Once in a while, I like to host other authors on my blog. Today, Laura Lee, author of Angel, a new novel, has stopped by. Here’s a description of her new book:

Since the loss of his wife to cancer six years before, minister Paul Tobit has been operating on autopilot, performing his church duties by rote. Everything changes the day he enters the church lobby and encounters a radiant, luminous being lit from behind, breathtakingly beautiful and glowing with life. An angel. For a moment Paul is so taken by his vision that he is tempted to fall on his knees and pray. Even after he regains his focus and realizes that he has only seen a flesh-and-blood young man, Paul cannot shake his sense of awe and wonder. He feels an instant and overwhelming attraction to the young man, which puzzles him even as it fills his thoughts and fires his feelings. Paul has no doubt that God has spoken to him through the vision and he must figure out what God is asking him to do. Thus begins a journey that will inspire Paul’s ministry, but will put him at odds with the church he loves as he is forced to examine his deeply held beliefs about himself, his community and the nature of love.

LS: What was your primary motivation in writing Angel?

Laura Lee: I wanted to write a good novel.  I wanted to put all of my literary ability toward telling a story worth telling.

LS:  You include a precede (epigram) at the beginning of each chapter, such as the one below. Please share your thoughts on why you chose to do that.

“I summited Mount Rainier.” Words are inadequate to the experience. All of the preparation, every single step, the times you think  you can’t go on, the cold, the thin air—all that it means to accomplish that feat—it‟s lost to everyone but the individual who undertakes the journey.”

Laura Lee: Some people love the epigrams and some people hate them.  I have no problem with anyone skipping over them.  They don’t change the story.  The novel Angel was inspired by Mount Rainier in Seattle. The mountain provides the spiritual center of the story. It was the image that I kept going back to in order to find the right feel for the events I was narrating.  The mountain informed the story for me from the beginning and infuses every aspect of the story. It is the breath of the story. So I wanted it to remain a poetic presence. In the body of the narrative itself, however, I didn’t want to constantly refer to the mountain. Ian and Paul’s story is their story, not a metaphor. The epigrams at the beginning of the chapter, however, ask the reader to back up for a moment and view the intimate and personal events of the story in light of universal truths, the types of truths that are difficult to articulate, but which can be discovered and felt by contemplating nature. It asks the reader to connect the specific to something that is, like Mount Rainier, larger than the story and its characters.

LS: What actors would you choose to play the roles of Paul, Ian and Sara?

Laura Lee: I tend to prefer it when a movie is cast with excellent but not well known actors.  When you see a famous face there is this recognition and associations with other roles to be overcome.  I would love to see Sara cast by someone who was not conventionally beautiful or model-esque but who could exude a warm spirit.  Hollywood tends to find it hard to cast like that.  Ian could be played by a young actor-model.  Physical beauty is important for his character.  Ian has a bit of an androgynous quality to his looks (but not his behavior).  So it would be important to preserve that.  He is the kind of man who is always described as “pretty” not “handsome.”  In the past I’ve said that I would cast Michael Emerson (Ben from “Lost”) as Paul.  He is actually not quite the right age and doesn’t match the description I gave of Paul the book, but he has that everyman quality as well as emotional expressiveness.  So he could do a good job with the part.  I could see him doing a bang up job as an internally-conflicted minister.

LS: Explain from your perspective as the author the meaning behind Paul’s internal thought: “I’m not gay, but my boyfriend is.”

Laura Lee: Paul is not exclusively, or even primarily, oriented toward men.  I left it a bit open as to what kinds of attractions he’s had in the past.  There is one line about Paul having had a variety of sexual fantasies in the past.  Some readers have taken that to mean Paul always had attractions for men.  Maybe he even willfully ignored them.  I find that most readers, though, tend to want to think of Paul has having been completely shocked and startled by his attraction to Ian.

My take on Paul (and you don’t have to agree with me just because I’m the author) is that he has probably “tried on” some homosexual fantasies in the past, in the abstract as a thought experiment.  I don’t imagine him as ever having focused romantically or sexually on a particular man.  The fantasies were never a big enough part of his psyche to make him question his identity as a straight man.  I am sure a lot of straight men try on a gay fantasy from time to time and don’t think of themselves as being homosexual because of it.  Paul didn’t feel driven to be with a man.  Had he not had a mystical experience involving Ian he might never have examined this potential. Part of the reason that it is so important to us to pin down which “side” someone is on is that sexual orientation isn’t just a feeling or behavior but a social category.   The other people in our community want to know how to define us.

We tend to have this “one drop” theory when it comes to sexual orientation.  So once Paul became involved with Ian he, essentially, became gay.   He must have been lying to himself about his attraction for his wife, or he is lying to himself about his attraction to Ian.  You’re in love with a man, you’re gay.  Period.  Paul doesn’t feel as though his internal nature has changed at all.  He did not become gay.  He is still what he was before.   Ian is oriented only toward men.  He is a gay man.  Paul is something else.  We would probably call him bisexual, but Paul doesn’t feel that word does a good job of explaining the nuances of what he feels.

LS: There is an obvious lack of graphic sex scenes. Can you explain why you made that choice?

Laura Lee: To be honest, I think the sexual act is subjectively beautiful and objectively goofy.  I described sexuality subjectively, in terms of how it made Paul feel, rather than objectively in terms of who touched who where because to me it is sexier.  Adult readers know what goes on in bed.  I have nothing against erotica, but turning readers on was not my purpose.  I didn’t feel vivid sex would add much information in terms of understanding the character’s relationship.  Beyond that, there is a perception among a lot of people that same-sex relationships are all about the sex.  It was important to present them as fully sexual beings without focusing too much on the sex itself.  I also wanted to be able to reach readers who might not be as comfortable with the idea of men being in love.  I wouldn’t be too successful reaching those readers if I had pages and pages of hot man-on-minister action in the book.  The focus of the story is on the spiritual and social dimensions of their relationship, not on their bedroom antics.  Unfortunately, the book consistently gets labeled as “erotica” anyway. It bothers me to see it labeled that way.  It is misleading and false.

LS: What is your interpretation of the mountain analogy that you use repeatedly in the epigrams?

Laura Lee: The mountain was an image that I could go back to as I was writing.  It helps me to have some kind of image or concept.  So when I am a little bit stalled, I can go back and do some writing that has nothing to do with the plot.  I think “how does this relate to the mountain?”  I write about the mountain until it brings me back to the characters.  Almost none of that writing ended up in the final book.

The mountain symbolizes the church and is tied into an internal church debate about whether or not to repair a crumbling steeple. The steeple is a man-made mountain, designed to remind us of our smallness and humility in relation to divine forces. It is also a symbol of natural forces that are of a scope that does not allow them be controlled through human will (as is the attraction the character Paul feels toward Ian). The mountain also symbolizes the relationship of the protagonists. I consciously thought of Ian and Paul as being like the mountain, where heaven and earth meet, so Ian is earthy and Paul has his head a bit in the clouds. This shaped the characters and what makes them compatible.

The mountain symbolizes beauty and the fear that sometimes accompanies our experience of beauty as well as the inevitability of loss that beauty implies  (a New Year’s Eve scene discusses that idea of beauty and loss).  As Paul discovers his attraction to Ian’s natural beauty, he is forced to face his fears. And like the dormant volcano that is Mount Rainier, the relationship has the potential to be destructive in the future.

The cycle of destruction and renewal that a volcano represents also ties into a theme of resurrection that is a subtext of the novel. It comes into the novel through Paul’s discussion of the mass with Ian, Ian’s participation in communion, and the new life direction that each finds through his relation to the other. (At the cost of the death of a previous way of existence.)

Finally, a volcano, so seemingly solid, is a reminder that everything beautiful is transitory and therefore we should remember to cherish it.  That is what the mountain symbol meant to me.

LS: Did Paul really love Ian and vice versa? Or did they just fill certain needs in their lives?

Laura Lee: I don’t really know how to answer that because I don’t know that there is this one objective thing called “love” that you can measure emotions against.  What does anyone mean by that word?  Big “L” love usually involves some element of sexual desire, but you can have sexual desire without love.  You can also have romantic love without sex.  Paul and Ian loved each other as friends but there is something about consenting to be lovers that transforms that into romantic love.  People who are married have moments when they wonder why they are together.  Is deciding to go through those times and remain together the definition of love?  If it is, if the couple breaks up, does it mean they were never really “in love” to begin with?  Are anyone’s motivations for being with another person ever that clear or unambiguous?  No one’s love lives up to the Platonic ideal.  Every love is made up of individual moments of being drawn to each other, confused by each other, annoyed by each other.   Mutually agreeing to fill one another’s needs is probably not a bad definition for love.  Do they do this perfectly?  Of course not, but what human being does?  I would say that permanence is not necessary for something to be called love.  No love is really permanent because no life is permanent.  The way to get a love story with a happy ending is to stop narrating at a point of happiness.

LS: Are you planning a sequel?

Laura Lee: I’ve written a sequel, as it happens.  Angel was written over ten years, the sequel has taken about three.  I haven’t decided whether or not to publish it.

You can purchase Angel here. 

Curious about Laura Lee? Here’s how she describes herself:

“I’m getting tired of my biographical blurb that appears everywhere.

I’m mostly known for my non-fiction such as Broke is Beautiful and The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation.

The novel that I am hoping will be my next also has a Seattle connection, and I’m not sure why this is as I grew up mostly in the Detroit area.

I began my career working in radio.  I always wanted to get a job at an alternative rock station but I was on the air at oldies, light rock and country stations.

I have a degree in theater and thought I wanted to be an actress.

As a speech writer I have written for high level international politicians and I have also worked as a professional mime and shopping mall Easter Bunny.

I divide my time between writing and touring the U.S. with a Russian ballet dancer to teach classical ballet technique to American kids.  This keeps me on the road half the year.

I’m still waiting for my financial ship to come in.”

Find out more about this honest, fun author, click here.