Mara Lemanis

About Mara Lemanis

I grew up with international choreographer father, ballerina mother, and revolutionist great granddad-a deputy in the Russian duma, jailed and scheduled for execution. He managed to survive through a prisoner exchange between Russia and Latvia, as did my parents, who were sent to Leningrad as “bourgeois decadents” for retraining in Soviet orthodoxy. I bear a bit of their legacy, and for a time, danced with the Detroit City Ballet. The spirit and rhythms of ballet sometimes show up in my fiction, morphed with themes that drill into our cultural and social creeds. I tap \'\'perception at the pitch of passion\" as a personal standard. Writing is a way for me to chase down fugitive thoughts and find out where they come from and where they\'re going. My novels try to find the fascinating contradictions beating at our mainstream creeds; plumb the warps between reason and religion, the scars in heart and race; and aim to uncover how worldly insights can swerve into unearthly focus-Throughout my work I seek to marry sense and spirit. Am also drawn to critical analysis: my essays were selected for 20th Century Literary Criticism and have been reprinted in college textbooks; recent articles and essays have been published in DIPLOMAT magazine, THE CLUB of AMSTERDAM JOURNAL, IF THEN IS NOW.eu, and MARBELLA MARBELLA-Adelante. My latest novel is THE BISHOP\'S JIHAD (finished ms.)- This narrative joins religion, daring, and spirit in the person of a dissident woman bishop from the diocese of St. John The Divine. On a mission to rescue church members kidnapped by Muslim fundamentalists, she travels to Pakistan. She is eager to reform Church doctrine. In her sermons she dares ask the question: what did Christ mean when he said, Only through me… As she tries to seek an accord between Christianity and Islam in Lahore, she is captured and imprisoned. Through a cunning twist, aided by a reform-minded imam, she finds herself delivering a sermon from the mimbar of a famous mosque in the ancient city.

Experience

1. New Earth

   Inzaken.Eu

   Dec 2023 — Present · The Hague, NL