I’m thrilled to announce that my second novel, To Catch a Moon, will be published in May 2022 by Unsung Stories. You can see the beautiful cover designed by Vince Haig here at the Fantasy Hive:
https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2022/03/to-catch-a-moon-by-rym-kechacha-cover-reveal/
Remedios Varo was a Spanish surrealist painter who left Europe during the second world war and spent the rest of her life in Mexico city, where she created most of her famous paintings.
If you’re interested in Varo’s biography then her wikipedia page tells the story of her life better than I can:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo
And then you’ll probably want to see a gallery of her works and be able to click through to see the ones you’re drawn to most:
https://www.wikiart.org/en/remedios-varo )
She was part of a group of female surrealist artists whose work is being ‘rediscovered’ and celebrated at the moment. It’s one of those beautiful tidal swellings of the collective unconscious (an image she might have made a beautiful painting of) that interest and appreciation for the work of artists like Leonora Carrington (A dear friend of Varo’s) Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini are giving a fresh retrospective on a movement that relegated them to the passive role of muse; but there is more to be inspired by than the work they left behind. These women lived surrealism in their bodies, hearts and minds. They enjoyed the kind of creative friendship where the lines of making art and domestic life were deliciously blurred; collaborating on paintings, dinners and puppet shows, looking after each other’s children and picking up each other’s post. They lived through the turbulence of their era, their marginalisation and their heartbreaks with their joy, imagination and thirst for life intact. This is what has seeped into me through my greedy research; a tiny morsel of their courage.
I can’t say where I first came across Varo’s work. It might have been on twitter. Or perhaps it was on a blog that I found after following a chain of links that started with a casual, mindless scroll through twitter, the kind of scrolling that, for better or worse, takes the place of daydreaming these days. Whenever I think about the way I encountered this artist who has taken up residence inside my heart, I think about the Surrealist worship of dreams, chance and fate. I can’t trace my first encounter with her work any more than I could remember the first time I saw a full moon or a murmuration of starlings. Now she’s just here with me, a quiet artistic familiar who knows more about most things that I could ever hope to.
So what’s the book about? It’s about the act of creation - of painting, writing, sewing, singing, birth, magic and dreams. It’s about love, and sacrifice and the destruction of the world. It’s about what we want to save at the end of things and why.
I strung together some of her paintings and made a story from them, a story I’m sort of convinced they already told. It is not a realist story, but I don’t know if I can claim the label surrealism for it either. It came from the charged space between the paintings themselves and the peculiar ways they hooked into my imagination and made themselves at home. There are moons locked in towers, men who roll around on a single wheel covered in hair, girls stitching the fabric of the world and a lion made of leaves. There’s a witch, a goat and a woman who is half owl. I didn’t make any of this up. Remedios did. So the book belongs even less to me than any book belongs to its author, and perhaps that’s why I’m so proud of it and so happy that it’ll be out in the world soon.