Red Rock Road, Light Blue Sea

Chasing after palaces in backcountry Spain… finding love and art on Formentera.

click below for audio: “Abyssinia,” by Strange Moon https://www.youtube.com/user/StrangeM00N

Midlife bohemians Wilson and Noella explore the limits of their creative and romantic identities during a six-week sojourn on the Spanish island of Formentera. On their earlier backpacking pilgrimage amid the wild and picturesque beauty of the Iberian landscape, they have pared away everything but the most essential elements: sea and sky, earth and sun, art and love. Their refuge from encroaching winter, a honeymoon-flavored cottage, proves a crucible of creative and romantic tension.

Wilson, an experimental writer, is haunted by visions of an elusive Moorish palace, and driven to coax a chronicle of their journey into a novel architecture. Noella, his partner of two years, is a fledgling painter and poet breaking free from her two children and the responsibilities of their British Columbia homestead. She suffers a toothache which deepens to the pain of an identity crisis: artist, lover, mother, nothing at all?

As the couple faces fears of infidelity and the specter of separation, they long for a new intimacy, a deeper embrace. Wilson, resolving life’s mysteries in a marriage of fictional and nonfictional forms, must learn to find the fabled palace in the familiar, the self-created, the close at hand; to satisfy both art and love.

Red Rock Road breaks new ground in the territory of the nonfiction novel, creative nonfiction, and metafiction; daring to explore the query, “What is a novel?” Based on a journey to Spain and Portugal in 2000, this is a story of itself in the making, and of the characters who make it.

“Lyrical, profound. Fully fleshed characters. Delicious language, idiom, and description. Breath-taking philosophical and existential prose. Fascinating structure. An ambitious oeuvre, with cult status potential.” –Marg Rose

Order now from Amazon:

Kindle ebook: Amazon.com | Amazon.ca

Paperback (247 pages): Amazon.com | Amazon.ca

“The subtleties of relationship and of the perception of nature infuse the narrative with a larger reality, a significance beyond the ordinary unfolding of events… Fresh and surprising insights, like precious gems to be discovered in the terrain of the novel.”
–David Bruneau, author of In Search of the Heart

Read more — Red Rock Road, Light Blue Sea: Sketches…

Book Categories: creative nonfiction and memoir.