I Live in the Land of Apples - by Joanna Easton (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

As a photographer and a poet, keen experience started early, lingered long, and spawned the ultimate impetus to document the harvest of my perceptions. There is much to tell as my memory is keen and the ride, on the waves of my insights, follows an inner compass formed early and tested deeply. The outer world of home life, learning and mastery, years living abroad, interests and accomplishments dazzle and puzzle me by turns. The memoir follows my detective work, joys, struggles and desire to make sense of the mysteries I feel compelled to understand. I follow the zig-zag path from questions to epiphanies, through study and onto some semblance of sovereignty. Points of reference include: dealing with an inadequate mother; facing the dynamics of a bi-ethnic household; fielding the qualities of a Catholic upbringing and its impact on spirituality and sexuality; and integrating exceptionality, loneliness, difference and strength. My education and career as an Educational Therapist adds the crispness of science, as neurology, psychology, and cognition underpin my career. Motherhood, gardening and yoga soften the edges while physicality and energy enliven the adventure. The range and depth of my inquiry structures the memoir and offers an eclectic, survival map of sorts. There are both photographs and poems woven in with the otherwise, more or less, chronological timeline.

Review Quotes

"Charlotte writer JoAnna Blaine Easton named her memoir for her father's ancestral village: Mazraat el Toufah ("apple orchard") in the mountains of Lebanon. 'I am his child, ' she writes of her second-generation-immigrant father, praising his 'amber-eyed vision that cradled me.' The seventh child born to this father and an Irish Catholic mother, Easton remembers her mother less fondly, as the woman who essentially abandoned her and her twin brother to nuns for their first three weeks of life.

The experience of 'feeling unmothered' helped launch Easton on a 'life as a seeker, ' she writes. Her seeking has included studies of yoga and Jungian philosophy; travels in Europe, where Easton met Frau Engels, the spiritual mother or 'motherangel' who fostered her artistic instincts; and long-time involvement in the arts. Rather than narrate her life chronologically, Easton takes a circling, lyrical approach, following intuitive associations and interspersing her remembrances with her own poems and quotes from the thinkers she admires. It's the portrait of a woman whose seeking has borne fruit. "
-Margot Harrison, Seven Days

"Rejected by her mother as an infant, Easton could have chosen the familiar path to self-destruction. Instead, the memoir relates how Easton created a path that led to her true home."
-Mel Huff, The Citizen