Freefall – A Divine Comedy
Freefall: A Divine Comedy features Tillie Bloom, a wacky installation artist, who travels to Venice for an extended reunion with three former friends, women she hung out with in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. She also plans to crash the Biennale, an art extravaganza scheduled every other year.
Each woman’s life has taken a different direction. Tillie and Daddy have both moved to the States from Canada, where Tillie has given herself over to art. Daddy—once a heterosexual radical feminist/hippie and now a lesbian—has turned into a successful real estate saleswoman. Moll, tres sportif, a housewife and mother of three, spends her free time exploring the Canadian outdoors. Sibyl—also married and a shrewd bookkeeper addicted to 4000-piece jigsaw puzzles, cigarettes, and wine—has a cabin in Whistler, a home in Vancouver, and a flat in Venice.
Tillie often gets lost in the maze of Venice streets, intrigued by the canals’ reflective surfaces and how they participate in the city’s love affair with light. These reflections counter the pull of darker forces that cause the four women to reevaluate themselves. A humorous yet serious meditation on the relationship between art and mortality, Freefall taps into the rich underground springs that feed all of our lives.
Praise for Freefall:
“These fascinating characters will fill your imagination, defying expectations about aging, art, and what truly matters in life.” —Laurie Ann Doyle, author of World Gone Missing.
“This is an enchanting story about old friends reuniting as they struggle with thoughts on aging, religion, motherhood, men, art, and death. A delightful trip in every respect, with plenty of surprises and laughs along the way. A Divine Comedy, indeed!” —Mark Willen, author of the novels Hawke’s Point and Hawke’s Return.
About Lily Iona MacKenzie (Berkeley, California Author)
A Canadian by birth, a high school dropout, and a mother at 17, in my early years, I supported myself as a stock girl in the Hudson’s Bay Company, as a long-distance operator for the former Alberta Government Telephones, and as a secretary (Bechtel Corp sponsored me into the States). I also was a cocktail waitress at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, briefly broke into the male-dominated world of the docks as a longshoreman (I was the first woman to work on the SF docks and almost got my legs broken), founded and managed a homeless shelter in Marin County, co-created The Story Shoppe, a weekly radio program for children that aired on KTIM in Marin County, CA, and eventually earned two Master’s degrees (one in creative writing and one in the humanities).
I have published reviews, interviews, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays, and memoir in over 155 American and Canadian venues. My novel Fling! was published in 2015. Curva Peligrosa launched in September 2017. Freefall: A Divine Comedy will be released in July 2018. My poetry collection All This was published in 2011.
I taught rhetoric at the University of San Francisco for over 30 years and currently teach creative writing at USF’s Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning. I also blog at http://lilyionamackenzie.wordpress.com.
