Literary Lotus is the blog of Christine Thomas, a book critic, features and travel writer currently based in Hawai'i. Christine began working as a freelance writer in 1994.
Christine's criticism appears regularly (recent book pages cuts aside) in the San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Honolulu Advertiser, AARP and Paste Magazine, but have been published in many more outlets, from the New York Times Book Review to the Times Literary Supplement. Her travel features, author interviews and profiles, food reviews and other articles often appear in such publications as Modern Luxury, Hawaii and Westways, Hana Hou, Islands, Hemispheres Magazine, Up!, and more. Her work for corporate clients include projects with branding and design firm Wall to Wall Studios, Shidler College of Business micro-site and brochures, press releases and publicity networking, radio advertisements, print ads, offering books, business plans, RFPs, and more.
Christine is also a fiction writer, a graduate of the 2000-2002 University of East Anglia (UK) creative writing masters program, and in 1996 earned a bachelors in English at UC Berkeley English. Her short fiction has been published in the U.S. in Bamboo Ridge, awarded best new writer 2008, and in the UK literary magazines Pretext and Spiked, the UK anthology Firsthand, and was shortlisted for the UK Asham Award for Women Writers. She is working on a linked collection of short fiction and an anthology of retold Hawaiian myth to be published in 2011.
Why Lotus? Well, the literary part of this site title is obvious given the above, as my world is centered on words and stories. Lotus, however, has led to some reader questions.
Lotus most likely conjures images of a flower and meditation. That is part of the impetus for the name, as the contemplative power of reading is something I mean this site to impart, and meditation is important in my life. Yet, this is just a fraction of the story.
A little down on the right there is also a telling quote by Isabella Bird, from her collected letters while traveling in Hawai'i in the 19th century: "I sympathize with those who eat the lotus, and remain for ever on such enchanted shores." This is an homage to my birthplace, Hawai'i, where I again reside, and which regularly features in my writings and posts, and to travel, another part of my work.
The Literary Lotus sub-head also reads eat the lotus. This may be obvious to many, for it is an allusion to Homer’s Odyssey and Odysseus’s visit to the Lotus-Eaters, who survive by eating a fruit that induces a stupor that makes them forget home.
While I don’t expect that readers will get so engrossed in Literary Lotus that they will lose their way, I do hope to create content that provokes thought, debate, awareness, pleasure and entertainment, so that even if you do have to go home again, you’ll never forget to come back.
Thank you for reading. I always invite your comments, and leads on new events, books, and ideas.
Aloha.
