About
Bonnie ZoBell's new linked collection from Press 53, What Happened Here: a novella and stories, was released on May 3, 2014. Her fiction chapbook The Whack-Job Girls was published in March 2013. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, the Capricorn Novel Award, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She has held resident fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA, and Dorland, received an MFA from Columbia University on fellowship, and currently teaches at San Diego Mesa College. Visit her at www.bonniezobell.com.
Involution-An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God
Description
<p>“<em>We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”(</em>Teilhard de Chardin<em>)</em></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;"><em>Involution-An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God </em> is as layered as a French cassoulet, as diverting, satisfying and as rich. Each reader will spoon this book differently. On the surface it seems to be a simple and light-hearted poetic journey through the history of Western thought, dominantly scientific, but enriched with painting and music. Beneath that surface is the sauce of a new evolutionary idea, involution; the informing of all matter by consciousness, encoded and communicating throughout the natural world. A book about the cathedral of consciousness could have used any language to paint it, but science is perhaps most in need of new vision, and its chronology is already familiar.</span></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">The author offers a bold alternative vision of both science and creation: she suggests that science has been incrementally the recovery of memory, the memory of evolution/involution</span><em style="line-height:1.6em;">.</em></p><p>“<em> Involution proposes that humans carry within them the history of the universe, which is (re)discovered by the individual genius when the time is ripe. All is stored within our DNA and awaits revelation. Such piecemeal revelations set our finite lives in an eternal chain of co-creation and these new leaps of discovery are compared to mystical experience</em>” (From a reviewer)</p><p>Each unique contributor served the collective and universal return to holism and unity. Thus the geniuses of the scientific journey, like the spiritual visionaries alongside, have threaded the rosary of science with the beads of inspiration, and through them returned Man to his spiritual nature and origin.</p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">The separation between experience and the rational intellect of science has, by modelling memory as theory, separated its understanding from the consciousness of all, and perceives mind and matter as separate, God and Man as distinct. This work is a dance towards their re-unification: Saints and scientists break the same bread.</span></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">All of time and all the disciplines of science are needed for the evidence. Through swift (and sometimes sparring) Cantos of dialogue between Reason and Soul, Philippa Rees takes the reader on a monumental journey through the history of everything – with the evolution of man as one side of the coin and involution the other. The poetic narrative is augmented by learned and extensive footnotes offering background knowledge which in themselves are fascinating. In effect there are two books, offering a right and left brain approach. The twin spirals of a DNA shaped book intertwine external and internal and find, between them, one journey, Man’s recovery of Himself., and (hopefully) the Creation’s recovery of a nobler Man.</span></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">From the same review “</span><em style="line-height:1.6em;">The reader who finishes the book will not be the same as the one who began it. New ideas will expand the mind but more profoundly, the deep, moving power of the verse will affect the heart.</em></p><p><em>(Marianne Rankin: Director of Communications, Alister Hardy Trust)</em></p><p> </p>
Story Behind The Book
WHAT HAPPENED HERE is set on the site of the PSA Flight 182 crash into the North Park area of San Diego in 1978, and I live right next to the site, so that was one of my inspirations. In the opening novella, a man's depression falls deeper and deeper in parallel to the 30th anniversary of the crash and the crash itself. Neighbors who are introduced here have their own stories in the book and grapple with, including chupacabras, free air, wedding jitters, and the like.
Reviews
<h3>Blurbs for <em>What Happened Here</em>:</h3>
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<h3>"In clear, lucid prose, <em>What Happened Here</em> evokes a haunting sense of place—calling up a California you don't often read about, with Californians you don't often meet." ~ Lionel Shriver, author of <em>Big Brother: A Novel</em> and <em>We Need to Talk about Kevin</em>, winner of the Orange Prize.</h3>
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<h3>"Bonnie ZoBell’s linked novella and story collection, <em>What Happened Here</em>, made me feel as if I’d lived all my life in San Diego’s North Park, whose inhabitants live and work in the long shadow of the 1978 airline crash that decimated the neighborhood. What is most extraordinary is the ease with which ZoBell at once accumulates the layers of a novelistic narrative and offers us beautifully written, compact stories with lives of their own. Like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Red or Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake, ZoBell allows us a complete picture only through a nimble narrative triangulation between the many characters and stories. The hard-fought and bounded truth we see here is, I think, the truest kind of truth." ~ Jerry Gabriel, author of <em>Drowned Boy</em>, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction</h3>
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<h3>"Bonnie ZoBell's luminously intersecting stories of artists, musicians, teachers and assorted shimmering misfits in a North Park neighborhood that happens to be the site of a historic plane wreck, beautifully chronicles the struggles of the living to survive--emotionally and physically--in the shadow of wreckage and ghosts. Her characters' connections, madnesses, kindnesses and demons are startlingly poignant and resonant." ~ Gina Frangello, author of <em>A Life in Men: A Novel</em></h3>
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<h3>“<em>What Happened Here </em>is a wise, lively celebration of the temptations we endure and the small victories we achieve, both individually and communally, under the shadow of transcendent events. Both her characters and her prose are fiercely alive. Their rage and spiky humor, their tenderness and forgiveness, weave through these fine stories like movements in a symphony.” ~ Robert Cohen, author of <em>Amateur Barbarians</em> and I<em>nspired Sleep</em> "Readers may argue over whether the greatest strength of Bonnie ZoBell’s <em>What Happened Here</em> is the prize-winning prose or the full sympathy with which ZoBell gives life to her delightfully varied cast of characters (sour, sweet, canny, sexy, you name it; all of them linked by a gruesome tragedy). Cherry-pick later; first time through, read the whole big-hearted collection from beginning to end to savor how perfectly the romance of the last story informs the vision of the whole. ~ Elizabeth Evans, author of <em>Carter Clay: A Novel</em></h3>
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<h3>“I love the moment in each of these geode-like stories when the surface cracks open and what lies beneath—the clear quartz of kindness, the dolomite of tragedy, the chalcedony surprise of unlikely love—at last comes into the light.” ~ Roy Kesey, author of <em>Any Deadly Thing</em></h3>
