Poetry in Prose: The Belvedere at Stone Gate

Written first as The Fire Stone and republished as The Belvedere at Stone Gate, this is a story dear to my heart. I suppose that’s because it was written from my heart. It grew out of poetry put to paper during a dark time, and blossomed into a novel seeking light.

The poetry, incidentally, has its own story of reincarnation. It was lost in a house fire along with everything else we considered irreplaceable.

Sometime later, the insurance company brought us a few boxes of charred and smoky items salvaged from a filing cabinet.

In the boxes were slide trays, school albums belonging to our children – and the poems.

So endearing have the characters of Stone Gate become to readers who meet them that they live on in Enigma Club and appear briefly at the end of my latest manuscript.

Guess I have to keep checking in on them.