Miss LuNae Christine Simpson
NOVELS
" Ace a Horse "~ 1949 Aged 6 - LOST
I scotch-taped four sheets of paper and made pictures of a white horse who described his life. Having been
given a Golden Book about "Cowboy Joe" and then a child's illustrated version of "Black Beauty" by Anna
Sewell. I thought each book was miracle, wafted down from heaven individually and I KNEW I wanted to be a writer!
" The Price of a Dream
Is a Piece of Your Soul " Volumes I & II
~ 2011 Messianic Jewish
Based on the recurrent dream
I had as a six-year-old girl of what it would be like to grow up Jewish with the LORD as a loving older brother.
The Book I promised Big Ed I would write one day.
" Richard and Sharon "
~ 1959 Young adult - LOST
Medieval
stories examining mores of the day disguised as historical fiction provided the fodder for my first 'real' attempt to move
from my success as a published poet to be ' a writer'.
Mrs. LuNae S. Carter
" Mystery at Tall
Fire's Island " ~ 1966 Adult - © 1967, Rewritten in 2006
Almost published by major Christian Book publisher until I was told I had to write threea year;
I knew I'd never keep the schedule so the project was abandoned. The story of a young girl who lived on board an ocean
going research vessel her whole life, I wanted to examine the relationship between parent and child. I couldn't get the book
published until I showed it BACKWARDS, revealing the nature of the 'monster' and then showing how the teens came to be the
only ones who could help to preserve the species.
" A Poet " ['Arthur
Poe ']
Classical 12th Century
Japanese HAIKU
Top Foreign Master Three Years in
Tokyo, Japan
" Harriet Elizabeth Stowe "
◊
" My Snowbound "
A full length narrative poem after the fashion of
" Snowbound " By John Greenleaf Whittier
.
♣
.
My first full time job was at the State Hospital in Agnew's California, soon
to be annexed into the growing city of San Jose. Because I lived on the grounds at the resident Nursing facility I had to
walk to the tiny post office that served the village of Agnews with a grocery store and Post Office just outside the gates
of the city-like grounds. To my regular name I added the chief pseudonym I used, since some of my overseas Editors mailed inquiries
and checks to "Harriet E. Stowe". I'd needed a pseudonym I could remember since so many of the poems I'd written were under
a list of names that I'd lost track of. If I wanted to approach an American publisher I would have to be able to show
that I had actually done the work. Since I couldn't get my own family to believe me, who insisted I'd found an obscure author
and simply copied them verbatim, I needed a name that I could remember. So
I chose "Harriet B. Stowe" as a name I knew I would remember, but I changed the middle initial to "E".
Years later when some of the overseas checks started to come in addressed to " Harriet E Stowe" I simply put them
aside as keepsake. But one day I was looking for a copy of the magazine with my poem circled in blue so I would be able to
know which one was which, and it didn't show up!
This sweet little old lady overheard me and remarked that the issue had been
placed in her post office box by mistake. I was tall and young, she was small and bent, she was gracious,
I was always in a hurry to get back to the Nursing dorm to study, but as we spoke from time to time I found myself listening
to the advice she gave as I worked on a new book of poetry for my publisher ~ until the afternoon I received word
my father had been murdered in his apartment after a large win at the racetrack. Mere words were no longer enough, nor could
I believe in the innate goodness of most men as he taught me growing up.
Decades later I took up the dream of
being published as a novelist since the name I had borrowed, belonging to that lovely, genteel lady were wrongly associated
with the passionate lesbian poetry she wrote in her youth. But even with this embarrassment I still cherish her insights,
her laughter and the memory of her sweet spirit when she took the time to encourage an awkward and shy girl to reach for her
dreams. Later when I was attending Junior College to expand my learning I met
two friends who were putting together a textbook. I was visibly impressed, and perhaps a little envious. In the course of
our conversations between classes, I got up the nerve to ask them to look at my book length Narrative poem which I entitled
" My Snowbound", based on the lovely cadence of John Greenleaf Whittler's classic narrative poem "Snowbound".The West German Government purchased the text book
to secure the rights to the poem and I didn't hear anything more about it.
One hot summer's day, many
decades later in Milpitas, California, my husband and I were standing in line at an ice cream line when a woman with
a lovely German accent began to recite one of the stanzas from "My Snowbound". Although I'd hated it when the nun
in eighth grade made me memorize whole stanzas of the archaic speech patterns, which I attempted to modernize as an an adult,
and bring it to a whole new generation, finally recognizing the inherent beauty in its structure, here was someone who'd learned
whole stanzas for the joy of it! To my profound amazement she told me that the poem had been used in all the schools
to teach 'How English OUGHT to be spoken" ! I don't think any other moment in my life prepared me for the profound
shock and delight in hearing her words! To his dying day my husban claimed I paid the woman to say it!
.
.
♣
.
" A Garden Filled With Verse "
' Le Jardin Rempli de verse '
◊
4 Volumes of Poetry in " Man as Nature"
Genre
translated into French
and published in French Quebec
.
◊
I tried in vain to learn French, I couldn't get over my stubborness in having a 'separate' language for Women, like many other
of the Romance Languages. I even hired a private tutor but I quit. It was simply too much fun to listen to herspeak!
She was well educated, spoke several languages and remarked that in all of her work as a translator for the UN she never felt
she'd done anything that made a difference, and she remarked on my poetry which I read to her from time to time. At her suggestion,
the poetry I wrote she translated into French, adding some of the unique beauty within her own ability and self, and there
were published, to my gratification, for several years until 1977 when they went out of print over my publisher's suggestions
because I simply couldn't write what I no longer belied. They are still very close to me and I wish now I'd learned to speak
french so I could translate the other three boos. But then, I remind myself, a large part of what made them 'work' in French
was due to my friend and so I slipped back...until the day I had the courage to write "Chapter One" - and meant
it!
ANONYMOUS
♣
" A Poet's Guide
to Robbie Burn's Scotland " ~
A Guide for Married Lovers [To each Other
"
Later published
as a Documentary by the BBC
The
Announcer said " Clearly this was written by a Scots man with a deep love for his country. I wonder what he would have
thought if he knew it's been written by a shy girl who hadn't yet been east of the Mississippi?
◊
I was always looking
for a unique gift of "Voice" to offer my Dad, Edward "Wildly Running Deer" Simpson, the daddy who breathed
life into my lungs when I was stillborn and shunted aside to meet the needs of the living babies int he multiple birth, but
I could never find anything 'worthy' of the gift he'd given me; the years of dedication and sacrifice for his faith and his
family. I was in a thrift store looking for one of the small, old fashioned books about 'The Wild Folk' that i was particularly
fond when I noticed a stack of glossy National Geographic magazines for only a quarter each! I started to thumb through them
when one pictorial review of Scotland caught hold of me and left me breathless. I knew how deeply he loved this far-away place.
It had come to seem magical to me as I listened to him talk about the day he would set sail to see it for himself. As I looked,
poetry began to well up from the deepest part of me. I wrote down the first one, but they kept on coming and I was getting
wicked looks from the man at the cash register as I kept scribbling lines in a small notebook while I perched the magazine
on the back of an old couch.
I don't remember how I got home, or what I ate, if I slept on a regular basis as the words and images combined int he most
magical manner for me! It must have been rhymed, but funny, I can't remember! It simply rose up in my heart and I had to sing
it in joy! Strangely...in a twist of fate, I ended up reading it to my natural father as he lay dying; when I donned a white
uniform and snuck in to see him between visiting hours when his 'real' family would have been there. It brought us a peace
I don't think we would have known under any other circusmtances, though when his wife and natural daughter found out about
it, I was banned from seeing him again. I'd already found a way to weave the final broken fragment into the mixture of races
and cultures I was raised with. Old World, Modern, American Indian, Canadian Indian, Jew, Christian, Taoist. All with the
same reverence for the eternal creator who lovingly watches over His creation, Man, foliage, and beast.
Then I found myself in my Sixties, dying, without
having kept my promise to Big Ed that one day I would write the dream that kept repeating itself to me, the view of Jesus
through the eyes of an innocent Jewish girl in Nazareth. I had to struggle from my bed each day to ease my way downstairs
despite my heart condition and the injury to both ankles, never guessing the journey to health and wholeness that would culminate
in the 1700 page journey, " Majesty, Lion of Judah". When I finally dared to use my own name.
POETRY
" The Book of Life, Page
3 " 1977 REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF 'CAT'S' MAGAZINE
" Oh what wondous
worlds concieved
in the touch of a kitten's paw
or the joy in a child's eyes "
" White Tree Shinning "
♥
My husband had died less than week before, but I could hardly
bear to eat or think or breath. All I knew for certain was that I was NO LONGER " Mrs. R.L. Carter" but who was
I? My stocker and the need to find a way to keep the biblical inunction to 'honor they father' with a means to 'honor'
the Daddy who raised me as well as the father that gave us life and then abandoned us at birth for being the wrong gender
was still twenty years away. So I locked up the dogs in the shed I was living in and walked to the end of the service road
to the orchard and sat down, wishing I could just fade into dust and blow away on the wind. A Monarch butterfly landed on
my hand and remained there for several minutes while I was rigid with shock. The last time I'd spoken to RL before he entered
the hospital for the last time was a discussion about the Monarch that settled near us, and a sharing unlike anything he permitted
in all the years we were married. This butterfly which probably didn't have wings that day was a seal between the past and
the present, promising me a future I couldn't have reached for until that moment!
I didn't know who I was but I knew who I wasn't...I wasn't
Misuss anybody anymore, so I lcosed my eyes and asked GOD to give me 'an Indian name' that could tide me over without forcing
me to choose between my Dad and my Grandfather's love and when I openned my eyes the sun suddenly broke through the clouds
and illuminated a tall, short tree that stubbornly survived no matter how badly it was cut back. "White Tree Shinning
" came into my heart witht he first sence of peace I'd experienced since I left the room and the dead body behind. It
was the beginning of my strength, and oddly, the beginning a new and stronger, different love for the complex man I had 'loved'
asn idealistic girl.
A.R.
Koheen
