Short-Story Collection Celebrates Romance and Passion Throughout Life's Stages

Writer Kathleen Valentine’s fiction serves two missions, to reclaim romance to its traditional meaning and to portray older characters as passionate and desirable.

Gloucester, MA (PRWEB) October 3, 2006 -- “When I turned fifty,” author Kathleen Valentine recalls, “I had just fallen in love for the first time in years. I was amazed at how intense my feelings were. In my twenties I never thought that fifty could be even more exciting.”

Out of that experience grew a series of short stories each featuring characters at various stages in their lives — from their twenties to a woman in her eighties — discovering or re-discovering the passionate nature of love. Valentine gathered these stories into a slim and elegant volume, My Last Romance and other passions, just released by Parlez-Moi Press (www.ParlezMoiPress.com).
                     
“I was actually born with the name Valentine, my great-grandfather came here from Scotland,” she adds, “and for years I didn’t like it. I thought it was too romantic and silly. Now, I’m thrilled to have a name that is something of an epiphany in the tradition of James Joyce.” She refers to Stephen Daedalus, the hero of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. Valentine, who lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, is promoting her book through a series of talks beginning with a Know Your Neighbor evening at the Seacrest Inn in Rockport, Massachusetts on October 25. This will be followed by television appearances on John Ronan’s The Writer’s Block on October 26 and November 2. More speaking dates will be announced throughout the winter.

Baby-boomers, Valentine, 56, says, are responding with great enthusiasm to the book. “A lot of them tell me it is gratifying to read stories that celebrate mature love and, more than love, passion.” She says she has been surprised by the number of men who have read the book and say they enjoyed it. “I really thought it was a ‘chick book’, even if the chicks were aging chicks. But a surprising number of men have told me they were completely captivated by the sense of place and the atmosphere as well as the steaminess of the relationships.”

But there is more to it than sex, according to Valentine. Romance as a genre has changed from its original meaning. At one time stories called romances were about adventure and about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances that transformed them. Classic romance in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper, is at the core of the eight stories in the collection. In the title story, “My Last Romance”, Ruby, a big band singer approaching her sixtieth birthday, is contentedly retired with her seventy-something musician husband, when she re-encounters a lover from her past who had abandoned her with no explanation. Suddenly a passion she thought long dead is re-ignited with surprising results. In “The Haven”, the socialite wife of a fish-packing industry CEO who can give her anything except the baby she longs for, finds consolation with her husband’s older cousin, a hard-living mariner who was once the terror of the waterfront. Each story is set in an environment that comes vividly alive, from a fog-shrouded Cape Cod tourist town to a torrid Louisiana bayou to the snowy mountains of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Highlands. Valentine’s deft skill at creating ambiance makes each story a sensual treat.

How does it feel to write so frankly about passion? “It’s a little intimidating,” Valentine admits. “Some people think you forget about that once you reach a certain age but you don’t. I want my stories to remind people that passion is energy, it’s life-force and excitement and nobody is ever too old for that, are they?”

My Last Romance and other passions (www.MyLastRomance.com), ISBN 0-9785940-5-3, is available from Parlez-Moi Press, and online from Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/My-Last-Romance-other-passions/dp/0978594053/ref=sr_11_1/102-0954877-4629751?ie=UTF8_blank), Barnes and Noble online (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780978594053&itm=1) and other online book dealers. The author’s blog is www.KathleenValentine.com. Her first novel, The Old Mermaid’s Tale, also published by Parlez-Moi Press, is scheduled for release on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2007.

“Since I was born with this name,” Valentine says, “and have begun to write about romance, we figured Valentine’s Day was perfect.”

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