Once Upon a Legacy of Ink, Sand, and Tears

A fifty-year-old, Cuban-born, Chicago-raised, former liberal arts professor named Crystal Donaldson longs to write a literary masterpiece - her first novel - during a critical point of deteriorating health and personal awareness in her life. She harbors endless questions about her Cuban parents, the history of the Caribbean island she was born on, and the secrets the older generations of her family left buried in la Habana (Havana) before fleeing to the United States just a few months after her birth half a century ago. Crystal begins to interview her eccentric, exotic, entertaining octogenarian aunts, Katerina and Sofia, while studying century-old love letters written by her grandparents, Lydia and Orlando, as well as examining the journals left by her dead expatriate father, Roberto Aguilar. Roberto was a maritime law-practicing lawyer and professor from an aristocratic Cuban family, a former CIA operative, and a poet who fell deeply in love with and wrote love-filled verses to Crystal's Cuban mother, Serena Vasco, an artist from a poorer class family. What Crystal will discover goes beyond the excavation of a few skeletons in the family closet and transcends beyond the dichotomy between truth and lies, rich and poor, male and female, democracy and dictatorship, text and subtext, and the differences in time and place. Crystal learns through the lives and loves of five generations of the women in her family history that the body, the mind, the heart, and the soul are far more complex, capable, and courageous than even an intelligent, middle-aged woman might have imagined. She also concludes that the truth can be an unaffordable luxury exigently commanding an unbearable price; there is no unconditional love without sacrifice; and to preserve the life-line between them, those on either side will often believe, say, and do the unthinkable. From the raising of the Cuban flag in 1902's colorful city of la Habana, through the political ups and downs of the decades preceding the so-called "communist" Fidelista revolution, to present-day American family life, this novel-within-a-novel takes the reader on a journey to another place and time and back again, opening up a dialogue and erasing the line between opposing cultures, socio-economic classes, political parties, gender roles, philosophical ideologies, values, traditions, and personalities.

Marianela Peterson was born in Havana, Cuba in the early 1960’s. Four months later, her family emigrated from that Caribbean island and sought political refuge in the United States. Her father died shortly after settling them down in Chicago. Marianela and her brother were raised by their widowed mother who worked two factory jobs to provide for her children and give them a Catholic school education and by their grandmother who nurtured them and made sure they got to school on time and did their homework. Growing up in a bilingual/bicultural home, Marianela became fascinated with language, words, books, writing implements, and paper as far back as she can remember. Ms. Peterson earned a Bachelor of Arts in English with a Minor in Spanish from Northeastern Illinois University and a Master of Arts in Teaching from NIU’s Graduate School, specializing in Language Arts. She obtained her teaching certification in Elementary Education. Ms. Peterson was a practicing educator for twenty years, having been a Pre-school teacher, an Elementary School teacher, a literacy coach, and an English tutor. Marianela lives with her soul mate Doug, a retired accountant, to whom she has been happily married for over 30 years. They have two grown sons - a cinematographer/artist and a digital cinema specialist/musician. The Peterson’s share their home with a mischievous black feline beauty named Demona who chews on the computer and runs back & forth across the keyboard when the author is trying to work. Marianela enjoys daily long walks in the woods with her husband, cooking Cuban food, going to the theater to see movies and plays, and of course, reading good fiction and writing her own. ONCE UPON A LEGACY OF INK, SAND, AND TEARS is her first novel.