ABOUT THE BOOK: Cardona-Hine takes a dream he once had about Morocco and the inversion of realities, and after a trip to that land to verify the landscape and the feel of the place, writes a novel that is funny, tender, and at times very touching, never forgetting the involuted nature of the Muslim mind. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A brief account of who I could be It is not too surprising that I should appear in print when you consider that I come from a family of writers in Costa Rica. Nobody questions a chiropodist coming from three generations of shoe makers. There was my novelist grandfather Genaro, my uncle Rafael, poet, essayist and journalist, my older half-brother Alfredo, a major poet, and my own father Jorge, writing his memoirs at age seventy. It was this cultural inoculation that led me to begin writing poetry at age eighteen. In English, for my parents had brought me to the U.S. at age thirteen and I had to secure the braces of a new language in my mouth. In California I caught up with Whitman, Thomas Wolf, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Proust, Vallejo and world poetry. I left Catholicism at age fifteen for communism, chaffed under its materialism, suffered a spiritual crisis around the age of twenty-seven and eventually found Zen Buddhism by way of Chinese and Japanese poetry. The second Zen Master I studied with made me a teacher. My brother was critical of my choice to work in the three disciplines I love: poetry, painting and the musical composition, thinking that a person should specialize in only one thing. I set out to prove him wrong. So far I have published close to twenty books in both Spanish and English, including AGAPITO with Chas. Scribners, have received grants from the NEA, the Bush Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board, have made my living for the last twenty-five years selling my paintings in my own gallery, and have had music performed in many parts of the U.S., including an elegy with the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra. I have four grown children through my first marriage and presently live in the mountain village of Truchas, at eight thousand feet altitude, forty-five minutes north of Santa Fe, with my wife, the poet and painter Barbara McCauley Cardona. At age eighty-five, suffering slightly from Parkinson's, I feel at the height of my powers. Three sources sustain me and color my functioning: First, illogical, indescribable Zen. Second, the account by Carlos Castaneda of his adventures with Huichol sorcerers in Mexico. Third, Jane Roberts' mediumistic ability to convey the cosmic views of an entity called Seth. The masters in each of these esoteric realms have allowed me to exist wonderstruck, subtly beyond the limitations of life and death.
