When acclaimed Canadian writer Brian Dedora travelled to Spain in 2012 to explore Lorca’s Granada, he experienced an unexpected transformation that set him on a path of understanding – of the life and work of Federico Garcia Lorca, of the basic elements in common between the Spanish writer’s life and his own, and of the tragic grandeur of Lorca’s death in Granada in 1936.
Lorcation progresses transformationally from prose poem to informal essay, sustained by its three vital metaphors of journey, suitcase, and crossroads. The book, presented as a bilingual English and Spanish edition, follows Dedora’s reading and re-enactment of Lorca’s life and writing, especially the Spanish author’s emergent awareness of his homosexuality, culminating, for Dedora, in a new understanding of Lorca’s call to attend to the living within the enigma of death.
With its blending of the personal with the historical, Lorcation by Brian Dedora will fascinate lovers of Lorca’s writing, and may just spur on a whole new generation of readers to discover the life, loves, and losses of this enigmatic Spanish virtuoso.
Praise for Lorcation:
Exciting, moving, a gift for us, a gift for Lorca. Dedora traces an under-the-skin map of both poet’s physical and emotional landscapes. – Laura Garc a-Lorca, President, Federico Garc a Lorca Foundation, Madrid
Praise for Brian Dedora:
Gutsy writing from a diving heart that knows how to surface from darkness into the liberating play of language. Stories within stories of growing up Other. Brian Dedora’s sleight-of-hand narrating offers social recognitions with all the casualness of experience as it hits, hard. –Daphne Marlatt
Dedora drags the past without misty-eyed backward looking or anything that reads like recrimination; just a tautly measured parsing of what occurred and the implicit amazement that anyone in midlife feels that somehow one has ducked and dodged at just the right time and managed to make it this far. –Bill Richardson
Dedora…creates a perfectly homogeneous book, ‘a continuum of traces’ into the future. A truly haunting reading experience. –Lola Tostevin
