Genesis 2: The Passion of Emma Ray Earle
GENESIS 2: THE PASSION OF EMMA RAY EARLE is currently being edited. I am in the process of seeking representation for the book so if you know of a literary agent who's looking specifically for fiction, adult magical realism, EMAIL ME!
ABOUT THE BOOK: EverGreen Circle Round Trailer Park is a place where the human comes before the law, babies are found daily in giant clam shells, and men who are about to turn ugly are tossed into a pit, naked and without weapons, so they can’t hurt anyone. Park born and bred Emma never had any plans to leave her beloved home but when she falls in love with childhood friend Robert Earle the power of their love triggers the mysterious balancing and the clueless Emma is thrust onto the path of becoming Mighty Creation.
An aching paean to life, love, and humanity and written in a stunning “southern epic” voice, Emma is a character like no other from a place like no other, with a spirituality and world mythos like no other. Gritty, hysterically funny, and riddled with beautiful, soul-twisting lines and truths that will take your breath away, Genesis 2 is dedicated to the women who will not be tamed and the men who love them, tty, spiritual, hysterically funny, and riddled with beautiful, soul-twisting lines and truths that will take your breath away, Emma is a character like no other from a place like no other, with a spirituality and world mythos like no other.
An aching paean to life, love, and humanity and written in a stunning “southern epic” voice, Emma is a character like no other from a place like no other, with a spirituality and world mythos like no other. Gritty, hysterically funny, and riddled with beautiful, soul-twisting lines and truths that will take your breath away, Genesis 2 is dedicated to the women who will not be tamed and the men who love them, tty, spiritual, hysterically funny, and riddled with beautiful, soul-twisting lines and truths that will take your breath away, Emma is a character like no other from a place like no other, with a spirituality and world mythos like no other.
“Katherine Manaan has woven a phantasmagorical reawakening of the world, with a heroine unlike any in literary history and a cast of eccentric characters who arrive cataclysmically alive. Loving, whimsical, wise, sexualized, fearsome--and fearless--Emma is a new earth mother for the ages, a goddess taking us back to a garden yet to be grown. "
“A unique book of inspired fantasy, mingled with hard edged reality and humor, and written with a stunningly fresh voice.”
“The Passion of Emma Ray Earle, is the kind of literary quest that comes along once every 50 years. Genesis 2: is the pagan’s Lord of the Rings, and Katherine Manaan is the pagan’s Tolkien.”
GENESIS 2: THE PASSION OF EMMA RAY EARLE
BY
KATHERINE MANAAN
God is separate from nature and nature is condemned of God. It’s right there in Genesis. Our story of the fall in the garden sees nature as corrupt and the myth corrupts the whole world for us…It is the sociological function of myth that has taken over the world — and it is out of date. What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as one harmonious whole?...What better mythical element could we find than the ancient concept of the heiros gamos, the sacred joining between god and goddess, the concept of a Sacred Marriage…” Joseph Campbell
“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.” Carl Jung
“Man and his kind lied the Goddess away and took the God’s horns.
Man and his kind broke the balance.” Jane Lee Randall – Oracle
CHAPTER 1 – IN THE BEGINNING
I was raised up down south in a trailer park so I got knocked up early. Sweet Sam James, my first true love was decidedly happy.
“I’m a man he said, dancing around and flexing his biceps.
I went to the bathroom and threw up. We were seventeen.
Lureen, who was like the best aunt ever, threw together a wedding and everybody came except for mean old Lucille, Robert Earle, and that two-faced bitch Felicity. Stupid Bill got drunk and shot Fat Jack’s dog for pissing on his leg. Fat Jack pulled a knife out his boot intent on carving up Stupid Bill and Sweet Sam stepped in. He caught the blade in his chest, crumpled to his knees, looked at me and said, “I love you, Emma.”
It was a tragedy the likes of which EverGreen Circle Round Trailer Park hadn’t seen in the million years it’d been there, and the people howled of a scale so desolate the earth gaged a fracture. She spread, slit open, hissed sulfur, and gleaned up the body. I dove unhinged, clawing at the earth, fingers to blood, hollering, “You give him back! You give him back to me!!”
Daddy peeled me off the ground a few hours later like I was silly putty, and carried my limp self back to the trailer. He lay me out none-too-gentle on a seat took out a dead car left to rust.
“Ow.”
“You gotta go, Emma.”
I sat up. My dead friends all around, stuck like road kill to thin walls.
“Where is he?! You tell me where he is!”
“Emma Ray.” Daddy clapped his hands in front of my face.
“What?”
“You stay, you’ll kill Stupid Bill and Fat Jack, and I ain’t gonna let that happen.
“What about me? Your precious daughter? I just lost my husband.”
Daddy dead-eyed the invisible over my left shoulder, and took a knee.
“You wanna have that baby in prison and your soul leeched by demons? You want this Park turned against you? Is that what you want?”
“Where’m I supposed go?”
“New York.”
“You want me to die?”
“No, baby. I want you to go to New York.”
“I cain’t. I got no money.”
He reckoned me a beat, given my talent for stealing most anything that wasn’t nailed down.
“I got no place to live in New York Daddy, and I don’t know anybody there, either.”
“I do. Get yourself some money. I’ll scribble up what you need to know.”
Night lanterns lit the paths. Stepping quiet ’round sleeping chickens, dreaming dogs, trailers lumped and hunkered down. It was so damp my jeans stuck to my legs, and my feet were sweating so in my grubby tennis shoes I wished I wore my little half socks with the powder blue pompoms. A baby cried, her momma whispered, “Shuss, shuss, my darling,” and the home-sweet-home of it all made my heart hurt almost as bad as watching Sweet Sam die. I didn’t want to leave my home, I loved Edgar, Georgia, and EverGreen Circle Round Trailer Park beyond all reason.
Sneaking into Robert Earle’s I startled the dark, stroked it soft till it sighed and settled. Felicity whimpering high-pitched cheerleader cheers in her sleep. Robert Earle snoring baritone. I stepped quiet down the skinny hall, I knew like I knew the nose on my face, and eased on into Robert Earle’s little office. Feeling for the indent under the desk top, I tapped light. The bottom drawer slid open with a sweet whish. Stacks of smiling money. I didn’t take it all, I took just enough, stuffed it in my knapsack, and then I took a little more.
Going out the same way I came in, faster now, Robert Earle snoring baritone, Felicity whispering “2 bits, 4 bits.” I closed the door soft behind me, jumped the steps and hit the ground running. Faster’n light I streaked through hot, wet night and was just in front Laurette’s Diner when the midnight bus to New York City cannon-balled to a stop. My exit out everything I knew and loved reverbed in protest, exhaling fumes of oily stink. Stepping up into stale air, lit dark, I paid the driver and took a seat, two back, next to the window. Lightning ripped open the belly of the sky, mean thunder doe-se-doed taunting the in-between, and pelts of water pounded to pulp everything in its way. Sweet Sam was dead and I was carrying his baby. My baby wouldn’t even be born in the Park. That’s when I started to cry.
I’m in my memories as I write this. You get old like me, and one memory begats another, and there’s no such thing as a new experience. There is a “new,” though, in the way you feel what happened, and you end up with colors and shapes you didn’t see ’cause you were standing too close. You end up with reasons you couldn’t possibly of known ’cause you were too busy putting one foot in front of the other, just to survive. Old people, we like to look at life as a whole, we like to think about what gave rise to what. No question, that first trip to the straight-line world of New York City landed me on unfamiliar soil, and that soil was the beginning of me becoming Creation. This was not on my to-do list. Taking down the mean old God man and his kind created, and birthing a whole new world wasn’t on my to do list either.
My best friend Betty say’s I became what I became, did what I did, because of my beyond all reason love for a man. That’s a partial truth. The rest of that truth is I cain’t stand bullies, and after I committed to walking the path of love, without a fucking clue what that really meant, there was no way I was gonna let man’s Omnipotent Hornless God destroy my beloved — the true God buried standing.
If you’re looking for smooth, for easy, you might wanna skip the path of love. Living the everyday of other and opposites is like being pulled in five different directions by slow moving horses, but that’s how I seen what they done, Man and his God, and that’s why I chose to fight. It never occurred to me I wouldn’t win but that that wasn’t the point. The battle itself was the point. It was next right action and I’ve always lived my life one right action after the other. Who knew my right action was the living, juicy, pink of humanity’s dream? It’s a long story, a woman’s story, and worth the tell.
I was raised up down south in a trailer park so I got knocked up early. Sweet Sam James, my first true love was decidedly happy.
“I’m a man he said, dancing around and flexing his biceps.
I went to the bathroom and threw up. We were seventeen.
Lureen, who was like the best aunt ever, threw together a wedding and everybody came except for mean old Lucille, Robert Earle, and that two-faced bitch Felicity. Stupid Bill got drunk and shot Fat Jack’s dog for pissing on his leg. Fat Jack pulled a knife out his boot intent on carving up Stupid Bill and Sweet Sam stepped in. He caught the blade in his chest, crumpled to his knees, looked at me and said, “I love you, Emma.”
It was a tragedy the likes of which EverGreen Circle Round Trailer Park hadn’t seen in the million years it’d been there, and the people howled of a scale so desolate the earth gaged a fracture. She spread, slit open, hissed sulfur, and gleaned up the body. I dove unhinged, clawing at the earth, fingers to blood, hollering, “You give him back! You give him back to me!!”
Daddy peeled me off the ground a few hours later like I was silly putty, and carried my limp self back to the trailer. He lay me out none-too-gentle on a seat took out a dead car left to rust.
“Ow.”
“You gotta go, Emma.”
I sat up. My dead friends all around, stuck like road kill to thin walls.
“Where is he?! You tell me where he is!”
“Emma Ray.” Daddy clapped his hands in front of my face.
“What?”
“You stay, you’ll kill Stupid Bill and Fat Jack, and I ain’t gonna let that happen.
“What about me? Your precious daughter? I just lost my husband.”
Daddy dead-eyed the invisible over my left shoulder, and took a knee.
“You wanna have that baby in prison and your soul leeched by demons? You want this Park turned against you? Is that what you want?”
“Where’m I supposed go?”
“New York.”
“You want me to die?”
“No, baby. I want you to go to New York.”
“I cain’t. I got no money.”
He reckoned me a beat, given my talent for stealing most anything that wasn’t nailed down.
“I got no place to live in New York Daddy, and I don’t know anybody there, either.”
“I do. Get yourself some money. I’ll scribble up what you need to know.”
Night lanterns lit the paths. Stepping quiet ’round sleeping chickens, dreaming dogs, trailers lumped and hunkered down. It was so damp my jeans stuck to my legs, and my feet were sweating so in my grubby tennis shoes I wished I wore my little half socks with the powder blue pompoms. A baby cried, her momma whispered, “Shuss, shuss, my darling,” and the home-sweet-home of it all made my heart hurt almost as bad as watching Sweet Sam die. I didn’t want to leave my home, I loved Edgar, Georgia, and EverGreen Circle Round Trailer Park beyond all reason.
Sneaking into Robert Earle’s I startled the dark, stroked it soft till it sighed and settled. Felicity whimpering high-pitched cheerleader cheers in her sleep. Robert Earle snoring baritone. I stepped quiet down the skinny hall, I knew like I knew the nose on my face, and eased on into Robert Earle’s little office. Feeling for the indent under the desk top, I tapped light. The bottom drawer slid open with a sweet whish. Stacks of smiling money. I didn’t take it all, I took just enough, stuffed it in my knapsack, and then I took a little more.
Going out the same way I came in, faster now, Robert Earle snoring baritone, Felicity whispering “2 bits, 4 bits.” I closed the door soft behind me, jumped the steps and hit the ground running. Faster’n light I streaked through hot, wet night and was just in front Laurette’s Diner when the midnight bus to New York City cannon-balled to a stop. My exit out everything I knew and loved reverbed in protest, exhaling fumes of oily stink. Stepping up into stale air, lit dark, I paid the driver and took a seat, two back, next to the window. Lightning ripped open the belly of the sky, mean thunder doe-se-doed taunting the in-between, and pelts of water pounded to pulp everything in its way. Sweet Sam was dead and I was carrying his baby. My baby wouldn’t even be born in the Park. That’s when I started to cry.
I’m in my memories as I write this. You get old like me, and one memory begats another, and there’s no such thing as a new experience. There is a “new,” though, in the way you feel what happened, and you end up with colors and shapes you didn’t see ’cause you were standing too close. You end up with reasons you couldn’t possibly of known ’cause you were too busy putting one foot in front of the other, just to survive. Old people, we like to look at life as a whole, we like to think about what gave rise to what. No question, that first trip to the straight-line world of New York City landed me on unfamiliar soil, and that soil was the beginning of me becoming Creation. This was not on my to-do list. Taking down the mean old God man and his kind created, and birthing a whole new world wasn’t on my to do list either.
My best friend Betty say’s I became what I became, did what I did, because of my beyond all reason love for a man. That’s a partial truth. The rest of that truth is I cain’t stand bullies, and after I committed to walking the path of love, without a fucking clue what that really meant, there was no way I was gonna let man’s Omnipotent Hornless God destroy my beloved — the true God buried standing.
If you’re looking for smooth, for easy, you might wanna skip the path of love. Living the everyday of other and opposites is like being pulled in five different directions by slow moving horses, but that’s how I seen what they done, Man and his God, and that’s why I chose to fight. It never occurred to me I wouldn’t win but that that wasn’t the point. The battle itself was the point. It was next right action and I’ve always lived my life one right action after the other. Who knew my right action was the living, juicy, pink of humanity’s dream? It’s a long story, a woman’s story, and worth the tell.
If you loved....
Women Who Run Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Rebirth of the Goddess by Carol P. Christ, Merlin Stone's When God Was A Woman,
and Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood,
StarHawk's The Spiral Dance, and
Riane Eisler's The Chalice and The Blade.....
AND
have questioned organized religion, love southern writing, the ways of the wyrd,
magical realism, myth, and the fantastical:
you will love, Genesis 2: The Passion of Emma Ray Earle.