"I remember reading "For Whom The Bell Tolls" and being able to feel the sunlight and the rain and the wind in the Spanish countryside. An early romance at sixteen with everything Spanish (had to be nature... wasn't nurture) along with a growing political awareness of the events of the Spanish civil war left me with a melancholy obsession with the holy trinity of food, romance and anti-fascism. The lives and times of the Abraham Lincoln brigade and the Mackenzie Papineau battalion also imbued this scenario with a grass-roots nobility that struck a chord in me. Several trips through Spain in the late eighties and early nineties led to the writing of Magdalena, and it's still a favourite of mine."
--Ron Hawkins
"I remember reading "For Whom The Bell Tolls" and being able to feel the sunlight and the rain and the wind in the Spanish countryside. An early romance at sixteen with everything Spanish (had to be nature... wasn't nurture) along with a growing political awareness of the events of the Spanish civil war left me with a melancholy obsession with the holy trinity of food, romance and anti-fascism. The lives and times of the Abraham Lincoln brigade and the Mackenzie Papineau battalion also imbued this scenario with a grass-roots nobility that struck a chord in me. Several trips through Spain in the late eighties and early nineties led to the writing of Magdalena, and it's still a favourite of mine." --Ron Hawkins