Jane Rosenberg LaForge - An Unsuitable Princess

An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir ($16.99) tells two stories simultaneously. In the first, which takes place in Renaissance England, a mute stable girl of mysterious talents and potentially dangerous parentage finds herself punished for saving the life of the boy she loves. The second story, told through a series of footnotes to the first, is situated in the late 20th Century, and explain the inspirations for the first story. An overly talkative, solidly spoiled, middle class girl muses on the social and economic phenomena the author observed while growing up in Hollywood during the birth of the hippie movement, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and the growth of Renaissance England re-enactments. She does not save the boy she thinks she loves. Indeed, she may have hastened his death. Even years later, the only way she can acknowledge this failure is by spinning an elaborate fantasy that becomes the tale of a wretched orphan who turns out to be a princess.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge got her bachelor’s degree at UCLA. Afterwards, she worked as a journalist in California, Maryland, and upstate New York. She studied writing in the Kate Braverman workshops before attending the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since earning her MFA, she has taught college reading, composition, and literature part-time in the New York metropolitan area; published critical articles on African-American literature; and written four volumes of poetry: After Voices, Half-Life, With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women, and The Navigation of Loss, one of the winners of the Red Ochre Press’ annual chapbook competition. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize (once for poetry, and once for fiction) and once for a StorySouth Million Writers Award.

 

Location: 

51 Tamal Vista Blvd
94925 Corte Madera
us