Meet Coyote: The Loner, The Lover, The Leaver

The wolf pack will die when scattered by man, lonesome coyote survives. --El Coyote, Kris Kristofferson

Of all the characters within the pages of my forthcoming novel CLOVER BLUE, Coyote was the most unknown to me. Usually when I start a book, I acquaint myself with each person, learn their history, let them tell me their story so I can tell it to you. In Coyote's case, his story was more of a quiet reveal as I got to know him through his actions. This is partly because he's a man of few words, and usually only speaks when he has something worth saying. 

Because of this, the best way to introduce Coyote is to share some excerpts that might offer a few clues about this father, protector, army deserter, and loyal friend. In the following scene, young Clover Blue shares his thoughts in the midst of a powerful storm lashing outside their tree house shelter:

Coyote’s hammock hangs empty across from my bed. He’s an insomniac and often disappears on walks at night. On nights like this, you’d think he’d want to take shelter in the tree house, but Coyote loves storms. Nobody knows where he goes but he usually comes back long after I’m asleep.

Coyote is also a beloved father. His daughter Aura makes her appearance within the first few pages of the book during a home birth with his loving partner, Jade. Aura calls him Yo-Yi. Here's glimpse of Coyote and two-year-old Aura at Saffron Freedom Community.

Aura runs behind Coyote carrying a basket of wild berries in her chubby arms. She follows him everywhere. Half the time Coyote has Aura’s little legs curled around his neck as he moves around the compound with her on his shoulders. She hangs on to his dreadlocks like reins, leaning this way and that as if they’re two heads on one body. Coyote often has bits of food in his hair from her munching on apples or carrots while she floats around on his shoulders.

Blue often seeks  answers to his many questions from his older brother and confidant. In one of the most telling scenes from the book, Clover Blue wonders about Coyote's motivations for leaving boot camp and fleeing to the commune:

“I was just wondering if you ever wish you didn’t go AWOL. I mean wouldn’t it have been easier to just do your stint and be done? Or turn yourself in and take the punishment now that the Vietnam war is over?”

Coyote lets the truck door gently swing back closed. He looks me up and down while he chews a little on his lower lip. “You know we live in a bubble here, right? Things are crazy different out there in the real world. They sent all the brothers to Nam, put ’em on the front lines. Most of them came home in body bags. My ‘stint,’ as you call it, meant I’d have to kill people, you realize that?”

 “It was a stupid question.”

“No, it’s not. You need to know this. That war was for the military industry. Most are. But the war against the black man is far from over. What they most want to take away from us is our dignity and our freedom.”

Finally, Coyote is also quietly compassionate, as revealed by newcomer Rain:

“My first day here, everything was so, I don’t know, different. I was scared. Coyote sat here on the other side of me. My hand was shaking so bad the food kept falling off the fork. He put his hand over mine and held it. He said, ‘It’s cool, sister. Everyone here is your friend.’ His words calmed me down. I’ll never forget that.”

To be frank, as a white woman who grew up in the Midwest, creating a believable character like Coyote, a black man from Oakland, CA, was challenging. But it also presented a unique opportunity to underscore the issues of the day, and give voice to the disparity in African American military recruits who were sent to the front lines, and the unrelenting bigotry they endured. I don't for a minute profess to know what it would be like to walk in Coyote's shoes, but I hope that I've imprinted the reader's heart with one man's indelible footprints.

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Only 39 days until the release of CLOVER BLUE. I hope you'll pre-order your copy today, currently 34% off the cover price! 

And don't forget, my debut novel This I Know will be out in paperback on April 30. 

Out On A Limb: World-Building From The Ground Up

Sanya Nanshan Treehouse Resort | Shi Huai Xun

When I was a young girl I envied our neighbor's adorable playhouse, a miniature home with tiny windows and a real roof, set back among the trees in their back yard. The little house had long been abandoned by their grown daughter but my sisters and I were not allowed to trespass on their fenced property. That didn't keep me from admiring the secret hideaway from our side of the barrier, which seemed more like a wall than a fence when you're a small child. 

What I remember most about the playhouse is the ache of jealousy I felt. I've always been a fan of cozy places. I used to love building forts under sheets draped over tables and sofas or between bales of hay in my friend Paula's old barn. I often hid in the linen closet on the second floor of our five-bedroom parsonage where I crawled between the shelves and wrote secret messages with glow-in-the-dark Play-Doh on the board above my head. One of my other favorite places was the small space between the washer and dryer where I would drag a blanket and let the warm rumbling and churning lull me to sleep. I also loved to hide in closets, a habit that helped inform young Grace Carter's visits with her deceased twin in my debut novel about a clairvoyant preacher's daughter, THIS I KNOW.

Fast forward to my teens when my dear dad gifted us with the best thing ever, an A-frame tree house nestled into a huge tree on the east side of our new house. At first it was a novelty to my younger sister and little brother, aged eight and twelve, but they quickly bored of it. Not me. I practically moved in, covering the walls with square carpet samples donated by Burcon's Furniture Store, coincidentally owned by the same family who'd lived beyond The Great Wall of our earlier home, the one with the forbidden playhouse and teenagers frolicking in an in-ground swimming pool, also off limits to my siblings and me. At age fourteen I carried my guitar up the rickety ladder of the tree house and sang Joni Mitchell songs and wrote a few aching love songs of my own. Mostly I sat  with my legs dangling off the edge of the plywood floor, scribbling bad poetry, my fort swaying as the branch yielded to moody Michigan winds. 

Given my love for trees and hiding places, it likely comes as no surprise that as a volunteer  

My Backyard Writing Shed

screener with our local film festival, I fell in love with a 2009 documentary about a group of free-spirited young people who formed a coalition of independent island-dwellers on the north beach of Kauai. I've long been fascinated by the revolutionary 1960s, the communes, the sloughing off of traditional family structures in favor of tribal life. I've fantasized about living in an intentional community. 

At one point I turned my empty-nest home into a sort of boarding house and filled the rooms with young women who needed a safe place to live. My "girls"  christened our house The Urban Oasis. They've long-since moved on, some now with families of their own, but those young women will always be remembered as part of my evolving tribe. I now live in a tiny converted garage next door to that house, what we call a granny unit here in California. I recently built myself a "playhouse,"  that serves as my writing studio under a Yucca tree in the back yard. Okay yes, it's my grown-up fort. It even has a hanging swing chair.

It's been almost a decade since I first began to conjure a story that incorporates my love of cozy places with my curiosity toward communal living. In about twenty weeks that story will hit bookstore shelves. In CLOVER BLUE, the members of Saffron Freedom Community reside among ancient live oak trees, the largest of which supports their many-roomed tree house. They live free from the weight of cultural norms. Free of clothing, if they wish. Free from overcrowded classrooms. Free to raise their own food and treat illness with herbal remedies rather than Western medicine. But as in all civilizations, freedom requires self-regulation, lest people begin to treat their claimed liberation from society's rules as a sense of entitlement. This concept is the moral challenge I sought to pursue through the eyes of a young boy who grows up dedicated to the precepts of his idyllic community and the tribe he loves. That is until he begins to question everything he's ever learned in his quest for truth, beginning the day the family midwife is preparing for a communal birth.   

I want to be excited, but I'm a little freaked out. I'm worried Jade's baby might not survive, just like the baby goat that got sick and died. Goji forbids doctors and hospitals. We believe in natural medicines. Sirona probably knows what she's doing, but what if she doesn't? What if none of them know what they're doing? --Clover Blue, age 10

I'm counting down the days (145!) until y'all get introduced to young Clover Blue, his best friend Harmony, and the rest of this ragtag clan of tree house dwellers. In the meantime, tell me about your favorite hiding places, your dream oasis, your sacred spaces. Where do/did you go when you need(ed) a quiet place to dream?

Book Trailer for CLOVER BLUE by Eldonna Edwards

I'll leave you with this delightful Shel Silverstein poem from his book, Where The Sidewalk Ends.

A tree house, a free house,

A secret you and me house,

A high up in the leafy branches

Cozy as can be house.

A street house, a neat house,

Be sure to wipe your feet house

Is not my kind of house at all- 

Let's go live in a tree house.

Hippies and Gurus and Communes, Oh My!

Back then it was just the six of us: Goji, Willow, Wave, Jade, Doobie, and me. I don’t remember much from the first couple years after I came here, but sometime during that summer my memories kick in, as if my brain suddenly threw the switch that saves stuff.  --Clover Blue

When I was a girl I envied my sisters for each having a unique nickname, endearingly handed out by my dad. My oldest sibling Sharon was called Queenie due to her towering height. Luanne was LuLu, Mari-Beth was Izzy, Nita was Neat (although she spelled it "Nete") and LaVonne was Ree, short for her middle name, Marie.  My baby brother David we called Gus, or more commonly, Gassy Gus, for obvious reasons. Me? I was simply Donna, although my sisters recently informed me that my nickname was actually Pinch-Face so maybe I just blocked the memory. 

One of the most thrilling parts of beginning a new novel is getting to name your "children". CLOVER BLUE is set in a 1960s/70s Northern California spiritual commune led by a quiet but charismatic man who gathers like-minded people to live a life that he terms The Peaceful Way. Each member of Saffron Freedom Community chooses or is given a new name when they join the family. As someone who lives in California and with a twenty-five-year career in massage therapy, I'm pretty sure I've heard every hippie-dippy-woo-woo-hooky-do name out there so I assumed this task would be easy. 

Long before typing the first words of the book, I made a list of my characters and their qualities, then assigned them a unique name. Besides Clover Blue and his best friend Harmony, whose namings are revealed as the story unfolds, Jao Ji  was the first name that came to me for the group's founder, given to him by an Indian guru. I wanted the leader's title to be a bit of a puzzle, just as he is. I liked the sound of the word. In Hindi Jao means "go" and Ji is a suffix of respect. So to my mind, having traveled throughout Eastern Asia before starting the commune, it felt like a fitting name for him. 

The next two names were given to prominent characters Willow and Wave, who, despite the free love enjoyed during the sexual revolution, remain steadfast in their love for each other. Willow is a skilled yogi and Wave a former surfer who abandoned the sea after an encounter with a shark. Another original member, Doobie gets his moniker from not only being the family marijuana cultivator, but also the person who consumes most of the product. It's a friendly name, which reflects Doobie's easy-going personality. 

On and on my list went with names like Lyric, Tao, Peace, Feather and Earth, a singer-songwriter, a thespian, a war protester, a bee-keeper and a wildish woman who worships nature. As the story progresses, three more characters show up: a teen-aged girl called Rain, midwife Serena, and Lotus, a neighboring artist. Other characters appear on the list, minor characters, and together I created a lively cast of spiritual seekers devoted to living a peaceful life in nature, far from the madding crowd. But as the story unfolded on the pages and these people came into better focus, they evolved from simple characters to three-dimensional human beings with a past and a purpose. Some wore their names perfectly while others began to slough off the names I'd given them, begging for a more suitable one. 

Jao Ji became Goji, a bastardization of what his teacher had called him, underscoring his flawed self-image. Rather than "Respected Traveler" his name became simply a plant with berries. Peace was renamed Coyote when he evolved from being just an army deserter to a man whose integrity runs much deeper than his politics. Earth became Gaia as she grew into her unpredictable wildness. I changed Feather to Jade because she is a much stronger, more independent woman than I'd first imagined. And sadly, Lyric and Tao disappeared from the pages as I tightened the cast and killed off my darlings.

What I realized while writing Clover Blue is that it would have been easy to take the lazy route and write caricatured versions of every hippie or flower child I've ever met, read about or seen on the screen. But the characters in CLOVER BLUE are more than their names. They are part of a collective tribe yet each with distinct passions and motivations, just like you and me. Mine just happens to be conjuring worlds full of imagined people and places to entertain and hopefully, enlighten readers. I sincerely hope you enjoy the time you spend with them as much as I did creating them.

CLOVER BLUE is now available for Pre-Order!

How Growing Up Poor Made Me A Minimalist

Call it lack of awareness or naivete, but as a child I had no idea my family was poor. We had food on the table, clothes on our backs and plenty of love to go around so I never felt lacking. It didn't occur to me to question  wearing hand-me-down blouses or homemade dresses that my mother sewed for us. Coming from a large family, I just assumed these to be normal, practical things that most families did.

The fact that I was unaware of our socioeconomic status says more about my upbringing than it says about me. I loved the meals my parents prepared out of leftovers, stretching our Sunday pot roast well into mid-week. I felt lucky to inherit one of my older sisters coveted outfits. And sharing a bed with my younger sibling was much more of a comfort than a burden--save for those times she gouged me with a sharp toenail.

It wasn't until I was much older that I began to understand how challenging it must have been to feed seven children on a rural minister's income. I have faint memories of falling asleep in the back seat of our car when my mom drove thirty miles to pick up my dad from his second-shift job. He worked at a Brunswick factory where he'd sometimes bring home defective bowling pins for us to play with. We loved those wooden pins, painting faces on them and gluing yarn on the top for hair. According to family legend he once brought home bowling shoes for us to wear. I was too young to remember it, but I heard how my older sisters pitched a fit and refused to wear the shoes to school. My dad insisted they were the same as saddle shoes and his ungrateful daughters should be happy to have them. My teen sisters begged to differ and the shoes "went missing" after that.

When drawing the character of Reverend Carter in THIS I KNOW I drew from my own experience of growing up with a man who could squeeze 200 pennies out of a dollar. He accepted gifts of venison from church members and had it ground with pork suet so his kids wouldn't balk at the wild taste. He milked his clergy discount wherever and whenever he could, often embarrassing my mom. And he cut coupons like nobody's business, stuffing his suit pockets, his wallet, and the glove compartment of our Plymouth until the little door wouldn't stay shut.

One of my favorite scenes in THIS I KNOW is when Grace goes grocery shopping with her Daddy:

When our basket is nearly full, Daddy stops in the middle of the aisle and thumbs through his stack of coupons looking for ten cents off Charmin. When he finds it, he pulls three packages off the shelf and dumps them in the cart. He doesn’t squeeze them even a little bit. I glance over the list and draw a line through TP. Daddy never spells it out. Maybe he worries about dropping the list and somebody finding out Pastor Carter wipes his behind just like everybody else. Which is kind of funny since he spends more time in the bathroom than anyone else I know.

You'd think that growing up having less would make me want more as an adult, but the opposite is true. My dad taught me the value of love over needless things. I live in a 400 square foot granny unit. I drive a 16 year-old car. I shop at thrift stores. I recycle or re-purpose whenever possible. I cut my own hair. And I rarely buy anything I don't need. Unless. Unless I have a coupon. Or it's a really, really good deal. In which case I've been known to blow money on restaurants, spas, concerts and bookstores. Yesterday I bought a new story board at Office Max. I'd been using push-pins to tack my scenes onto a wall but they had white boards for half off retail.  I rationalized that the new dry-erase board would make writing the next book easier but the truth is I inherited the thrill of saving a buck from my dad. 

I'm not cheap--I tip well and happily pay for quality products and services. But I still love a good bargain. I subscribe to Bookbub, scour the internet for airfare deals and never pay rack rate for a hotel room. Which is why I want to acknowledge that $26 for a hardcover book is a bit steep for some of our budgets. I'm thrilled to share that my publisher is running a sale on THIS I KNOW for 90% off the cover price. My dad was frugal but he was also generous. If he were alive today I bet he'd buy every one of you a copy.