Falling Pomegranate Seeds by Wendy J. Dunn Book Tour

Win a copy below!

Wendy J. Dunn has been obsessed by Anne Boleyn and Tudor History since she was ten years old. She is the author of three historical novels: Dear Heart, How Like You This?, the winner of the 2003 Glyph Fiction Award and 2004 runner up in the Eric Hoffer Award for Commercial Fiction, The Light in the Labyrinth, her first young adult novel, and Falling Pomegranate Seeds: The Duty of Daughters.

While she continues to have a very close and spooky relationship with Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, serendipity of life now leaves her no longer wondering if she has been channelling Anne Boleyn and Sir Tom for years in her writing, but considering the possibility of ancestral memory. Her own family tree reveals the intriguing fact that her ancestors – possibly over three generations – had purchased land from both the Boleyn and Wyatt families to build up their own holdings. It seems very likely Wendy’s ancestors knew the Wyatts and Boleyns personally.

Wendy gained her Doctorate of Philosophy (Writing) from Swinburne University in 2014, and is the Co-Editor in Chief of Backstory and Other Terrain, Swinburne University two new peer-reviewed writing journals.

Falling Pomegranate Seeds: The Duty of Daughters

Book 1 in the Katherine of Aragon Story

Dońa Beatriz Galindo.

Respected scholar.

Tutor to royalty.

Friend and advisor to Queen Isabel of Castile.

Beatriz is an uneasy witness to the Holy War of Queen Isabel and her husband, Ferdinand, King of Aragon. A Holy War seeing the Moors pushed out of territories ruled by them for centuries.

The road for women is a hard one. Beatriz must tutor the queen’s youngest child, Catalina, and equip her for a very different future life. She must teach her how to survive exile, an existence outside the protection of her mother. She must prepare Catalina to be England’s queen.

A tale of mothers and daughters, power, intrigue, death, love, and redemption. In the end, Falling Pomegranate Seeds sings a song of friendship and life.

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“Wendy J. Dunn is an exceptional voice for Tudor fiction, and has a deep understanding of the era. Her words ring true and touch the heart, plunging the reader into a fascinating, dangerous and emotionally touching new world.” ~ Barbara Gaskell Denvil

“Dunn deftly weaves a heartrending story about the bonds between mothers and daughters, sisters and friends. Each character is beautifully crafted with a compassionate touch to draw the reader into every raw emotion, from triumph to tragedy.” ~ Adrienne Dillard, Author of Cor Rotto

Crafting stories means listening to your characters.

“My lord father, the king, is a liar.”

I remember the night Catalina of Aragon, the Catalina constructed in Falling Pomegranate Seeds by research and imagination, spoke those words loud and clear, just as I had started to drift off to sleep. Those words left me wide eyed and fully awake again.

“My lord father is a liar,” she told me, and I was yanked straight back to Castile. I saw the child Catalina there, but not looking at me. She wasn’t even looking at her closest friend, Dońa Maria de Salinas. My princess stood in deep shadow, and I knew why: I needed to get out of bed, turn on my computer and step back into creating her story. I had no idea where I would be taken that night through writing her story. Would the sun beat its heat down on me, or would I start shivering along with my characters from the cold of another winter’s day, when snow drifted down and dusted an uneven ground white.

I write fiction that explores female lives, mostly through the prism of Tudor history. I am constantly amazed at what my Tudor women achieved despite their deeply ingrained patriarchal society. Crafting my work, I recognise the cause and effect of strong character pitched against the friction of their world. I hear their voices sing to me, “I will survive.”

Katherine of Aragon, the subject of my newest novel, Falling Pomegranate Seeds: The Duty of Daughters, was a strong-minded woman, especially when she believed herself in the right. Garrett Mattingly, her best-known biographer, described her as granite shaping the final course of the stream. She refused to bow off the stage and deny her twenty or so years of marriage, a marriage that saw her losing baby after baby, excepting one surviving daughter, and changed England forever. Raised to be queen by her mother, Isabel of Castile, one of the strongest queens ever known in history, Katherine lived, from her sixteenth year, a life of exile. She faced trouble after trouble, mostly troubles of a “female” kind, closed in by the claustrophobic walls of chambers filled with women at the beck and call of men.

In my new novel, imagining those very claustrophobic chambers, Catalina confided “My lord father is a liar” to my point of view character, Beatriz Galindo, La Latina, royal tutor extraordinaire. Beatriz looked shocked and discomforted hearing Catalina say those words. Engaged in crafting the scene, I wondered what was up with Beatriz. Was there a problem involving her husband? He served in the King’s army. Did this medieval man enjoy having a wife,long committed to the queen as an advisor, as well as poet and professor of a famous Castilian university? Many men today would have “issues” about possessing such a wife, a clearly intelligent and influential woman.

Catalina’s statement didn’t shock me, although I felt a sense of surprise that she gave voice to those words. Catalina learnt from the cradle the meaning of honouring her parents. Unable to sleep until I knew the reason my Catalina had disturbed my night, thoughts swirled like tumbling autumn leaves in my head. What had driven her to speak of such a thing?

Ferdinand, Catalina’s father, was one of the rulers Niccoló Machiavelli used in “The Prince” as an example and a benchmark for other rulers to follow. A wily fox and able politician, he made use of whatever he could, including members of his own family, to achieve his own ends. Machiavelli wrote:

 “…always using religion as a plea, so as to undertake greater schemes, he devoted himself with pious cruelty to driving out and clearing his kingdom of the Moors; nor could there be a more admirable example, nor one more rare” (The Literature Network).

We know from history that Ferdinand lied; but, in my world building of Falling Pomegranate Seeds: The Duty of Daughters, what had happened to make his daughter so upset that she expressed this harsh reality, and showed the first cracks in her beliefs that her father was infallible, and that whatever her father did must be right? I went over in my mind what may have caused my imagined Catalina to speak those words. Had she discovered the fact of her father’s unfaithfulness? Catalina grew up aware of her father’s bastards, but perhaps it had taken time to dawn on her that some of them were born after her parent’s marriage. There is a time in childhood when many of us remain very blind to our parents’ failings and then, without warning, they fall off the pedestal, with a resounding bang. I wondered that night if Catalina’s utterance was, in fact, that resounding bang, when she first realised how complicated were her parents’ lives.

I also realised writing a scene like this would be important to the sequel to The Duty of Daughters, when Catalina realises the unfaithfulness of her own husband, Henry VIII.

“My lord father, the King, is a liar.”

I told my Catalina that night, please tell me what’s upsetting you. I discovered then her words underpinned something of far greater significance to her. “Using religion as a plea… pious cruelty….“ I think I have hinted enough. You will have to read Falling Pomegranate Seeds: The Duty of Daughters to learn what had upset my imagined Catalina.

I’m thinking now how stories work through their characters, characters we really feel for – and make us want to journey with them. I believe that if I believe and feel for my characters, then there is a good likelihood that my readers may feel for them and believe in them, too.

“My father is a liar.” One thing I have learnt as a writer: when my characters speak, I better stop and listen. ¹

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