Thursday, November 12, 2015

Published in various versions in Asheville Citizen-Times (September 8, 2015) and Black Mountain News (July 16, 2015)

Black Mountain Writer Pat Christy's Book, "The Education of Temple Fox," Explores Rebirth of Spirit 

Everyone has a story to tell. Each of us (sometimes secretly) believes our life history is unique, rich with quirky detail, and huge with seas of emotion. And, universally, people want to share their stories – even with strangers.
     When you’re a writer, you’re compelled to commit your story on paper. It’s a gift: a wave of longing, a tsunami of passion, that rushes you onward from the turbulent ocean of your imagination. The story may be told as allegory, disguised in fantasy, but it pushes shoreward, building momentum, into a heap of manuscript pages crawling with the blood and guts of your soul.
     Ah, that first draft. You feel relief, throw open your arms, curl your toes into the sand, eyes on a miraculously clearing blue sky, and sigh: Behold, this is who I am.
This is the exhilarating spirit reflected by writer Patricia S. Christy in The Education of Temple Fox, a spiritual fantasy and adventure story like no other.
     Pat Christy, who’s lived in Black Mountain for ten years, was born in Baltimore in 1953, child of a magician and a mercurial, beautiful mother, each self-absorbed, complex, depressive, and having suicidal tendencies.
As a precocious, shy, and curious child, Pat took refuge in deep thought. At age fifteen she became a Neo-Platonist, believing in Truth, Beauty and Love, with a belief in divinity residing in human form. 
A restless and questioning soul, Pat felt guided by "Spirit" to move to many terrains across the country, where one could say she has lived several lives, both on terra firm and in metaphysical realms.
While living in Santa Fe, NM, she learned to discern the charlatans from the genuine shamans of New Age thought. In the “lush, green woodland of somnambulistic” Connecticut, Pat said she had an experience that "engulfed me in magnificent love and peace that permeated every cell of my body.” 
Pat survived three serious illnesses and was told by “Spirit” to move yet again, this time to Wisconsin.
“It was there that I slowly gained the power to heal myself, and where I fell in love,” she said.
In 2005 Pat and her partner were told, again by “Spirit,” to resettle among the mountains of Western North Carolina.
Has this writer drawn on her own rich spiritual experiences to develop her memorable characters? Unquestionably, yes!
The hero, Temple Fox – an Anglo-American free-lance pilot in 1930s Kenya – emerges from Pat’s pen as his wood-hulled plane crashes headlong into a lightning-torn sea, where he meets his maker.
But wait… The hero, struck dead in the first chapter?
No, of course not. Temple Fox is fished up from the sea by a magical, primitive tribespeople, far from civilization as he knew it. Brought back to life, Temple Fox is hailed by them – well, by some of them – as a god and savior.  The story of Temple Fox is a universal one of rebirth, spiritual awakening, mysticism, magic, belief, and disbelief. It is also a compelling, beautifully crafted saga that enchants the reader page after page.
Copies of The Education of Temple Fox are available through Amazon, at Town Hardware in Black Mountain, and at Mountain Made in Asheville. Book Two of this trilogy is being written now.
“It’s taken twenty years to bring Temple Fox’s story to the public,” Pat said. “Now he can proudly proclaim, as I can, ‘Behold, this is who I am.’”

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