The Azores Islands

The Jewel of the Oceano Atlântico

I am often asked why I chose to set my novel, Artemis Rising, in the Azores Islands. The answer is quite sim­ple: I used to live there. But that doesn’t really tell the story, does it? To truly describe the love I have for these islands, I have to go back to Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota in 1994. My fam­ily had lived there for four long, cold years, and ever since I was a wee tyke grow­ing up in Washington State, I had loved the ocean. I mean LOVED the ocean. Think of your most favorite thing or per­son in all the world. Can you pic­ture it? Okay, yes, this is exactly how I felt about the sea. Being land­locked for four years was a soul-​​crushing expe­ri­ence for me, so when my mother told me where we were to be sta­tioned next, you can believe my reac­tion. Though, I con­fess, I’d never heard of the Azores and had no idea where they were. But frankly, I didn’t care. That was just about the best news I’d ever had, um, EVER.

And it con­tin­ued to be, the more I learned about the Azores, the more I dis­cov­ered its peo­ple, its cul­ture, its beauty. Nothing in my pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence had pre­pared me for the sight of the moon­rise heav­ing up from the sea in my back­yard, its light-​​stream burst­ing over the sur­face of the break­ing waves. I don’t even know if I do it jus­tice in the novel. But I sure tried. And that brings me to my real rea­son for set­ting my novel there. I wanted oth­ers to expe­ri­ence the love I have for these islands and this peo­ple. I wanted them to feel what I felt, to see what I saw.

I first arrived on Terceira Island (one of the largest of nine islands in the mid-Atlantic, about 800 miles off the coast of Portugal and 2000 miles from the U.S.) at 3 a.m. on a stormy night. I had no idea what to expect. We stayed in tem­po­rary hous­ing at Lajes Air Force Base that first night, and in the morn­ing, when I peeked out the win­dow to that round rim of blue ocean encom­pass­ing an island only 18 by 11 miles wide, the first thought I had was: “I’m going to miss this island when I leave.” You might find this reac­tion rather strange. I was sur­prised by it too. I’ve since learned that the Azoreans have a word for it. They call it saudade. It is one of the most dif­fi­cult words in the world to trans­late, but I can tell you this: I felt it deeply on that day. I can only describe it in my own words as a per­pet­ual and intense long­ing for some­thing you did not know existed. It is sad­ness and joy mixed into one. And it encap­su­lates every­thing I feel for the Azores Islands.

It wasn’t until I did leave the islands two years later that I real­ized I wanted to set my first novel there. I have always had a love for his­tor­i­cal nov­els and par­tic­u­larly nov­els set in the late 19th cen­tury. So when I was 22, I began a 5-​​year-​​long study of the Azores Islands, and out of this research came many of the ele­ments of my book: reli­gious fes­ti­vals, arena bull­fights, street bull­fights, and the towns and vil­lages I fre­quented when I lived there–Angra do Heroísmo, Praia da Vitória, Agualva, and Lajes.

These ele­ments are inter­wo­ven seam­lessly into the mytho­log­i­cal aspects I also use in the novel: the Greek myth of Alpheus and Arethusa and the Arthurian leg­end of Tristan and Isolde. In a way, writ­ing Artemis Rising was like piec­ing a puz­zle together. I knew in my heart that the pieces fit—I just had to fig­ure out the order.