Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 27, 1995 TAG: 9507270027
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEANNE JOHNSON DUDZIAK SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"I've always wanted to do something with that toaster," she says. "It looks so sinister."
A novelist, Cockrell doesn't usually dabble in making sculpture. But she spends ``a lot of time watching squirrels'' through the window of her writing room at home, and she's hoping that the funky folk art project will get her creative juices flowing.
Not that she has many problems in that regard.
"Daughter of the Sky," the first book in a trilogy about pre-historic American Indians, just came out in book stores. The second volume is done and will appear in the spring, and Cockrell is already at work on the concluding book. She makes it her habit to produce 25 pages a week.
The 47-year-old author lives and writes in a comfortably decorated Roanoke home with an extended family: her mother, husband Tony Neuron, three children and an unusual art collection that includes an Indonesian flying fish goddess who hangs from the dining room ceiling.
You won't always recognize her books by the name on the cover. In order to generate regular income, she has used various pseudonyms to pen books in a Viking series, a Western series, a Roman centurion series, a 19th-century American family series and a "seething plantation saga that I'll never tell anyone I wrote," she laughs.
The plantation saga required "a lot of sex, and I'm not very good at [writing] that," she says modestly. "My editor and I would get on the phone, work on the sexy sections and laugh hysterically."
The pseudonyms are for the benefit of publishers who want to continue a series regardless of who is available to write them.
"I'm the third Dana Fuller Ross," she says, referring to the author of the 19th-century family series. "It's really strange."
Under her own name, she has written "The Legions of the Mist" (her first book) and "The Moonshine Blade," a comic thriller set in a fictional version of Franklin County, in addition to the new series (``The Deer Dancers'').
Cockrell is pleased to put her real name on the "Deer Dancers" books, which reflect her long-held interest in mythology, "layers of truth" and the origins of knowledge. "Daughter of the Sky," set around 3,000 B.C., is a vivid portrayal of prehistoric life and the way magic and superstition intersected everyday experience, including historical events such as the introduction of maize.
The book's main characters are Wind Caller, a proto-Mayan musician who is perceived as the god Coyote; and Deer Shadow, from a pre-Anasazi tribe called the Yellow Grass People, who is believed to have the power to "call" deer for the hunt by drawing their likenesses.
The story portrays relationships in ways that are believably prehistoric yet human enough to transcend time or culture.
"It was fun to go back to a time when anything was possible," says Cockrell.
In "Daughter of the Sky," the power to play music or reproduce likenesses is considered magical.
"The book is about the role of artists in prompting change and evolution," the novelist says. "People are terrified of change. If it weren't for artists, for Coyote and chaos, we'd still be hunter-gatherers."
Cockrell read what she could find about prehistoric Indians to research the book, but for many of the cultural practices she depicts, she used her imagination to "take a known custom and extrapolate backwards to a simpler form based on universal, archetypal principles of magic and the idea that things are conjoined." For example, the idea that pouring rain looks like snakes, therefore snakes bring rain.
"All myth goes back to something," she says.
Cockrell grew up in California as the only child of Hollywood screenwriters. Her parents wrote for such well-known television series as "Batman," "The Outer Limits," "Alfred Hitchcock" and "Gunsmoke."
Her hometown of Ojai was an artsy Hollywood bedroom community and resort town "that was a haven for every possible religion and philosophy," she says. "Ojai was New Age before there was a New Age. It was a great place to grow up. Like in any small town, everybody knew everybody and gossip was rampant, but people were very tolerant and not at all star-struck."
For Cockrell, it was an existence of feast or famine, depending upon her parents' unpredictable incomes.
"One year I'd get a horse for Christmas and the next year it would be hard to make ends meet," she said.
She resolved to earn a regular paycheck and never be a writer, but fate obviously had other plans. Her Southern-born parents wanted her to go to a Southern college. She chose Hollins, where she majored in Russian studies.
"I had this notion of a glamorous life traveling overseas, but it was a crazy thing to do," says Cockrell. "For one thing, I'm awful at languages."
In California, Cockrell was viewed as a relatively straight-laced Southern girl. But in a paradigm shift that taught her about the power of perception, she was seen by the '60s Hollins crowd as a hippie "because I had long hair and wore sandals."
She graduated from Hollins with honors in 1969. (``My creative writing brought my grades up.'') She began her first book, "The Legions of the Mist," that same year. Set in second-century Britain, the book is "my take on what happened to a Roman legion that mysteriously vanished," she says. "It's the kind of thing professors fight over in footnotes."
Post-graduate jobs as a newspaper reporter and copywriter for an advertising agency and a California rock radio station proved unfulfilling. She finished "The Legions of the Mist" in 1978. It was published, and "I've been writing steadily ever since," she says.
After returning to the Roanoke area, Cockrell received a master's degree in English and creative writing from Hollins in 1988. She works part-time as the director of the Hollins College Graduate Program in Children's Literature.
More than the earlier series, the latest has allowed her to apply her artistic sensibilities to the process of fiction writing, which she views as "entertainment with a subliminal message - a window onto another world."
```The Deer Dancers' is really different than the other paperback historical novels that I've done," she says. "I insisted on digging deeper into culture, origins and the relationship of the spiritual world to the human one. I found the voice I was looking for."
As she states in the book's introduction: "This is the origin of myth: strange tales handed across the eons, unbelievable, laughably unlikely, still able to raise the hair on the backs of our necks."
"That's what I like," Cockrell says. "The things that raise the hair on the backs of our necks."
Cockrell will sign copies of her book in Roanoke at Books Strings & Things on Aug. 5 from 1 to 3 p.m.; and at Books-A-Million on Aug. 12 from 1 to 3 p.m.
by CNB