Dianne Romain
Dianne Romain, philosophy professor turned fiction writer, lives with writer Sterling Bennett in the house she designed in Guanajuato, a colonial city smack in the center of Mexico and the site of her novel The Trumpet Lesson.
Dianne grew up and went to college in Missouri before moving to Berkeley for graduate school. After completing her Ph.D. in philosophy, she stayed in California, teaching at Mills College, U.C. San Diego, and Sonoma State University. She also taught philosophy and yoga to prison inmates during a year’s sabbatical in Mexico.
Visit Dianne’s website at Dianneromain.com>>
The Trumpet Lesson
In Romain’s poignant, yet witty novel about secret love and loss, a woman skilled at translating the words of others must learn to understand her own heart.
When Callie Quinn becomes pregnant at seventeen in 1960s rural Missouri, her outraged father, with her mother’s acquiescence, insists that no one ever know. Callie complies, goes away, and gives up her baby. But not for their reasons. The baby’s father is black. She accepts loss in silence to protect him from the era’s racist violence. Over thirty years later in a colonial Mexican gem of hidden rivers and maze-like footpaths, Callie, skilled at translating the words of others, still never speaks of her child. Though she has located her, she tells herself that her daughter does not want to know her. Devoting her days to perfecting translations, obsessive cleaning, evading roving Jehovah’s Witnesses, and dreaming up darkly comic morality tales to calm down her closeted friend Armando, she guards against her own longing.