Lily G. Stephen

 

Marlene Lily Gebhart Stephen was born December 19, 1943 in Dayton, Ohio. Lily has lived and worked in Southern California, Oklahoma, Dallas and Houston but says, "In 1975 I was seduced by the paradise setting of Mount Shasta, California and its mystical and spiritual influence, and soon made it my permanent home." In 1996, Lily's life found solidarity when she married Bob Stephen, a relationship that provided the refuge of true unconditional love. Since then, Lily has worked at her husband's dental practice and has established her own independent publishing company called Blooming Rose Press. Her life is a balancing act that includes the dental practice, the publishing, promotion and marketing of The Tenth Muse, and the writing of The Eleventh Hour and The Twelfth Age. Lily's other interests include meditation, gardening and running. Lily says her greatest hope is "...that the fiction I write and publish brings to readers fresh views threaded with wisdom, and incites their curiosity to investigate beyond the hypnotic, ceaseless activity that goes on around us." Visit Lily online at http://www.bloomingrosepress.com

"The Tenth Muse is a compelling and emotional novel of the diverse childhoods of two girls, each of whom are living in a slightly different parallel world. Elements of myth and legend fuse with reality in this unique, intriguing, complex, well crafted, highly recommended tale."
– Midwest Book Review

"Two beautiful young girls, Opal Courtright and Sapphire Deland, grow up on Earth and Zamora, respectively, unaware of each other's existence or of their cosmic link, in Lily G. Stephen's The Tenth Muse, first in the Third Verse Trilogy. From Lamartine, a planet in a higher dimension, a kindly, beneficent stranger named Branicor has high hopes for the shared fate of the two girls."
– Publisher's Weekly

 

 

Pageonelit.com: Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?

Lily G. Stephen: For the first four years of my life we lived in Dayton, Ohio, where I was born. I had an austere upbringing. We lived there in a small trailer my father built. He's quite a trooper. I've known my father to overcome great obstacles in his life, including a near-fatal auto crash when I was two years old that put him in bed for a year. Both my parents taught me to read early, but they were really surprised when one day there in Dayton they were unpacking a grocery bag and I read "tomato" and "chicken" from the labels of upside-down soup cans.

The earliest influences in reading were the Bible and religious tracts. We moved to Pomona, California in 1948, when orange groves still flourished there and one had a clear view of Mount Baldy. We continued to live a Spartan lifestyle in another small trailer with an ice box and no bathroom. I was seven years old when we first moved into a dwelling with four solid walls.

The main writing I did as a child was Biblical topic assignments which we would present to the congregation, and letters to friends. I tried my hand at a couple of short stories and threw them away in disgust. As for reading, I devoured everything I could get my hands on and would often spend my allowance on books at the Goodwill store and the Salvation Army. For some reason I read all the Bobbsey Twin books, perhaps because I was an only child and enjoyed feeling part of their family.

As for the earliest lifelong influences, at age 21 when I was newly married to my first husband and living in Houston, a hard-hitting inner wake-up call prompted me to do some serious spiritual investigation. I checked a book out of the library authored by Dr. Charles Francis Potter: The Great Religious Leaders. His book opened a window into global spirituality and initiated my lifelong spiritual path. Soon afterward J. Krishnamurti's Think on These Things was a major assistance.

 

Pageonelit.com: Why did you write THE TENTH MUSE? Where did this story come from? The voice and tone of the THE TENTH MUSE is very poetic -- Tell us about the voice of the book.

Lily G. Stephen: I spent twenty years, off and on, writing my first novel that ended up as 830 manuscript pages after all the rewrites. For the next two years I wrote poetry, attempted to find an agent, and realized two matters: the first book was too long for a debut novel; and a story waited wherever stories do -- one that would better serve my impetus as an author, my objective to write engrossing fiction that challenges readers to look at life from a higher point of view.

During my birth month of December in 1999 I made a conscious psychic request for the story to "come through", if you will. Throughout all the outer activity and daily cares of life, inwardly I waited in as close to an empty, receptive creative state as I've ever achieved. It was on the morning of January 29, 2000 while taking a shower that the core idea for The Tenth Muse came in like a flash, and I wrote it down as soon as possible on a scrap of paper which I still have. The story is about a bifurcated "old soul", one who had evolved far along toward an enlightened state, yet whose course had been interrupted by outer circumstances so that initially, as she states in the book, "the integrity of my spirit shattered into fragments that became lost entities repeatedly seeking reunification". In the book this fragmentation has consolidated into the two girls, Opal and Sapphire. As for the voice, Part I shifts from Opal's developing years to Sapphire's and back again in a gradual progression toward fusion. These two characters develop the voice that is, after all, ultimately the voice of one of the most renowned poets throughout time, the one to whom Plato referred in the Phaedrus as The Tenth Muse. They each grow into their individuality -- one a visionary and the other pragmatic -- and at the same time arc toward each other.

 

Pageonelit.com: Tell us about Opal Courtright, a child of Planet Earth, and Sapphire Deland of Planet Zamora and explain the worlds they live in. Are these parallel worlds these characters live in or, are they just two girls leading unusual lives?

Lily G. Stephen: They are two girls leading unusual lives in the greater context of interdimensional time and space. Opal and Sapphire are quite different from each other, and although the sometimes mundane realities of their existences are laced with inexplicable bleed-throughs, they are unaware of each other's life in these parallel dimensions. The parallel worlds of Earth and Zamora, the primary settings throughout the story, evoke questions in us. The concept certainly resonates with me as I view the complex and volatile events developing currently in our world. I wonder how humankind in dimensions parallel with ours has brought conscience, compassion, and wisdom to bear upon the climate of dispute and tension present here today.

Pageonelit.com: The cover design for THE TENTH MUSE is very interesting and beautiful, please tell us where this concept came from and how it relates to the book.

Lily G. Stephen: My husband Bob and I married in 1996. All his life, Bob has been a collector. When I first came to this house I was captivated by an old photograph which Bob found many years ago in an antique shop. At some point we took the photo out of the antique frame and found that it must have been a commercial print. In the lower left-hand corner a copyright date of 1899 appears. Early on during my work with The Tenth Muse I moved the picture to hang by my work station, and soon I sketched the cover design to incorporate an adaptation of the photograph because to me the beautiful young woman represents the exalted aspect of The Tenth Muse. Acquaintance and graphic artist Leanne Krause worked with the photo and my design to develop this beautiful cover that was selected one of three finalists for cover design in PMA's 2002 Benjamin Franklin awards. The cover for Volume II in The Third Verse Trilogy, The Eleventh Hour, will be a comparable work of art featuring a statue in the design.

 

Pageonelit.com: Tell us about the forthcoming second volume in The Third Verse Trilogy: The Eleventh Hour.

Lily G. Stephen: At present I'm fully immersed in writing The Eleventh Hour, a progression of the overreaching story that connects ancient wisdom schools, an amazing account given by a South American Indian chieftain named Tatunca Nara, an earthly subterranean colony, and a return of humankind to a new world focus of illumination. Miranda, who makes a couple of brief appearances in The Tenth Muse, is the central character. The main story follows Miranda through developments that literally and figuratively bring her to her knees. Through Miranda's experiences as she comes through to the other side of her ordeal, we're challenged to see the possibilities for bringing wisdom to bear in all aspects of our lives as the veil lifts. Several sub-stories are threaded through The Eleventh Hour as well. It is exciting work to be involved with.

 

Pageonelit.com: Being an experienced published author - What advice can you offer for those writers who are working on their first book?

Lily G. Stephen: Allow the process of fiction writing to grow and develop with influence from the unconscious mind even though having an outline or following a method. If something fits, use it and don't be afraid to allow characters to take you, the author, into uncharted territory. Read your work aloud -- an indispensable tool for making changes in awkward places and for development of characters' voices. If possible, read aloud to someone you know so well that you can read boredom and other responses from them when they might not actually speak up. My husband is a god-send and never appears to tire of hearing my work read aloud. When the first draft is done, take a vacation from it for up to six weeks, if possible. This is Dorothy Bryant's recommendation, and I find it works for me to distance myself from the novel in embryo form before taking on rewriting. Finally, when you write about your most passionate ideas, whatever they might be, realize that the voice of the critic -- whether the inner critic or someone who chooses to wear the critic's hat -- wields a double-edged sword. It's important to learn from the critic's observations and concurrently to be impervious to vitriol. I've only received one negative letter from a reader, and he did have a statement to make which I took to heart. The reader wrote in such terms of anger around the useful statement that I had to recognize the source of such anger was deep within him. I had to step back from the emotional impact of that.

 

Pageonelit.com: What has been your feedback from readers? What do they say to you about their interpretations of THE TENTH MUSE?

Lily G. Stephen: The Tenth Muse was at the printer on the morning of 9/11. In fact, I didn't know about the occurrence until speaking with my contact person at the print shop by phone around 9:00 AM PDT that morning. Soon after that I sent out pre-publication copies and preliminary courtesy copies. One reader told me that, like many, she'd been in a terrible state of grief and anger over the WTC tragedy. After reading the book, she was able to view the horrific events from a higher perspective than what the overwhelming ocean of media coverage allowed through. She felt a calming release as she finished reading The Tenth Muse.

Last August I received a letter from a reader in a small rural Texas town. I couldn't have written a better endorsement of The Tenth Muse myself had I tried. She wrote: "Lily, I was so glad you used the phrase 'bringing fiction with wisdom to readers". I didn't realize that that is exactly the literature that I hunger for. I noticed that I am almost never drawn to an author with initials after their name. Somehow I believe that their words will be coming from their head and not their heart. I want to read words that come from the heart (no degrees required). For at least 8 years my spiritual reading has been stories, not manuals or how to books. So thank you for choosing to bring us wisdom in fiction."

In September a young teenager who writes bought a copy of my book at a Barnes & Noble event. She emailed this message to me two weeks later: "I really enjoyed your book, The Tenth Muse! I can't wait for the next one to be published! My mother and grandmother also want to read the book now that I'm done with it, but I won't let them borrow my autographed book because it's special so they have to buy their own copy."

 

Pageonelit.com: Who are your favorite writers and why?

Lily G. Stephen: I have so many in a variety of spheres that this is a hard one to answer. Those I include leave out others I consider valuable influences. The foremost author on my short list of favorites is His Holiness the Dalai Lama. To have such a being among us with his endearing humility, representing some of the highest spiritual teachings available and bringing these teachings into print, is an exquisite blessing for all humankind. In the spiritual sphere, ranking close behind the Dalai Lama on my list is the now-deceased Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, whose collection of talks is found in As It Is, Volumes I and II. He gets right to the heart of what we want our human life to be about; as he says, "The suffering of a sentient being can be transformed into wisdom." Other dynamic spiritual authors are Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. They are important because they offer methods that help.

In the sphere of fiction, the top of my list is shared by three women who profoundly moved me with their works: Marie Corelli, latter 19th century author, whose stories abound with divine revelation, and who wrote: "Poets are often the best scientists"; Ayn Rand, well-known for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, crafting dramatic works based on her unique philosophies, works about death and rebirth of the spirit; and Anya Seton, historical novelist, daughter of a Theosophist who grew up in a home filled with volumes on comparative religion and mysticism and who utilized reincarnation and mystical spirituality vividly in her work.

 

Pageonelit.com: What's next?

Lily G. Stephen: The last trilogy volume, The Twelfth Age. After the trilogy is completed, I plan on quite a different kind of book based on interviews. I'd like to put into print stories from people who have been drawn to Mount Shasta, about how they came to live here at the base of what is known world-wide as a sacred mountain and center of spirituality and mysticism.

 

Pageonelit.com: What was the last book you read?

Lily G. Stephen: I dip into piles of books during research while writing. The last book I read from cover to cover is Lawrence Block's Spider, Spin Me A Web: A Handbook for Fiction Writers. Any author from beginner to veteran has a hard time putting it down. Currently I'm reading, off and on, Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.

 

Pageonelit.com: Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do they enhance your writing.

Lily G. Stephen: "Hobby" is a word that I have a hard time using. I've heard people call a great creative enterprise their hobby, and to me the word minimizes the value of their work. As such, I have no hobbies; however, the activities I regularly include in my life are meditation; gardening which is another form of meditation that keeps me grounded (not intended as a pun); maintaining with help from my husband a back-yard bird habitat to delight in watching the beauty and characteristics of our feathered friends; exercise through running and mini-sessions of weight training, yoga, and cardio; vegetarian cooking; and last but perhaps most valuable to enhancing writing skills through enlarging the vocabulary is solving crossword puzzles. My favorites are N.Y. Times and Merl Reagle's Sunday Crosswords.