[00:01:02] Speaker A: Welcome to WRITE on radio. I'm Eric, and on tonight's program, Josh talks with Cass Dalglish about her new book, Ring of Lions. Ring of Lions explores the power of memory as mysteries around the last Moorish kings of Spain become entangled with a series of recent deaths at the Alhambra. The novel leads readers across timelines and through folk tales as the story is told by characters of several generations whose cultural, religious, and academic motives have drawn them to the Alhambra. All of this and more. So stay tuned to WRITE ON Radio.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Graciela Corsal de Moreno came down a wide stone staircase with a small overnight bag in her left hand. She had slipped an ivory colored envelope into the outer pocket of the briefcase that hung across her shoulders, so no attention was required as she reached the bottom of the staircase. With her free hand, she opened the heavy door and stepped out onto the plaza. She was in her 50s, close to the age of Lorena Isabela when she died. But it was not the 16th century, and Graciela Corsalde Moreno did not appear to be aging. Her gait was quick and strong, and her scholarly mind was the same. When you met her, if you didn't know you were supposed to call her Doctora, you would have found another title to address her, maybe Donia. She was the kind of person who entered your thoughts and remained there.
Inside that ivory envelope was a proposal that the Alhambra be added to the list of wonders of the world. This was her second attempt. The Alhambra had come so close in the past, and now that the competition was open again, she was determined that the Alhambra would achieve the status it deserved. This was not a light responsibility for Doctora Corsal. For her, it was the duty of the director of the Alhambra to carry this Moorish city in all its magnificence on her shoulders. But she was not a woman who could disavow even distasteful episodes from the past. Her memory also supported images of Cordoba's tolerance being extinguished by intolerance, Spain's monarchs expelling the Jewish and Moorish populations, blood spattering under the sands of the Inquisition and the land being thinned by civil war and tyranny. The vision Dr. Casal held closest at that moment, however, was of the time in Spain, when knowledge had been protected, when one language touched the boundaries of another without leaving a gap, when mathematics, science, architecture, dance, astronomy, and poetry link scholars as if they were triangles joined to squares on the walls of the Alhambra.
[00:04:24] Speaker C: Very good.
That was Cass Douglas, reading from her recently released novel Ring of Lions.
She's a fiction writer and prose poet. Was worked as a broadcast journalist. She studied Sumerian in Acadian cuneiform in her search for the earliest written work by women. And investigations have led her to write a lecture on similarities she found in ancient cuneiform text and hypertext. She's professor. She's a professor emerita of English at Augsburg University in Minneapolis where she was the lead designer, fiction mentor and first director of the Augsburg Low Residency MFA program. Cass, welcome to write on radio.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Thank you very much, Josh. Glad to be here.
[00:05:05] Speaker C: The prologue. It introduces a fable like story about a king and a philosopher searching for wisdom.
How does this theme of storytelling within a story relate to the novel's central mystery?
[00:05:19] Speaker B: Well, central mystery, that's a hard one, you know. But there are many mysteries that are involved in a process that we might call tessellation. And tessellation is that process whereby there's no gap, there's no overlap. But things like tiles in the Alhambra can be touching each other without causing one to overtake the other or cover it up. But they are there. They are tessellated. If you think maybe of the work of Escher, we always see this as something that holds together geometric designs. But it's not just geometric designs that are tessellated in this novel. Stories. It is apparent to us that stories are tessellated one to another, echoing each other. Touching, but no overlap, no gap. And the old story that comes into the novel is one of a king who wants power and he wants to rule, but he also wants peace. And he's heard that there are stories that can help him do that. So he sends one of his messengers off to get them. And it's a very dangerous trip. But the man comes back with stories that are full of anger and hatred and violence. And the king says, no, that's not what I want. A story that tells me about different people all getting together to cooperate, to help each other. And the messenger goes back again and gets in touch with this material, which is actually from the Panchatrada, from the Sankrit, and comes back with a story about a crow, a turtle and a crow, a turtle, the rat, I'm trying to think. The crow, the turtle, the rat, and of course the gazelle. And so those four characters, sorry, it was hard for me to pull them back out out of the Panchatrada, but here they are. And so those characters come together and what happens is at the beginning of the story, the crow is flying around, and he sees that the rat is getting a ring dove out of a trap that a hunter has laid for the dove. And he's so impressed by the fact that this rat goes to help this one other animal that he stays with him. And the story goes on and on and on, through the saving of one animal and then another and then another.
And we have these four wonderful animals working together.
[00:08:07] Speaker C: The narrator in the prologue suggests that time is fluid, stating new stories are constantly being told, old stories forgotten, some deliberately suppressed. How does this idea shape the way the story unfolds?
[00:08:22] Speaker B: I think it's important for us to get back in touch, because later on, we might want to think about stories that are still being created, about places like the Alhambra, the last castle in Spain. And we must realize that if we want to do that, we're really probably talking to a great deal about the tradition of the folktale, People getting together, telling stories around the fire as we do. Still, we get together in the summer around a campfire, and we tell the stories, and they all change a little bit. And yet there's a similar storyline or a character or the tyrant that comes in as the enemy in the story. And so the stories change, the languages change, the culture changes, but the story carries on. And it changes because the teller of the story might have something new to add.
[00:09:18] Speaker C: Ring of Lions blends historical intrigue with modern suspense. What was the initial inspiration behind this novel? Did the idea begin with a specific historical event or a particular character?
[00:09:34] Speaker B: It began in just a very mundane way. I had just come out of the two projects for which I had decided I had to learn Akkadian cuneiform and Sumerian pictographs. And I'd been studying those pictographs so that I could decipher the work of the woman named Enheduanna, who was the first human being to claim a text when she pushed her name with a cuneiform wedge into soft clay and told the story of the great deity Inanna.
And I was tired.
Years, I had spent a lot of time to go from Spanish and English and even my Latin. My professor said to me, what else have you studied? Have you ever done anything like this? And I said, latin. And he said, no, this is going to be totally different. And it was.
And each. Each time I had come through to an understanding of that story, I gained a little bit. But I always had to spend more time going through and looking at those pictographs. And I decided, okay, my next project is not going to take me 10 years. To do it, I want to write a cheap and dirty murder mystery.
And I want to get it done. So the first thing that came to me was that I wanted to take an investigator, a figure like an FBI agent, and let him have this awakening where he realized that he wanted to get out of that kind of crime and start investigating art. And so my husband and I went. I had a sabbatical. We went off to Granada, to Spain, with that in mind, with the inspector, who was now going to be an art authenticator in mind. And, of course, we spent a great deal of time in the Alhambra in Granada, and fell in love with it. And so that's kind of where the lions then took over. Once we could be there with the lions, we realized it wasn't just the inspector. It was the lions who were important.
[00:11:48] Speaker C: How did you approach integrating historical events into a contemporary thriller?
[00:11:54] Speaker B: Well, Toni Morrison has a way of talking about this. She says that there are things that we can know from history. That we can know from contemporary documents about the world and human life. But there are things within that reality, that history, that we don't know.
And if we want to know it, one of the really best ways we can consider doing it is to use fiction as a tool to help us excavate the reality that was going on that wasn't documented. The people who weren't part of the story.
And I follow that rule of Toni Morrison if I want to find out more. Fiction is my way of getting at the stories that lie beneath. What we may have. In documenting.
[00:12:50] Speaker C: As both a historical novel and a suspense thriller. How did you balance the pace in between historical exposition and the unfolding mystery?
[00:13:00] Speaker B: You know, there are people who I know, and I've been writing fiction a long time. And teaching the writing of fiction and being with fiction writers. And I know that there are some fiction writers who sit down almost as though they have a scale. And they balance things out and they write it all down. And they know what they're going to write that day. And then they move on.
That's one kind of writer. And I think those people are absolutely magnificent. I'm the kind of writer that likes to think of fiction coming through my hands as they rest on the keyboard. I don't necessarily program where I'm going On any given writing day. I want to leave myself open.
I used to tell my journalism students that they had to go out investigating stories with the null hypothesis in mind. No one end to the story is going to be better than another. Just go and find out what is the truth? When I'm writing fiction, I'm looking for the fictional truth. And I feel that there is sort of a geist that comes and helps me, and I just surrender to it. So what happened to me in this story was that I began with Walter Drummond, the FBI agent turned artist, artifact authenticator. And then other people came into the story as I moved along the lions, as I said, obviously. And so then there is the reality that the story, one of the storylines that runs through the Alhambra and through Granada is that those lions had been turned off, that it was a fountain that Isabella did not want to have water running through. She didn't like the way it was going. And this is history. This is one of the historical facts. Isabella actually did order that her servants, her army, disassembled the waterworks that went through the Alhambra. And the Alhambra is very well known for this Moorish waterworks that seemed to be almost magical, the way it functioned in the castle. And Isabella ordered it taken apart.
[00:15:32] Speaker C: Could you elaborate a bit about the reasoning behind why she wanted to disassemble it? Because you mentioned over the phone we were talking with us, she believed that there is alchemy present in this.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Well, I mentioned that some people wondered if she believed it. And this is exactly where we stand with the difference between history and fiction. All right? We know its history is absolutely straight, pure nonfiction. Isabella had the water turned off in the fountain of the lions.
But, Josh, you asked me why. Do I know? Do I know why? Isabella? No, Isabella. We didn't get Isabella's diary where she talked about that. We know that her closest advisor was Torquemada, who was the head of the Spanish Inquisition. And even if you didn't study Spanish medieval history and know about the Inquisition, if you ever watched Monty Python, you know that nobody expects the Inquisition. It was a horrible, terrible time. And there was a lot of concern about superstition and magic and power and people's beliefs could cause them to be killed.
And so we don't know why Isabella didn't want the water running, but we know that she also didn't like the water running in the water wheel in Cordoba. And so one of my characters has concerns about this and asks a question. Why did she do this? Was she afraid that there was alchemy in the castle because it seemed to have some powers.
We don't know. That's fiction.
[00:17:13] Speaker C: You mentioned this character, Walter Drummond. So he works as an authenticator, as an authenticist investigating art and historical objects. It was fascinating to know about this? How did you research this profession? And did you base him on any real figures that you knew?
[00:17:34] Speaker B: You know, I've known some FBI agents in my life and watched have known police. I was a crime reporter back at KSTP back in the day, in the 70s. So I watched how they gathered data and what was important to them. One of them said to me once, the reason that murder is fascinating to everybody and everybody likes murder mysteries is that all of humanity seems to come forth in that act. Somebody has power, somebody doesn't have power. You can really find out a lot about the human condition if you are studying a murder case. So I knew that about an investigator, but also I have a brother in law who is. He's passed away 10 years ago. But he spent a lifetime as an artist himself and a musician. And also he was the caretaker and collector of incredible documents, art objects, notebooks of great musicians, also Shakespeare, first folios. He guarded all of those things and he did it with precision.
And I think I learned a lot just from knowing about him and knowing him. So that was another piece that comes out of experience. But he definitely isn't an FBI. You know, these aren't real people. It's not an autobiographical novel.
[00:19:04] Speaker C: The novel references several historical figures from Voidabille to Maimonides and Tomas de Torquemada. How did you balance historical accuracy with fictional storytelling?
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Well, kind of like what I was saying, I was going for the fictional truth. Going through it, I wanted to. I'm kind of a demon for accuracy even in my fiction.
And so I did a lot of research.
For instance, I found myself reading lists from the Inquisition, the names of people. There was a time in Spain during the Inquisition and during this, back in the time when Isabel and Fernand were in power, where people were offered the choice of converting to Catholicism, giving up their Jewish faith or giving up their Moorish faith, or being subjected to the Inquisition.
They were forced to leave Spain. This was, by the way, 1492, when the whole movement of people was forced on Moors and on Jewish people. And they could have a choice of converting. And those people were called conversos. And they're listed all the names of the people in the papers of the Inquisition, which I found and read and found the names of people who I knew on that list who had left Spain at that time and also who were considered conversos. That is real stuff there, right?
That's history. That is an actual documentary piece of authenticated reality. But it occurred to me when I found names that I knew what would happen. If those people decided that they wanted to go back to Spain and find out more about why their families had done this, how they had appeared in there, then that journey back is the journey that two of my characters take. The young people, the folklorist from New York and the scholar from Cuba who feels that he is the descendant of a translator, a Jewish translator who went with Columbus on the first voyage. So the young one is a fictional character, and the translator who went with Columbus obviously is a non fiction character. He actually existed. That was somebody who came to me while I was doing my research. And that was one more character that had to come into the story because he was irresistible.
[00:21:56] Speaker C: The novel explores identity in various ways. Rubin's search for his Jewish ancestry, Anna's connection to her Moorish heritage, and even Walter's role as an authenticator. Do you see identity as a kind of puzzle in this book?
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Yes.
And I think it's the Ring of Lions that becomes the puzzle. And trying to figure out what is going on with the Ring of Lions. And we didn't. We didn't mention that, which we really should. What happens at the start of the novel is that one of the lions comes back from an atelier actually functioning as a clock, whereas it hadn't worked since 1400s when Isabella had taken it apart. And Graciela de Corsal, the director of the Alhambra, becomes worried that maybe something has happened to the lion. Somebody has falsified it. So there we get another whole sense of authenticity. And so to solve the problem of why the lion was important, each of these different people, young people, older people, come together, bringing their own cultures, their own history, their own memories, stories that glance off one another but are not exactly the same, to try and figure out the puzzle.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: And I think I have enough time for one more question. If there's one thing you hope readers take away from Ring of Lions, what would it be?
[00:23:26] Speaker B: Well, there you go.
I would hope that they take away the fact that they want to read all the way to the end, that they want to be able to actually let themselves play with the puzzle and try and figure out what it is that was happening with the lions that was so important that two people either accidentally or were murdered in the process of trying to solve them during the. During the whole resolution of the puzzle.
[00:24:00] Speaker C: This has been my time talking to Cass Dalglish about her new novel, Ring of Lions. Cass, thanks for being on the show with us.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you very much. It's been fun.
[00:24:10] Speaker C: And now this.
[00:25:52] Speaker A: You have been listening to Right On Radio on KFAI at 90.3 FM in Minneapolis and streaming live on the
[email protected] I'm Eric Zimmerman. We would like to thank Cass Daglish and all of our listeners. Without your support, KFAI would not be possible.
