Author Rena Dunsworth mixes modern-day religion with ancient deities to come up with a fresh perspective on relationships. Her first book, “The Girl, the Moon, and the Melon” is about a young boy who wants to be a girl, and when his prayers are answered, she finds herself holding the key to change a cosmic law that has imprisoned others in hell.
I wrote my first poem when I was in the first grade. I’ve long since forgotten the poem, but I remember it was about the love relationship between a butterfly and a flower. My parent’s jaws dropped when they read it, but quite innocently I told them I could do better. That was fifty years ago. I didn’t start taking my writing seriously until I was nearly twenty-four. Again I started out writing poetry, story poems twenty pages long. But it wasn’t until 1999 that I started writing books. This book “The Girl, the Moon, and the Melon” is the result of three tries to write a novella about Henry/Henrietta Bloom.
It wasn’t until I came to New York in 2007 that things began to gel for Henry, and after I got my own studio in 2009 I had a much clearer picture of what I wanted to write, and why I wanted to write it.
I became Catholic in 2002, and I always had a hard time with the concept of hell. I even told a priest that I couldn’t believe in hell; he told me as long as I kept an open mind and prayed about it I was in no immortal danger.
I’m not your usual Catholic though. I believe in reincarnation. I now believe in hell, but that there are many hells, and that none of them are permanent. I used this belief to explore in my own mind the idea that gays go to hell when they die, a common belief by many Christians. People do this even though we’re told very specifically not to judge, yet so many do, and so verbally some of them. I got the idea for many hells from the Chinese. It just makes sense for me. In my book I confront the injustice of the whole idea of hells in the first place. It doesn’t seem like a concept that works. Punishment seems like such an outdated idea. So why does God allow it? Maybe the devil uses his free will to set up the underworld the way his twisted spirit wants it to be. Maybe it’s not God’s design at all. Even the devil is said to have free will.
This book is the first in a series of four books. Book two is at the publisher, and I am working on book three. The first book raises more questions than it answers, but I promise most of the questions will be answered by book four, but a few I will leave for you to figure out on your own. Call it the Welsh blood that I have from my great grandmother.
These books also explore the idea that Eve, a goddess in the early myths, is lost in the midst of humanity, and that she holds the key to setting free all the gays who are in hell due to an unfair cosmic law. She also holds the key to defeating Lucifer and his son Satan, or so the prophecy says in the Book of Dark Secrets, a book that only Lucifer has.
