Raising The Ruby Tuesday, a memoir.

Aug. 19, 2011 - PRLog -- Raising The Ruby Tuesday is the story of a boat and a woman who loved her.

It is a true story of this woman building a boat in a male dominated fishing port, told in fragments of diary and memoir woven into the fabric of the current text.  I had originally meant to diary every day, and then have that for a non-fiction story when my boat project completed itself, but boats are difficult creatures, Ruby herself dictated my schedule and my writing, like her builder, Ruby was difficult, beautiful, extraordinary in all her phases.  I cursed her, loved her, became disenchanted, worn, worked, scraped and bruised in her building.   And life too is a difficult creature; many obstacles were thrown in my path during the build; I blundered for months in staggering grief, and finally. . . created this text, which weaves the diary and memoirs along with some occasional autobiographical fiction.  

Dialogues recalled contain the tone, at least, if not the word-by-word moment of the recalled event, sometimes I have created fictional dialogues to put in the mouths of my other characters. These may or may not be fiction; I do not represent any dialogue as true accounts as many dialogues that I represent took place when I was not present.   These are the things I have assumed happened, so I must say they are entirely fiction, but, in my opinion, the tone would be appropriate and the possibility that they are reinventions of simple truths is possible, too.  My diary entries will be apparent as many of them are dated, but there are other entries not dated that are diary too.  The poetry at the head of each chapter was written in Port San Luis during the building of the boat, reflections of moments that made my world.  This is a collage then, of memoir, non-fiction, poetry and some autobiographical fiction to bind the fragments of thought and memoir into the only form it could assume in the telling. I shall let the booksellers decide in which section these fragments sit on the shelf.


About the Author:

     Marlene Evangeline spent her early years in the orange fresh groves of early California, between Los Angeles and the Palm Springs desert, in the town of Redlands where she viewed a changing world through the lens of an imaginative mind. Later, after many years in Santa Cruz, California, and then, after raising her daughter in the small town of Wilson, Wyoming, she studied at California State University, San Bernardino, where she earned a M. A. in composition and literary theory; later she attended the Writers Workshop at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she earned an M.F.A. in Fiction.
     The Orange Blossom Express, her fiction novel, was nominated for the Pushcart Press, Editor’s Book Award, under another title.  Along with poetry, fiction, essays and non-fiction, Evangeline has written several screenplays . . . among them an adaptation of this memoir.  Her poetry has been published in The Pacific Review and Poetry Motel.