There is a thread that runs through everything I write. It does not announce itself. It does not appear in chapter summaries or back-cover copy. But it is there in every novel, in every narrator’s voice, in every reunion between characters who meet for what the plot calls the first time and recognize each other […]
The Cosmological Thread: Souls Finding Each Other Across Lifetimes Read More »
There is a moment known to every writer who has ever chosen a nom de plume when the invented name becomes more real than the given one. I cannot say when that moment arrived for me. I know only that it has. The name Edmond Thornfield was not assembled at random. Each of its two
The Pen Name and the Alter Ego: Who Is Edmond Thornfield? Read More »
Set on the island of Crete during the Minoan Bronze Age some 3,500 years ago, Asterios and the Labyrinth (Mythos of Knossos) by Edmond Thornfield is a tale of gods, kings, heroes, revolts, and magical powers. The Minoans, a wealthy people known for their farming and commerce, experienced some turbulence following the death of King
Asterios and the Labyrinth | Reviewed by Leonard Smuts for Readers’ Favorite Read More »
Every novelist who works with ancient mythology eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable discovery: the sources disagree, they fall silent, or they compress into a few lines of poetry what would have taken days or weeks of human effort to accomplish. The Calydonian Boar Hunt presented me with those three problems, and the most instructive
Of all the gods of the Greek pantheon, Artemis is the one most commonly misread. Popular imagination has settled on her as a figure of cold severity, the virgin huntress, remote and punishing, more comfortable among animals than among people, quick to anger and slow to forgive. There is evidence for this reading in the
Who Is Artemis in Atalanta of the Wild? Read More »
There is a particular dishonesty that runs through a great deal of fiction written by and about men, a tendency to grant male characters the external architecture of complexity without the internal substance of it. Men in such novels have ambitions, rivalries, codes of honor, and moments of violence, but their inner lives remain largely
Six Novels That Taught Me About Men Read More »
I have spent a great deal of my writing life inside the minds of women. Atalanta, Elena, Pasiphaë, Costanza, Stella—the women of my novels are not secondary figures, not love interests arranged around a male protagonist. They are the story, or so much of it that the distinction barely holds. People sometimes ask me how
Six Novels That Taught Me About Women Read More »
Asterios and the Labyrinth (Mythos of Knossos) by Edmond Thornfield transports readers back to the time of ancient Greek power, of mythical beasts, sorcerers, and the battle for royal succession. Upon the death of King Minos, his son Asterios must succeed to the throne before the various warlords tear the kingdom apart in their quest
Asterios and the Labyrinth | Reviewed by Grant Leishman for Readers’ Favorite Read More »
There are books one reads, and books one lives. The ten gathered here belong to the second category. I have returned to each of them more than once—some many times—not always for study, not always with a writer’s analytical eye, but often simply for the comfort of returning to a world that once held me
Ten Novels That Made Me a Writer Read More »
Every novelist has a private library of books that made their own work possible—not sources to be cited or influences to be acknowledged in an author’s note, but companions in the deeper sense: books that showed what historical fiction could do when it refused to compromise, when it trusted its readers with difficulty and moral
Six Novels to Read Before (or After) Atalanta of the Wild Read More »
