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Fiction • Badlands • Frank • Imogen • Floating Boundary • Art of Love: Love Poems and Paintings |
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Badlands a novel |
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Badlands, a novel Badlands is set in the forgotten soul of America, in the awe-inspiring landscape of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. To the cosmopolitan New York lawyer Adam and his British lover, the lives of the Sioux are dark reminders of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Adam returns regularly to the Badlands, determined to make amends for America's past and "get back the land" for his friend, the charismatic young leader Blackfoot. But politics and ideology give way to a more desperate underlying quest: the need to give and to get love. When Adam is obliged to return to New York, his lover does not want to accompany him. Instead, she plunges into life on the reservation, as if rediscovering her true home. The Badlands become her gateway into her true self. Enmeshed in desire and in need, with Blackfoot and his willful adolescent daughter, Minnie, she finds herself awakening to new and infinite vistas of her own sexuality and deep running passions. As she takes the young girl under her wing and enters Blackfoot's world, an intoxicating love emerges between them that transcends politics and destiny. Within the fabric of this intensely moving novel lies the story of modern day America's awakening to its own nascent spirit—a spirit made of the visions of Blackfoot and his ancestors, and of the deep dreams of the newer immigrants. A Book-of-the-Month Club Selection "In Badlands, Melinda Camber Porter has focused her English intelligence on America and rendered it as an uneasy dream of sex and death and abandonment, a mirage with the power of possession." —Joan Didion "Badlands is an extraordinary book. Its imagery makes one think of William Blake. Better than a novel, it reads like a fierce poem, with a devastating effect on our self-esteem." —Louis Malle "Badlands is a very strong, very intelligent and very intriguing novel." —Joyce Carol Oates "The book is beautiful . . . with this strange plangent cry through it. . . . It is an exquisite prose poem, but is absolutely specific about the American landscape." —Michael Hastings "Melinda Camber Porter should be congratulated on Badlands; she knows her subject thoroughly; her vision is lyrical, yet unflinching. Badlands is an achievement." —Peter Matthiessen Sacred Journey, a documentary film currently airing on Vision TV and APTN in Canada A feature documentary, Sacred Journey, which explores the powerful influence of Native spirituality on Melinda's paintings and writings and her collaboration with Mi’kmaq rock musician and spiritual elder J. Hubert Francis.
Badlands,
the feature film (a work in development)
Badlands Lectures |
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Frank |
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by Melinda Camber Porter Illustrations from Melinda Camber Porter's Luminous Bodies Series of Paintings Forward by Saul Bellow Frank is set in the early seventies, in an era when sexual license and hallucinogenic drugs had become an accepted part of western mores. In Frank the world of excess is no longer born from a rebellion against the status quo as it had been during the sixties; it has become the fashionable style. The heroine of Frank, whose name we never learn, narrates her spiritual and emotional quest for significance as she journeys through a world that appears to be free from shame and guilt, a world that strips away from existence all anecdotal reality, until only pure desire—her sexual desire—remains. Armed with financial freedom (she is the heir to the main body of her sculptor grandfather's priceless oeuvre) she navigates, with her visionary sensibility, an impossible dream come true, where there are no boundaries, no rules, and no demands made on her. But does license equal true freedom? Does pure sexual desire breed love? Does a life of excess lead to the path of wisdom? Melinda Camber Porter, in the tradition of a Voltaire or Camus, uses the novel to explore the key questions of our existence, attempting to redefine our concept of human freedom and bondage, as well as our definition of sexuality. The subtleties and originality of Melinda Camber Porter's vision are worthy of a John Stuart Mill or a William Blake. She miraculously creates a world where, undeniably, spiritual infinity springs from sexual desire. But, unlike many "philosophical" novels, Frank is born from the passionate, volcanic imagination of the author, who plunges us into a tactile, sensual world where intuition and vision are our guides. In an age when AIDS has instilled a resurrection of fear and distrust in the world of sexual desire, Melinda Camber Porter's novel Frank reinstates sexuality as the life force and the primary source of all our energies. But what are the boundaries that our heroine creates to delineate a life born from desire? How does she flourish in a world where no rules or restrictions bind her? Is love the key? "The great 'meltdown'
of modern sexual anarchy is the real subject of Melinda Camber Porter's
novel Frank. To judge by the electronic speed of her narrative
and the Stendhalian decisiveness of her characters she has learned all
there is to learn about the anarchic phase (if it is a phase). Nevertheless
she has some hope for a post-anarchic future. Even now, she seems to say,
love is possible. A kind of love, perhaps. Some kind of love. Readers
will understand, without coaching, what she means." "The subject of the sensual—what a human being can experience through the physical self and the senses, and the profound effect of that experience is at the heart of Ms. Camber Porter's output as both an artist and writer. . . This painter-novelist draws a line between erotic and obscene." —The New York Times Illustrations from Melinda Camber Porter painting series Luminous Bodies. "The bold, uncompromising originality of Melinda Camber Porter's imagery in the Luminous Bodies series, her exquisite feel for color, her reflective lyrical brushstrokes and translucent washes, reveal her to be a master of both watercolor and pen and ink as well as oil on canvas." "Few artists have the rigorously philosophical instincts that drive Camber Porter's writings and paintings. In her new series, she seems to reconstruct our image of ecstasy by chipping away, with the movements of her brush, at the boundary dividing the body and the soul. Her searing, precise strokes have an urgency to them, as if she is merely a witness on the scene of a magnificent, unfolding vision that she has been privileged to receive. And it is certain that the Luminous Bodies series is the work of a visionary artist and post, for Camber Porter's incandescent washes dissolve away the world of appearances to reveal a deeper reality where the body is as luminous as the soul." —Leo Castelli
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Imogen by Melinda Camber Porter Imogen is set in the bucolic lakeside estate in Geneva where film director Clive and his wife Imogen make their home. Clive has just suffered a nervous collapse that obliged him to leave the set of his movie, Twilight Games. Clive believes his dissatisfaction with his career prompted his collapse: for years he has been making films with the sole aim to make money, despite his brilliant early artistic success. Thus, back at home, he searches for a project that will give meaning to his life. The religious Catholic nanny who cares for his son, Alex, becomes his new subject and eventually his mistress. Juliet's faith in Christ is metamorphosed into a boundless passion for Clive. As Juliet is plunged into passion and a brusque sexual awakening, she tries, against all odds, to awaken mutual feeling and empathy in a man whose character is marred by indifference and a cold heart. Imogen is a moving novel about a girl's passage from fervent innocence to experience and a man's quest to return in time to the innocence and the authenticity of his youth.
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Floating Boundary by Melinda Camber Porter Floating Boundary is a novel of epic proportions set in Hong Kong in the decade preceding 1997, the year China will take control of the colony. Into the life of British expatriate Geoffrey Lipton, the chairman of a vast conglomerate, steps Anna, a photographer on vacation in Hong Kong. During a day trip on Geoffrey's yacht off Saikung, they sight a woman drowning while trying to swim the five-mile stretch that separates Hong Kong and China. They rescue her and later discover her reasons for escape. Han is the daughter of a disgraced politician and is married to one of the leaders of China's Democracy Movement. Feeling her husband chose politics instead of her (when he knowingly committed acts that would lead to his imprisonment), she half tried to swim, half tried to drown herself, in desperation. Love, not politics, was her motive for escape. Han and Anna develop a firm friendship. Unknowingly they become twin obsessions for Geoffrey, who cannot decide between them. Into this emotional web steps Jerry, an American who works for the UN High Commission for Refugees. An American presence in a world dominated by tradition brings new solutions and new conflicts. Floating Boundary shows us the real boundary between freedom and tyranny, in the hearts and in a nation's identity.
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Art
of Love: Love Poems and Paintings by Melinda Camber
Porter "My Life in Two Worlds" In the other life I led Years later, in New York
City, I saw • see more info about the Art of Love Tour
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The Works of Melinda Camber Porter info@camberporter.org |
