The artist of the Month feature is back, and stronger than ever! This month I have the honor of featuring an author who's work is ahead of it's time, while also representing the classic style  prose of the old masters. When I first read her work I whispered to myself, this is literature, not that pop fiction sh*t. I knew Yvonne Ignacio would be well received on nathanlewis.com, so I invited her to share her talents with us in this space. She graciously accepted.

Her work is titled The Picture: A Work of Theory and Fiction, and it is deep and moving. I encourage you to click in and read the excerpts I have posted on the Artist of The Month pages. For those of you who have ever wondered how authors put such beautiful words together, Yvonne has answered, in detail, all questions about her writing process and motivations in my exclusive interview with her.

 Oh, and after you click in to read her work, don't forget to send her some love. Send her an e-mail letting her know that you read her work. Offer your feedback. This is important because the artists who feature at nathanlewis.com get their validation from readers, from you. Remember, without you, nathanlewis.com would not be able to attract such talented artists. Thank you for being such a valuable part of my website.

 For questions and comments e-mail me at n@nathanlewis.com.

Greetings and welcome to the Artist of the Month feature. Over the past four years  I've been committed to finding the fresh new talent in literature and art. This month I have the pleasure of feature an author whose work is among some of best literature I have read. I have invited Yvonne Ignacio to share her work with us here at nathanlewis.com, and she has graciously accepted. It is a particular personal pleasure for me to feature Yvonne because she represents what most authors, most mainstream authors, don't know how to do: write literature. Most of our best-selling authors today specialize in fiction; that mass market, mass produced 4 x 6 book, that ultimately looks and reads like every other book in the market place. Not only is Yvonne a inspiration to me but I believe, her works and this interview will be an inspiration to you. She is the author's author. Nathan: Greetings and welcome to The Artist Of The Month Feature at nathanlewis.com. It is an honor to present your work in this place. Yvonne: Nate, it is my pleasure to be a guest on your lustrous screen and sit in the orb of such aglint writers. Nathan: Your writing style is very fresh and flowing. Your sentences have their own definite literary style while also staying true to your thoughts, or your characters thoughts. How did you come to find or create your style of writing? Yvonne: When I place my hands upon the keyboard, I feel the movement of music. Like song, whose reserves are mostly of love, my words are offered up in ceremony and dance. I know the nature of the wind, the ice that slides off the windowpane, these things observed become the glissades of my thoughts. May I become indulgent, and quote myself here? Nathan: Please do! Yvonne: "I did not let him. So he retreated into his room beneath the pungent monkey pod tree, which dropped its engorged seeds heavily upon the dewy lawn. And I slept in mine, as the plumeria tree with its milky blossoms, secreted its scent onto the margins of my dreams." What, I write, must fit around the body, and set into the eye, an illuminated strike. I cannot escape the asymmetry of my four-chambered heart or the long canal down my back that expands and collapses with each breath. These are the measures that I hold true as I search the map of my mind: "He then lifted my clinging shirt with the velvet blossoms and blessed my tummy with more kisses. He kissed me with ancient wisdom and natural piety, circling my flowering belly as the pilgrims do the standing stones. To my belly button he bestowed the deepest one, as into a well where holiness dwelt."   Nathan: In Iron Wall Of Autoeroticism your female character, who is nameless in the piece, goes through finding and loosing of a lover. However, it appears that both, she and Johannes (her lover), were holding back parts of themselves in their own efforts to remain whole and true to their own individual selves. Johannes, it appears from my opinion, wanted the free part of himself that traveled the world, landing in life's uncommon places, not wanting the actually commitment or routine of love. She appeared to hold back in an effort to keep the part of her that wanted to fall into passionate love with him in control. From your perspective as the author, did any character end up in a better place due to their with holding of their selves? Yvonne: The Iron Wall of Autoeroticism was one of the first pieces I wrote for my novel THE PICTURE: A WORK OF THEORY AND FICTION, and all the quotes here are from that work.  I just gave it a title so my excerpts for this interview could be identified easily. It appears a quarter into the book, so the conflicts you question are not resolved within that segment. The female character, Ava, is not named thus far, because Johannes uses her name so very sparinglyit would seem to cost him the weight of saffron. In actuality, the conflicts in the entire book are settled outside the framework of the narrative, into a brackish future. This piece cycles naturally as cloud do formfrom evaporation, to absorption, to condensation, to the precipitation of snow and rain:   "I could not imagine him with anything changed. I put him with my other contracted dreams. I folded and laid aside his words and deeds in that part of me that was sore from growth. I reverted to my native state, an animal with animal understanding. I only remember those visually hungry eyes with the cold particles from the Northern European skies. The beat of his body. Those terrible gestures of self-love. Nothing more. No myth. No ballad.  Nevertheless when I bit my lower lip, his kiss resurfaced, floating on the moment, a blue sky stopped."    I like this piece because the viscera is charred and smoking. Ava's anger, confusion and hurt are like the magma from the compressed mantle, but are articulated in a fundamentally female way: she turns the affront of Johannes's absence onto herself. And, though he did not take her, he showed himself to her, but that was enough for her to be tortured and immured, a wretch and dissembled inheritor: "I was living in an ancient age. I expressed myself to him by waiting. Waiting. I had the docility of a woman chemically bound. The origins of my behavior were a molecular event in my cells that translated into thoughts and feelings. The debate was taken out of metaphysical conjecture and into academic boundaries. I could only focus on time, love and remembrance." I constructed this book so that each segment could be read intact like a psalm or verse or chanson; like our mitochondria who live autonomous lives, oblivious to us. But I was also restrained by custom to course a narrative prey. I wanted to emit a literary archipelago. In the Thai Temple Reflection, Ava's teleological argument for love, like God, infers the reality of a cosmic purposive force. She also believes true love can only be expressed by the immaterial and the infinite. So throughout the book, and especially in this section, she uses the terms of holy writ, implies the rationalist gods of Decartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, abases herself before all the gods of the upper and lower atmosphere for whom we strike the gong or smoke peyote.  Johannes is but an aspect that must mean but an appearance of the Absolute. (To paraphrase F.H. Bradley) The other reason I include this portion was because it has the toll and tinkle of poetry. Something to satisfy your readers of that concentrated persuasion. The mysticism of the East provides Ava with sight beyond this world's illusion, which become an exhausting spiritual struggle:   "I was of this earth, but I longed to be free of it, to be the earth, to be the source of my own longing. I was a mammoth hunter following the herds over shallow seas, having tasted such rich meat, never satisfied again with the muscle of any other; watching the land bridges drown in glacier melt, eliminating the only path home, which could never be mine again, without the taste of that meat." And you are right. Their love is so magnetic, the attraction of opposites pulls them to each other, and then through each other, until they emerge on contrary sides. As voracious black holes are evident in every active galaxy, such is the co-existence of destruction and construction, even in the constancy of affection.   Nathan: Are both characters in the Iron Wall Of Autoeroticism completely fiction? Yvonne: Nate, for the well being of my parents, I will admit no party to witnessing men so excited by my structure that they have masturbated before me. And since sensuality pours through this book like a thick cordial, they have been warned that its heady nature could distress them, and to keep clear. I think (thoughtful daughter that I am), I will add that admonition to this interview. This is a book of my altered saga. All that I know of love has been sifted through my heart and devolves through my prose. Like the ruins of Paluzzi for the Neapolitans, I am the remnant of this storied past, because I wrote it: I lived it. I am not a fortress, vacant and silent. I am in residence within all my characters. You hear my footsteps break upon the stillness, even when I am echoing a bit of conversation once overheard and now re-shaped into partial dialogue.   By writing THE PICTURE: A WORK OF THEORY AND FICTION, I had become prescient. Though I had not gone to Hawaii or The Philippines in years, while I wrote the book, my mother was in the Philippines, and when she returned she told me about her experiences in a typhoon. What she described I had already recorded. What I had imaged had become a true impression:  "On the tenth, the storm built, and grew to full might. Like a briny beast, the sea came to the edge where we dare build our dwelling, clawing away at the cement pilings, until the shadows of the waves were on living room walls, with dolphins doing spins in the light of the candles; and it was possible to see the South China Sea tangling in the placemats and vases, and the fish entering early to the be seated at the table." Ava also lives in mountainous Santa Clarita, but descends to attend the clubs and concerts along Los Angeles's lapping coast and level boulevards. So this book is auto-geographic. How I feel about my environment, she shares the same. Even the steep regions, which she thought only God could contour, which become fatally cropped, are, of course, my woeful concerns: "I could not face the hills of my home, scraped down to the dust, seated by crows and ants. I cried when the bunnies fed on my lawn, and wished I had more to offer. In the morning the birds revoked their ancestral song. The nights were awful. I gentled the coyotes as they screeched in their emptiness, and prayed for the nocturnal cats whose safety was gone." But the pivotal word in your question is "both." If this story were true, I would blush for the sins I had confessed. But I will not be bound to a pillar and made to answer this question frankly. However, I will admit this: I have written other pieces from friends' point of view, and they have been astonished that I have caught their inward reflection so precisely, as to be their double selves. That I have used them to draw forth traits, they will forgive, I hope, for the pleasure of my portraiture.  Nathan: One of the first things that struck me with your writing was the knowledge base and the vocabulary that you have in explaining situations and feelings. I thought to myself, Yvonne must spend a lot of time crafting her stories. What is your process for writing a story? How long does it take to write a story such as the Iron Wall Of Autoeroticism? Yvonne: I write mostly a la belle etoile (under starlight) and so the light reflectance has remote astral markings, therefore time is of a different ticking. Also when I write, I have the collective worth of all my other beings, so there seems to be a phalanx of me at work. Nevertheless, The Wall was something I composed and honed within a week, and the whole book, each 379 pages of gold leaf, took one year of literary cloister. For physical process of writing, I need complete isolation, except for the dogs at my feet, and a few hours beforehand to play in my house and read the paper. I do my all my writing while the computer hums beside me with only a few broad notes as guides. Mentally, I float on an aqueous bed of objectivism to far-off vaporous civilizations in space. What I experience is like looking through a powerful telescope at those terrestrial transformations, but I squint rather than stare, and see only out of the corners of my eyes; those are the extravagant gifts that plunge from the sky.   As for my knowledge base, I turned my interest in Yugoslavian enmity into a passionate abstraction.  I wanted to describe fearsome and heartburning sex, like panthers shredding the mossy floor and hanging lianas of their mating grounds; the adversarial nuance of bodies engaged in incursion and saturation. Johannes is from Germany, and that in its self makes for a difficult love interest. Ava supplements and disassociates her love for Johannes, by taking a Yugoslavian lover, Dragan. The antagonism between these two countries represents the tourney of their wills, as her body becomes a fight over occupied territory. In this section, Ava converts herself into the land of the Southern Slavs. I employ the linguistic characteristics of the many Slavic languages in that region to describe Dragan's oral copulation on her, as well as the history and geography of that besieged land, which are also the means projected throughout this extensive piece to describe a recalcitrant seduction: "With the first touch of Dragan's tongue, I yelped and buckled towards the ceiling. Liking this position, he raised my hips with his arms, and made a tabletop of my body, holding me so high, he had to be upright on his knees. I had never thought someone so concerned about decorum and correct behavior would be slurping away at my inner labia and hidden clitoris like a Roman procurator at a bacchanalia. I would not have guessed the blithesome rites of anthropophagy were the custom of the region near the Voivodina. Afterwards, he surveyed me like a tourist from icy circumstances, seeing hot springs, various sporting facilities, clear skies during the summer along the beach. Once more he took me to dine, but this time he gourmandized, and conversed with me in an intimate tongue, a language of flexible verbs, and a vocabulary that was largely original. Against my thighs he sang folk songs; and along the plumpness of my rump, he carried on his work, not in prose, but verse with regular rhythms. I heard a long series of metamorphose as he spooned into my basin, a dialect merged with the Celts, trespassed by the Ostrogoths, held by long German rule, and influenced by Roman and Venetian Italy."    To further answer your question about the types of words I use to describe feelings, in this example, the words I chose to express a tacit ravishment are the principles and customs of war.  Dragan infiltrates Ava's with the ambition of a Balkan conqueror, maneuvering sorties and raids against her body and heart. She is admittedly a "shiva, Sklavin, slave, enslaved" and a loyalist, braving against his canon. But both of them are conspirators.  "I upsurged on my toes to give him deeper access, and curved my back so my breast spilt backwards. The atmosphere was heavy with funk and crime. My hands rented the bed, sabotaging the sheets.  He was the uptake of insemination by tanks and missile launch, punching through to new boroughs, and heisting in the stir plenty of candied boodle." The imprint of ballet is fencing. The motions of Javanese dance drama are martial arts derived. The bellicosity of hard sex provides the same kind of pantomime.    Nathan: Now let me ask the same questions about your sentences. They are wonderful. They contain buzz words for your story, something that many authors forget to include. What is your process for creating a sentence? Yvonne: Throughout THE PICTURE: A WORK OF THEORY AND FICTION there are four principle undersongs, or buzzwords, as you will: photography, quantum physics, worship and war. They are the fundamental forces of my lyric invention. I am very strict upon this code. In particular, the section I submitted to you entitled: The Portrait examines the relationship between photography and the illusion of love. Tintypes, paintings, movies, computer graphics, calendar posters and all sorts of manufactured images are used to reinforce Ava's sensory findings.  This equips the story well, since Johannes is a commercial cinematographer. There are two division included here. In the first is a holographic narrative about their night together. Proprietarily, they view his professional work, which among other things, she sees for its miraculous qualities: "He posted a hundred little marvels that were like jazz to the retina." And later, because she realizes the temporality of his corporeal form, she uses the camera to preserve him: "I conceived of the shot before I closed the shutter. He let me take his picture, as he had let me discover his dimensional body. Slowly, he opened his lips and thighs to me, and made himself vulnerable to my instrument." They become intimate, without penetration, and afterwards it is not his body beside her that distract her from sleep, but his pictures: " But I could not rest. Behind my eyes I saw his studio apartment in all its complex vignettes, and his commercials, those blurred images of remote illusions." In the second section, the last she sees of him, is the chemical resolution of his face on paper, and the recognition of what this snapshot exposes: "His large hands are the ones Michelangelo carved into decisive David, resting on his flat tummy, in contact with his appetites; and next to his masculine jaw as he indulges his voyeur."  And, it concludes, like dead flowers crumbling to dust, with her speculative philosophy about what photography and Johannes's picture mean to her: "Pictures are ideal worlds better visited than the ones we occupy. There are no threats of separation. No prayers in the dark for the one you want, who will not come.  But pictures fade. Leaving only the intangibles. This picture was the last consequence of my amorous piracy. He never asked to take mine. It was a significant detail perceived slowly." And how do a write a sentence? I feel the power of an old yearning to create something novel. The aesthetic order I generate is always a search for distant heavens. Nathan: I have been reading your complete manuscript, THE PICTURE: A WORK OF THEORY AND FICTION, and one of the first things I noticed is that you seemed to address many different relationship emotions in the text. These issues are often found in gleaming bits of emotional sarcasm and angst in your main female character. This is something that is missing from a lot of mainstream fiction. In addition to this, how his your manuscript different than the other works currently published? Yvonne: I don't sit comfortably with the word sarcasm, but I suppose with Ava's inclination towards scientific synthesis, she makes a natural existentialist, and like Simone de Beauvior, in her epistolary labor, never getting her man, there is a bit of pessimism and nihilism in this tract:   "Each drop was from him: the storm and season of the end of my life. My fear was that I would see him againbut only on the other side of death. He could not be broken even from across the world. And still I was alone without his engagement. Never getting the love that I wanted most. I was miserable in my quagmire. Listening to my feelings did no good. So I listened to my expanded consciousness, and acted in consonance with my utmost good. In conclusion, I decided Johannes was no consort for me. Having made that evaluation, I began to strenuously divert my thoughts and actions from him. But it was not easy. My heart held fast for it knew no other way to be.  I learned that love could not be dispelled. But I had the vague hope it could be usurped, and replaced by another. The distance in my heart had expanded, and it would accept no other, unless that new love was in mass and range as I had with Johannes. But I was no angel with an infinite capacity to love. I only had strength to love that way again, for a cause, a child, or God. " I also think, I expression emotion with faithful outrage, melancholy abandon, desperate veneration, fluid illumination, because I crumble before passion, I recognize my truest self built on sacrifice and reunification; I present a wreath of jasmines, pillows covered with kisses, a restoration of a true wilderness.   "Oh, to see his jaws open and his lips raised passed the gums. I wanted him to gnaw at me with the concentration of an animal tearing sinew from a still warm bone. I wanted him to hold me possessively, as if assailed by hyenas and circling carrion, to swipe away any interference with a puissant paw; and rather than accept detachment of himself from me, accept only his death as the final struggle." In this book, I have several experimental formats. The linearity of writing prohibits layering thought and images, unlike what can be done with collage or symphonic sound. And unless, this was a workbook, with answers in the end to skip back and forth to, time cannot be conveyed in parallel. So to create the look of Ava remembering a memory of Johannes as she is skimming across severe surf, I splice the two occasions together. The result is initial disorientation; until you realize that there is no divide between her consciousnesses: "Then, Thaddius pushed me astonishingly hard, my projectile's path against the grain. I took off on a flight of speed, towards the relentless turbulence of incoming waves. Johannes said he would call the beginning of the next week. It was only Wednesday. I tried to curb my excitement, which was equal to my panic. The water beneath me was slipping away, pulling towards the open ocean and building to a great height. It drew me up its vast face. As I waited for his call, pressure began to build up in me; creating fear and dread. My stomach dropped. I knew this wave would be too big and fast for me. I was too amateur to ride its slanting sides. When Thursday came, I knew I had been deceived again. The sun had now been covered by this aqueous behemoth. No midnight sky could be as dark." I also try to show that each object and person in the scene has a weighty existence, filled with signs; concrete spirit and matter; that a person represents not just himself but all experiences from a mysterious, incalculable foundation. This psychic life makes my dramatization a continuation of karma, nourished by humanism, the work of transitional history.  " 'I would not wait to love you then,' he further conjectured. 'But, I prefer loving you now.' His smile reflected supremely the sea routes that belonged to the Ottoman Empire. The dessert tray arrived. Each panettone, torta, tortellini, meringhe, mondorle, cannoli, bundino, crema and zambaione cast back the penetration of Saracens, the return of the Crusaders, Roman excess, the deeply rooted superstitions that were shallowly dug beneath the consciousness. 'Take whichever you like, or more,' he suggested. 'You can take all of them home.' Paolo knew my weakness for complicated pastry; how before cakes drenched with subtle liqueurs, I quivered as if the hollows of my knees had been blown upon; that I would eat the composta di castagne all crema until I died from a surfeit of it.       As I bit into the cloying desserts, I was initiated into a secret sacrificial society; took part without realizing into a rite of the dedicated, that was perhaps prehistoric from fete days that were forgotten."   I would like to smash all dictates about novels, shatter all the accepted idioms, in exchange for unlimited amorphousness and obscure attractions, to expunge old worlds, nostalgic, as I am to restore the unity of primeval chaos. I know I appeal only to those with Cyclopean souls, hardy enough to withstand a state of crisis or an intrepid idea. Still and all, after the initiative trials, this is still, a pursuit of the flesh, the perfect form, the survival of the intellect, a trek back to Ithaca, towards the center.    Nathan: Can you trace your writing to a specific time or event? How old were you when you started writing? Yvonne:        My first fascination was not with writing but with reading. I distinctly remember seeing Sally, of the Dick and Jane series, playing in the rain with an umbrella and her dog, Spot. And although, there were not words beneath, I drew through inference, and from then on, the symbols of writing became clear.          As a child, I was madly in love with Paul McCartney, and The Beatles by extension. I cut apart the Hard Day's Night album, and made game pieces of it. Then, I stacked my Golden Reader Books in a shoe box, cut a rectangular aperture through one of the longest sides, and slipped in a piece of paper that showed through the slot. That was the typewriter on which I wrote The Beatles News. I had no real data to impart, but I daydreamed often about my love affair with Paul. I remember thinking that it was too bad sexuality was institutionalized; otherwise there would have been no kapu against me being his bride at seven.  In this way, my writing has been as circular as flamenco in Granada. In the beginning and during the lovesome toil of THE PICTURE: A WORK OF THEORY AND FICTION, I sometimes came across a Philips big screen television commercial with Rudolf Martin, an evocative actor I had not seen for six or more years. Yet, from those silvered moments, I devised a story around his brow and body. He was an inspiration, a rest upon beautiful shores, as Artemesia must have lain upon when painting full lips onto the creatures of her tormented canvas. When my book was done, coincidentally, a television movie of Martin's was released. His character's name had the same meaning as my character: Dragon. Shortly, thereafter, with an enveloping moon, my shadow laid across his now vanished one in the Romanian town of Sisighora. This does not depart from the customary rules of my reality, i.e., what I dream, becomes.                           Nathan: What do you currently see in Literature that you don't like? How would the publishing of your manuscript help change those things for literature overall? Yvonne: I think many of the other arts have surpassed writing, the visual arts of photography and cinematography especially, with technology being the handmaiden who cohorts. Our word usage has become effete because we rely more and more on the primitive response of seeing to communicate. The saturation of images has taken precedence; it is as we have reverted to Neolithic stratagems.   Of current books, I like their painted covers the best. I saw a friend's reading list for her high school daughter recently; none of the books recommended were written after the mid 20th century. I think that, too, many take to heart the Shrunk book on the elements of proper composition. I also hear the voice of television in the storytelling, transcripts of cable and sitcoms. Nate, perhaps my work can be used as regressive compass. Not like reefs that are found atop the Continental Divide, a relic. But studied as an incorporation of earlier classical forms, like what Impressionist created after viewing Japanese screens.  When other writers refer to my writing, they use the word LITERATURE in emphatic capital letters. I hope that they mean there is permanence to my work. I would love for it to take its place in this world. This book is loaded, fragrant, undulating with the shape of new hills, swaying out to the darkness of deep dreams. And although, you Nate, have been exceedingly generous with you compliments and your influence, I must admit, writing has not been encouraged in my life. For the effort, it pays too poorly and is a trade that most people place layman claim. My parents have hazarded me against it, and for fear of rebuke, I have hidden it from philistine boyfriends who find my aesthetic bent burdensome.  It is not a compulsion; it is a vacation that I wearily retreat when Edenic situation occursand enclosure of love and security.             But it is the only thing that has granted me life. I am this gaunt tiger that fights to write. There is no lineage of writing in my family. My ventures to be published have been alleys of anguish. But my skill has been building; I feel my dexterity and sublimity filling me like an oaten substance. The impression on my senses is so consuming that it seems that if I don't write, death will reign in my chamber.  Such is my vanity. Such is my summons. People tell me that they love to read what I have written aloud, and will often recite my words back to me. When breath is given to my work, I am no longer a singular effort. I become a chorus, a chant in the body of others. I become increased. But I am, really, only an astrolabe pointing out ancient stars and moons that have always been there.   Nathan: Who are the writers that inspire you? Yvonne: When I was little, I used to draw blueprints of my dream house. Always there was a library, a chapel of ephemera where I would devote myself to storing the good works of others. Even now, when you come into my house, the room that faces the entrance, where most would put the glowing hearth of a television, I have stacked books and books against those tall walls. In my life, I have left behind machinery and men, but never books; even magazines and pamphlets, in their bulky, meditative silence, have joined me where others would have transported a bike or a bed. My baby books are still my favorites. The clear, purling rivets of fairy tales and fables are my habitual purlieu. These are collective voices and primeval memories of no true authorship, but I prefer those detailed before 1930. In my mind, before I start a story, it soothingly begins: "Once upon a time" In fact, as I wrote The Picture, I had written with lute in hand, imagining Johannes and Ava as sensuous immortals:  "I am thinking of howling winds across the arctic waste, the depth of moon craters: those places of loneliness and purgatory. I am thinking of him. I am where all women go to ride out the interminable storm of abandoned love. He is as dark as the ocean floor, as tangled as the virgin jungle.  I look out from my rooftop, my lap covered with handiwork, into a vastness, spaces undefined, and see him. Only him."  Whenever I read the hard sciences, Geography, Physics or Math and Geometry, I become a feathered nation; my imagination storms the air like a savage inhabitant. I want to fetch the truth. What astounds me is that I can project phenomena in space by given the smallest details. I think inductively, and have a Taoist intuition about life beyond us. From that, I formulate downward and use theorems to prove my themes in my writing. But there is a hollow in my brain where those skills should reside, and so I am giddily enamor by those who document scientific discoveries. In THE PICTURE: A WORK OF THEORY AND FICTION, science is one of the columnar metaphors. I use it to ground the evaporative nature of passion. The qualities and endowments of love have to be calibrated. But logic and analysis heighten the dangers and crosses of Ava's disquiet: "I realized the neutralizing effect my gross advantages and awkward shortages had against each other. These tipping apogees were their own kind of homeostasis. The more I attracted men, the more I would suffer for it. The cosmic process had a keen stabilizing system to keep me in line. It was a balance of extremes. As I was craved for, I would in turn undergo my own cravings, only multiplied by the number who had suffered for me."  Even the endoskeleton of this book is based on the triptych of the Hegelian Dialectic: Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis. I don't have chapters in the familiar sense. In Antithesis, the true presence of Johannes disappears, but like a net thrown into spectral seas, he encloses all. My favorite novels are usually French written. Maragarite Duras's The Lover, Violette LeDuc's Le Bastard, Collette's Gigi, and Jean Rhy's The Wide Sargasso Sea, Mircea Elide's Bengal Nights, and Andrei Makine's Once Upon the River Love are my literary progenitors. I also relate close in kin to Michael Ondaaje's English Patient and Running in the Family, and Lawrence Durrell's Justine. Those authors have stirred and loosened the vineyards of my mind.  In all these cases, the bark of storytelling is the least interesting part of the voyage. I take refuge in the way the words plough beautifully through the liquid plain.  Nathan: When can we expect to see your manuscript in print? Yvonne: Soon. Its place has already been set at Booklocker. Those interested can email me at yvonneignacio@yahoo.com. I think I may even churn out handcrafted Xeroxed copies for those too impatient for my petty concerns to clear before I can set this baby to bed. Otherwise, I would like to send this prayer out to the universe. I saw a movie with a character modeled after Anais Nin, who was paid by a patron to write about her erotic experiences. I would like to duplicate that circumstance in modified form. To write a book is to walk along a warm country road. I cannot forget the heat, the sun. I cannot resist the enchantment of that fable.  And thank-you Nate, with this hand, with this wave, I wish you a life full of richness and joy. May your days be like the opening of summer. May your work be like the rocks that always stay. May your heart never tire of happiness and love. Postscript: My book will instead be published by Book Surge in June 2003. For your copy please order at www.booksurge.com or order through www.bn.com, www.amazon.com , www.half.com , and through your local bookstore and library. Thank-you very much. -Yvonne