“Sometimes admitting you know nothing is the only way to discover what you do know.”
C. L. Francisco
A retired college professor, C. L. Francisco’s faith reemerged several years ago after a time of radical doubt. Her conservative Christian upbringing, undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke College, year’s stay at L’Abri, early career years in art therapy, and PhD in world religions had all contributed to her confusion.
But as a woman whose life had always been grounded in faith, she struggled to find her way again. Oddly enough, the voice of non-human nature spoke more clearly than any other—except for C. S. Lewis’ fiction, which she never abandoned.
The whispers were faint at first, and often resulted in dead ends, but when they finally spoke clear, she found herself in the presence of the Christ who lives beyond all walls.
C. L. Francisco has always chosen fiction for her downtime reading: “Fiction sneaks up on me, gets under my guard, and touches my heart in a way that non-fiction can’t,” she says. “It opens up new possibilities and sets me dreaming. For me, life-changing books have always been fiction. That’s probably why I chose to write a book like Yeshua’s Cat.”
The Gospel According to Yeshua’s Cat emerged from Francisco’s desire to offer fellow strugglers a fresh perspective on Jesus of Nazareth. The book’s feline narrator speaks with the wise voice of a young cat whose death after a devastating wildfire provided Francisco with the impetus to begin the book.
Francisco has gone on to write A Cat Out of Egypt (2014), a stand-alone prequel to Yeshua’s Cat, which introduces her original feline character’s many-times great-grandmother Miw, beloved of the child Yeshua. Third in the series is the sequel The Cats of Rekem (2015), following Miw’s descendants as they join Yeshua in his mature ministry and help the apostle Paul toward his calling. Just published this fall is Cat Born to the Purple, a further sequel that picks up the story of the young woman Yeshua healed in Yeshua’s Cat after finding her battered and dying near Nazareth. In Purple, Yeshua intervenes to prevent Eliana’s enemies from finding her, and sets her on an unexpected path to wholeness among the Phoenicians of Akko.
Indie Reader has chosen both The Cats of Rekem and Cat Born to the Purple for their “Best Of” new book list for 2015 and 2016, respectively.
Francisco’s fifth and final novel in the Yeshua’s Cats series, Yeshua’s Loom: A Tapestry of Cats, was published in late 2017, with 4 and 4 1/2-star ratings from Self-Publishing Review and IndieReader, respectively. Loom follows Eliana to a new life and an unexpected encounter with the apostle Paul.
As an author of mysteries . . . .
Francisco has also published a first volume in a new mystery series, This Madness of the Heart: A Miranda Lamden Mystery. Madness was initially published in the spring of 2016 under the pen name Blair Yeatts, but was withdrawn and republished under C. L. Francisco’s name.
On the surface, Francisco shares a lot of qualities with her main character, Miranda Lamden: although Francisco is a Kentucky native, like Miranda she is the daughter of Virginia-born parents; she and Miranda are both religion professors; spirituality is endlessly fascinating to both, personally and academically. A writer with a definite mystical bent, Francisco could no more write a novel without “spiritual” elements than she could write in Sanskrit. Spirituality is her “normal” . . . and it makes her mysteries unique. These mysteries speak with Miranda’s voice, as a phenomenologist of religion—that is, someone who goes to great lengths to set aside her own beliefs and submerge herself in the culture of the people she studies. Francisco herself studied phenomenology as part of her PhD program.
Francisco witnessed a denominational “war” with many of the same destructive results she describes in Madness, although they are exaggerated and reshaped in the novel, and the characters completely changed. She wrote the book originally as an expression of her own anger and grief, which resulted in the creation of a protagonist much like herself. In Francisco’s own words, “Reading Madness’ original draft felt like Harry Potter opening the screaming book in the Hogwarts’ library: the anger flamed from its pages. I eventually set it aside—for almost twenty years—until I could return and work with it more objectively. Then I wrote most of the anger out, changed the story line and crafted a fast-paced tale about a slimy charlatan with an honorary divinity degree in a haunted hollow in Appalachia.”
Unlike her Yeshua’s Cats series, the Miranda Lamden Mysteries are not Christian. Miranda looks at Christianity and the Church from the outside, as one religion among many—and from the point of view of a woman alienated from her roots, wary after the pain she experienced there. But you can feel Francisco’s calm assurance of a universe undergirded with love, even in the violence and horror that flood Miranda’s small Appalachian college. Miranda’s personal struggle for meaning is the deep stream flowing beneath the treacherous rapids in Madness—as well as in the next two books in the series. One thing Francisco assures her readers: Miranda’s journey will surprise you at every turn.
Why does Francisco choose to write mysteries? “I write books I’d like to read,” she says. “And I’ve always loved mysteries, even as a child. But I’ve never cared for simple whodunits–or cozies. I enjoy watching realistic characters evolve, and since I think a series does that best, I chose to write a series. Of course, a series also has the added bonus of guaranteeing the sleuth’s survival into the next book, which puts an agreeable limit on possible disasters. The protagonist creates order from chaos, evil is vanquished (more or less), and life goes on, even if the ending is bittersweet. In fact, that’s not a bad description of the Miranda Lamden Mysteries.”
C.L. Francisco has now retired from writing, due to the sudden onset of serious illness. But since her 3rd mystery is mostly complete, Francisco hopes to be able to get it published within the next year. She discusses her conflicted feelings about publishing the last two books in the Blood on Holy Ground pages.
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