About Laura Davis Hays
Laura Davis Hays was born in Whittier, California, the only child of a theoretical physicist and librarian. When she was five, the family moved to Livermore, where her father, Don, worked at the Lawrence Radiation Lab. When a young chicken wandered into the backyard from the adjacent farm, he became the first of a series of bantam rooster pets. The backyard was a garden paradise for chickens and young girls and a mother with a green thumb. At night, Laura’s father read her adventure and fantasy stories, and taught her math. Laura began studying classical piano when she was nine, and so began her lifelong love of music.
When Laura was thirteen, her father, contracted a strange illness that was eventually diagnosed as lung cancer. After he died at age forty, Laura’s mother, Elaine, sold the house and moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where her sisters still lived on the family farm established by their Finnish immigrant parents. Marquette Michigan was a different world from California. Laura’s new friends’ parents were miners instead of scientists. On frigid winter nights, Laura followed her friends around town, suffering frostbite on the tips of her ears. In the brief summer, the kids would wade into Lake Superior and swim in water so cold it knocked their breath away. Elaine and Laura next moved to San Antonio Texas where Laura’s paternal grandparents lived. Again Laura experienced culture shock in a state that loved football and Cadillac cars. At Rice University, Laura fit in more comfortably, and graduated with a double major in mathematics and psychology. There she met her future husband, Jim, and many friends, dear to this day. Although Jim was a native, leaving Texas was easy. Both wanted to move west, and in the 70’s, passing over careers in big oil in lieu of freer self-exploration made sense. They moved to Santa Fe, and after a six month tour of Central America in a TR-4, returned and were married in a mountain meadow. Their son, Gabe, was born in 1977. Laura began writing fiction in 1985. Besides Incarnation, she’s the author of a fantasy novella, Ice, and The Atlantis Material, a trilogy-in-process. The Coat, part of the collection titled The Lighthouse, was inspired by a family memoir about her Danish ancestors. Great Grandmother Karkondina Holm and her sisters used to skate across the frozen sea to Copenhagen by starlight. Jim and Laura live in an adobe house. Jim is a builder and Laura writes whenever she can, and plays piano on Sundays at Everyday Center for Spiritual Living. They ski in the winter, and enjoy watching the spectacular sunsets from their back porch. Every few months, they travel to LA where they visit Gabe, his wife, Holly, and their two beloved granddaughters, Sadie and Gemma. |
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"Laura Hays masterfully guides us thru the matrix that is Incarnation. An adventurous exotic journey that bobs and weaves its way from present day Santa Fe to glimpses of a vibrant mystical Atlantis. "
Paul Dillon Singer/Songwriter, Bandleader One Color Red |
About Incarnation
“Do you think I’m crazy?” Kelsey asks Marigold, the dream therapist.
“I hardly know you.”
“But I’m hearing voices. Voices are standard for crazy people, aren’t they?”
“And saints.”
So begins an odyssey into the strange visionary world where Kelsey sees, hears, feels, and tastes the life of a young woman chosen to save an ancient land from destruction. As Kelsey’s learns more of the green-eyed saint’s story, she is drawn into a complicated parallel reality where the voice tells her:
Be better than I was. Be wiser and more courageous. You are my future and I offer you this: I will protect you with all the power of my past.
“It’s stronger. More immediate, more experiential. I feel … as if I’m becoming her,” Kelsey tells Marigold as she seeks to understand what is happening to her and what she must do. “Is it a karmic debt?”
“Karma doesn’t have to be about faults. We have entanglements, meetings, fates that coincide. Perhaps debt is the wrong word.”
Yet there is something to make right.
There’s the crystal that everyone wants:
Kelsey closed her fingers around the stone and for a moment she and Irma were in a tug of war. It was starting all over again, the desire, the stone soaking up the attention, making a play for the new admirer. Look at it glow.
There’s the scientific crisis in the modern world—the engineered organism let loose in a Caribbean paradise:
She was close to the beach now, and the dead fish were thick. She felt the sand come up and strike her knee. She crawled through the lacy surf talking to the smallest of the swimmers.
You must help each other, she told them through the crystal. Do not kill. You must not kill.
There’s the spurned suitor who travels through time to find her, then won’t let her go:
“Don’t you think you owe me something?” he asks.
“You’re not who I thought you were.” She was thinking of him in the beginning, his charm, his seductive politeness.
His face colored. “Not that name you called, Jarad, but the other one, the bad one.”
Then there’s the storm:
Cast off with her nemesis in a Belizean waters, Kelsey relieves her nightmare. A new wave forms out to sea. A wall of water rushes toward us. It towers all the way up to the black sky. We are under it, we are over it, we ride it toward the shore. But the shore is gone now. There is no fire, no land, no people.
Only water.
With a different ending this time:
She could stop this dance, however beautiful, however fated. It was what she’d been born to do.
She didn’t understand herself; each moment was unfolding fresh. Her actions took no premeditation from the past, only its knowledge embedded in her cells. That and the voices, repeating their words and memories until she no longer could do anything but act.
And a karmic resolution:
Before you lived it, I had not known that we were halfway up the spiral of enlightenment, and that each attempt is perfect and blessed.
I had not known that where there is murder, there is forgiveness, where there is hatred, there is love, where there is failure, there is success. In death, there is birth. And rebirth.
I bless you and I thank you.
Now go in peace.
“I hardly know you.”
“But I’m hearing voices. Voices are standard for crazy people, aren’t they?”
“And saints.”
So begins an odyssey into the strange visionary world where Kelsey sees, hears, feels, and tastes the life of a young woman chosen to save an ancient land from destruction. As Kelsey’s learns more of the green-eyed saint’s story, she is drawn into a complicated parallel reality where the voice tells her:
Be better than I was. Be wiser and more courageous. You are my future and I offer you this: I will protect you with all the power of my past.
“It’s stronger. More immediate, more experiential. I feel … as if I’m becoming her,” Kelsey tells Marigold as she seeks to understand what is happening to her and what she must do. “Is it a karmic debt?”
“Karma doesn’t have to be about faults. We have entanglements, meetings, fates that coincide. Perhaps debt is the wrong word.”
Yet there is something to make right.
There’s the crystal that everyone wants:
Kelsey closed her fingers around the stone and for a moment she and Irma were in a tug of war. It was starting all over again, the desire, the stone soaking up the attention, making a play for the new admirer. Look at it glow.
There’s the scientific crisis in the modern world—the engineered organism let loose in a Caribbean paradise:
She was close to the beach now, and the dead fish were thick. She felt the sand come up and strike her knee. She crawled through the lacy surf talking to the smallest of the swimmers.
You must help each other, she told them through the crystal. Do not kill. You must not kill.
There’s the spurned suitor who travels through time to find her, then won’t let her go:
“Don’t you think you owe me something?” he asks.
“You’re not who I thought you were.” She was thinking of him in the beginning, his charm, his seductive politeness.
His face colored. “Not that name you called, Jarad, but the other one, the bad one.”
Then there’s the storm:
Cast off with her nemesis in a Belizean waters, Kelsey relieves her nightmare. A new wave forms out to sea. A wall of water rushes toward us. It towers all the way up to the black sky. We are under it, we are over it, we ride it toward the shore. But the shore is gone now. There is no fire, no land, no people.
Only water.
With a different ending this time:
She could stop this dance, however beautiful, however fated. It was what she’d been born to do.
She didn’t understand herself; each moment was unfolding fresh. Her actions took no premeditation from the past, only its knowledge embedded in her cells. That and the voices, repeating their words and memories until she no longer could do anything but act.
And a karmic resolution:
Before you lived it, I had not known that we were halfway up the spiral of enlightenment, and that each attempt is perfect and blessed.
I had not known that where there is murder, there is forgiveness, where there is hatred, there is love, where there is failure, there is success. In death, there is birth. And rebirth.
I bless you and I thank you.
Now go in peace.