Longoria Wolfe is a contemporary Christion author who gained an education from a classical arts conservatory that founded their teaching on the idea that great art stimulates emotion to provoke thought and that if you aren’t creating something you truly care about then you may ask yourself why you're making it at all. “I car.... more
Longoria Wolfe is a contemporary Christion author who gained an education from a classical arts conservatory that founded their teaching on the idea that great art stimulates emotion to provoke thought and that if you aren’t creating something you truly care about then you may ask yourself why you're making it at all. “I care about innocence. I care about the suffering of life and the joys that make life bearable- worth celebrating. And how we manage differences between cultures and walks of life.” Longoria says. Education experience also took Wolfe to California Institute of the Arts.
Wolfe’s debut novel Evah & the Unscrupulous Thwargg was written with specific intent. “I wanted my first novel to reflect the important issues of our age. Multi-culturalism and feminine struggles had to be at the core of the work. There are places in our country today that are still stuck in the fifties with an easy fall back mode of life and places in our world that possess the female body. These are the human issues of the day even now. These and the ongoing issue of abuse of power. There is a struggle of the sexes and cultural clashes facing modernity. But my main focus in the novel was the question of how personal power may develop through these struggles and adversities. At the same time, while I feel it is important to expose duplicities of the human condition in the current age it is also a necessity to reveal where hope may be found and the reason to retain a persevering faith in our fellow human.”
Longoria’s debut novel is set in otherworldly places as it is a sci-fi novel. About this, the author says, “When themes are treated in fantastic ways and taken to fantastic heights we are able to remove ourselves from it enough to have an experience that is entertaining with some emotional distance. I wanted to get in contact with the dreamer inside my reader. It also left room to address issues to do with our relationship to technology and how it may affect us which will be dealt with more deeply should there be further companion works. There are places where the unexplained of science and faith meet. Whatever powers we devise there are still mysteries where physics and spiritual sciences hold tightly to question marks and potential. My future works, should there be some, may be urban drama so mundane it makes you wish you could fly, but to start I wanted to deal in shades of fantasy both internal and external, where they meet and where they depart from one another."
Wolfe’s influences have a wide range including novelists Charles Dickens, C. S. Lewis, Voltaire, Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, and even Clive Barker as well as playwrights Samuel Beckett, August Wilson, Harold Pinter and poets such as T.S. Eliot and others that arose from tremendous periods of global cultural change like Brecht and Federico Garcia Lorca. Wolfe’s ideas on story structure have other influences. “I studied story structure in many ways, beginning with plays, all the way down to beats, french scenes, and larger arcs. In school, we studied the Aristotelian elements. Then I found Joseph Campbell’s mono-myth. These ideas he talked about were Jungian based. These ideas really opened up a universe to me and I found that the stages of the hero's journey resonated in a more human way, some deep way. It is a journey with very human aspects that reach the "out of this world" or an experience and knowledge that is alien to the norm, expressing the struggle a human has to undergo change, transformation reconciled to the inner life of the character, then onto what one does to move on with life. From the beginning of my education in the arts, the question of analysis always started with who is the protagonist and what is their arc. Then mono-myth added angles to that movement Aristotle didn’t really provide.”
Longoria Wolfe has one daughter and lives in California. “Evah & the Unscrupulous Thwargg was written as a letter to my daughter. it was written for someone I love. It is not written to have all the answers of life but to be thought-provoking and entertaining. I’ve always believed that writing to some demographic or some broad idea that’s elusive doesn’t have the impact that a work can hold if it’s specific. In this way I hope it will be more engaging to readers."
Longoria Wolfe's Projects
A young girl, haunted by visions and strange phenomena, discovers her connection to a mystical tr... more