a couple of years when my name comes up on the Sr. Housing list in Aptos.
What do you write?
Saludos and abrazos,
Lorena
Lorena Cassady
Lucie! Great question! Well, of course we write to gain perspective, no? My heroine was very young, the age of Lolita IN the age of Lolita, so no, she (and we both know who I am talking about) didn't have a perspective on what was happening to her. But she did feel uncomfortable and objectified around her beatnik buddies in a way that she hadn't when she had boyfriends her own age…who would grow up to be hippies many years later. The "beatnik boyfriend" still lives. He is still a beatnik, still an idio…. I mean, still limited in his ideas about women.
Lorena Cassady
That's an interesting question because I struggled with the genre problem. Memoirists told me I had to tell the truth and nothing but the truth (which is an unexamined proposition, since no one is endowed with perfect, factual memory) and fiction did not define what I was doing since something over 50% of the book was memoir and a record of historical events. I call "Her Perilous Journey" a picaresque memoir because that's what it is, and for me it honestly represents what the reader should expect. Hope I answered your question.
Lorena Cassady
I definitely write character-driven work. However in "Her Perilous Journey" the heroine was definitely affected and influenced by the tragic events of the 60s, the crazy characters she met, the sexual mores of the time. But she was by no means a blank slate in her encounters with these things. It's all about an intense interaction of the protagonist with her environment. And by intense, I include satire and humor, of course!
Lorena Cassady
Thanks for the question, Victoria! I'm going to change my bio! It's an old habit from the days when I spent more time every year in the States. I moved to Mexico at the end of a process of becoming bilingual and realizing that I loved the place after many visits to Chiapas and Oaxaca. It is the most evocative and fascinating place I've ever been. I am surrounded by Zapotec and Mixtec ruins, 17th century churches, beautiful art and architecture, and many vibrant indigenous cultures. I also found that I need some distance from my own culture to stay sane.
Lorena Cassady
I understand your dilemma! I understood my genre as I wrote the book, "Her Perilous Journey" -- one of the oldest genre's in the world -- The picaresque. My book is also a memoir, essentially, though I consider Regina IV a character that is free to think beyond the limitations of my actual life. Sometimes she does things I never would have done. Sometimes she does things I should have done. Sometimes she enters another reality. The book is about her, not me.
So, what I wrote is a picaresque memoir. That's what it is, but the book sellers aren't going to let me choose my own category. That lack of choice means that my readers will be robbed of understanding that my book comes out of a tradition, and that it should be seen in the context of of that tradition -- Voltaire's Candide, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, etc.
PS: Any memoirist that tells you that memoirs must be "true" have not read or understood the extensive research on the utter unreliability of memory, or the hundreds of philosophical discourses about the nature of "truth"!!
We writers must remember that genres have become a marketing tool solely for the convenience of those who have made books their business -- publishers, agents, and bookstores. Our choice is clear, if not stress producing. Do we write inside their corral or out on the free range? Are we artists or sheep? Baaaaa :)
This is only my opinion, but it makes me sad to think that you might actually alter the course of your writing "to make it fit nicely into a single genre." I want to read you, not them! Keep in touch!
So, what I wrote is a picaresque memoir. That's what it is, but the book sellers aren't going to let me choose my own category. That lack of choice means that my readers will be robbed of understanding that my book comes out of a tradition, and that it should be seen in the context of of that tradition -- Voltaire's Candide, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, etc.
PS: Any memoirist that tells you that memoirs must be "true" have not read or understood the extensive research on the utter unreliability of memory, or the hundreds of philosophical discourses about the nature of "truth"!!
We writers must remember that genres have become a marketing tool solely for the convenience of those who have made books their business -- publishers, agents, and bookstores. Our choice is clear, if not stress producing. Do we write inside their corral or out on the free range? Are we artists or sheep? Baaaaa :)
This is only my opinion, but it makes me sad to think that you might actually alter the course of your writing "to make it fit nicely into a single genre." I want to read you, not them! Keep in touch!
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