MOONTIME FOR KORY GETS A MAKE-OVER

HERE'S NEWS FROM CO-AUTHOR

SHINAN BARCLAY

Moontime for Kory makes puberty an adventure. Through friendship, finding her talents and place in a community, a girl experiences a rite-of-passage into womanhood. The story also inspires readers to create a local, sustainable economy—so important in these changing times.

How is this book different from others on the market?
Most books on adolescent change and a girl’s first period are filled with anatomical diagrams and biological facts. As a historical fantasy, Flowering Woman, Moontime for Kory makes menstruation sacred and shows what is possible when women work together. In addition to being entertaining and heartwarming, the book contains information that eases a young reader’s concerns about how, where and when she’ll get her period. And, the wise grandmothers of the village offer profound advice on menstruation, sex, passion and pregnancy.
Many women have said that in reading Moontime for Kory they’ve experienced their own rite of passage. The story invites dialog between mothers and daughters, women friends and family members.

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SHINAN BARCLAY ON MOONTIME FOR KORY

INTERVIEW WITH SHINAN BARCLAY

Tell us a little more about the book.
Let me read a 1989 review of the book by Mary Greer, Woman’s Spirituality Author in San Francisco. “Moontime for Kory shows us how to reclaim the power of Menarche, [first menses] and to celebrate this special time through gift giving, loving words of elders, envisioning the future, time spent alone and within, and the returning of the sacred blood of life to our Earth Mother. There is also the acceptance of new levels of responsibility and the bittersweet changes in childhood friendships which we have all experienced. This is both fairytale and vision.” This also speaks of the revised 2009 story.

So this is a rewrite of the earlier story?
It’s a major overhaul, a complete remodel. The first story was mostly written in summary. After moving to the Oregon Coast and teaching workshops on another book of mine, ABC’s of Nature Writing, I realized how much was missing from the Moontime story, in terms of scenes, description and actual facts. With the input of several friends, I revised the story again and again, making the characters ‘more real’ through descriptive actions and dialog. I hired a proofreader, two professional editors and a fact finder; all offered priceless ideas.

2009 VERSION OF FLOWERING WOMAN MOONTIME FOR KORY

AN INTERVIEW WITH SHINAN BARCLAY cont.

How is this new story different?

Hopefully over time, a writer changes. In twenty years, since co-authoring Moontime for Kory, my writing has dramatically improved and I felt uncomfortable with the quality of writing in the first book. One of the things that’s different is the descriptive writing itself. The story is also structurally enhanced. With additional writing, the word count doubled. Smaller units or chapters appeal to more readers. I created seventeen chapters and then divided those chapters into sections or parts – village life, initiation, celebration, resources.

There were no men in the first version; I added a father and other men going out to sea. I live in Charleston , a small fishing village on the southern Oregon coast; we have a bronze sculpture and memorial park for those lost at sea. Dealing with the loss of Kory’s father and Selene’s husband deepened the pathos of this new story.

The earlier characters were flat and plain. I had to do a lot of free association, thinking and research to explore each character’s life. I gave Selene a trade of basket-weaving, because it’s important for women and girls to think about ways they can express and provide for themselves within their community.

Here in Oregon, I’m involved in a local, sustainable economy group; how people provide for themselves and their families, how people eat and survive, are primary issues. In the first edition there was little village life; I rewrote the story to make Kory’s village a sustainable economy as a way of planting that idea in the reader’s mind.

One of the wise women in the earlier version has my middle name, Naom, but I thought it more important for current readers to be familiar with Durga, the dark goddess. A few years ago I had the intuitive prompting to take a sculpture class at the community college and was amazed as a huge dark goddess formed through my hands. We are living at the end of several cycles—planetary, solar and cosmic. The end of this epoch, according to many ancient religions, is in 2012. Who knows what will happen then? Through Durga, a wise-woman who raises and skins rabbits, I included the idea of creative destruction, the dark side of the goddess.

The editor I hired to fact-check informed me that menstrual blood attracts predators like bears, mountain lions and dingos. In the earlier version Mary Dillon and I had Kory spending her first-moon night alone on the beach. When I reread that episode, it felt dangerous to me. I wouldn’t want my young daughter sleeping alone on the beach, especially while she was bleeding. I wanted to create a Moonlodge for Kory and the village women, making it so inviting that readers would be inspired to build their own Moonlodge. Also, because I’ve been involved at the Cob Village nearby in Coquille, and because cob, a combination of earth, clay, sand and straw, is an easy, accessible, natural building material for sustainable villages, the idea of women building their own cob lodge plays into the vision of sustainability.

I had to make the relationship between the girl and the dolphin more believable. After a lot more research on dolphins I figured out how Kory could understand Mahrah, intuitively, clairvoyantly and physically; I wrote that into the story.

Building friendships is an important learning skill for children and having supportive friends is a necessity in adult life. That was also in my mind when I rewrote the story to strengthen the relationship between Kory and Mahrah.

I hired, bartered and begged professional writer friends to critique various parts of the manuscript. I invited ‘slash and burn.’ Susun S. Weed, author and herbalist, tucked the manuscript into her travel bag, and when her airplane was grounded for several hours in a snow storm, she read, critiqued and offered invaluable suggestions, including changing the dolphin’s name from Mara to Mahrah to give the dolphin more of an oceanic sound. Although writing is a solitary process, having a community of writer friends has empowered me to keep revising Moontime for Kory. The result is this new, dynamic story.