I came into novel writing rather late in life. While I’ve always had a facility with language, I also have a visual side that clamoured for expression. I’ve been a professional copywriter, an art director in a pinch, and a stylist when there was no budget for such. I trained as a fashion designer in Canada and worked for a large retailer.
Today, my creative process continues to have a graphic and tactile component. Drawing on my experiences from advertising and fashion, I used Pinterest boards to help my characters in Celestina's House come alive.
I imagined Celestina as a mestiza, more Chinese than Spanish, built like a Tamara de Lempicka siren. I selected three women (actresses Ming Na Wen and Constance Wu, as well as a model from Vinta Toronto) who exude a feral quality and a dark, slightly dangerous sensuality. For Celestina’s closet, I selected a mix of light goth, vintage glam, flea market, and DIY fashions—perfect for a nineties-era bohemian living life with a vengeance. My favourite is her Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking suit, unearthed in piles of used clothing during a vintage market expedition. Another favourite is the dress she wore during her moonlit dinner—a manslaying sepia-toned silk chemise, confidently accessorized with a flea market diamante body chain. Her distinctive personal style reflects her determination to move beyond her trauma and reinvent herself.
Celestina’s house is a character all its own. I gave it a savagely feminine quality— womb-like, cocoon-like, all curves and snaky vines. Mother nature defying man-made order. I was inspired by Antoni Gaudi’s Casa Batlló with its fantastical features such as roofs evoking dragon plates. The house also comes with ghostly inhabitants—Celestina’s elegantly spectral Great-Aunt Selena and a fleshy hag of a nightmare spirit called the Bangungot.
While the titular house was built by the ghostly Selena, it was Celestina who brought it back to life by filling it with her chosen people and stamping it with her personal style—cast-off chinoiserie, inexpensive bamboo furniture given a black lacquer sheen, and other objects that are beautiful in their imperfection.
Josémaria, Celestina’s handsome mestizo, is equal parts old-world elegance and sexy beast. I gave him a palette of whites and silvers and put him in his favoured stomping grounds—a jasmine plantation, a marina at sunset, or a beautifully restored colonial villa ablaze with candlelight and crystal. Here, I cast TJ Trinidad, a Filipino actor of Norwegian descent. Like Josémaria, TJ toes the line between white knight and dark prince, which is the essence of his allure.
For Antonio, the monstrous patriarch, I cast the great Spanish actor, Javier Bardem. Antonio’s defining flaw is his Luciferian pride—displayed in his penchant for transgressing societal boundaries. In his mind, his brilliance and beauty exempt him from laws, including moral ones. I gave Antonio a crest bearing the credo of notorious occultist Aleister Crowley— “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
I styled Antonio with fashions reminiscent of famous renegades—Steve McQueen (for Antonio in the late sixties), and Keith Richards and Javier Bardem (for Antonio during the eighties). I wanted Josémaria and Antonio to be almost mirrors of each other, with one important difference. One man fully embraces the monster within. The other struggles, sometimes vainly, to be the man Celestina deserves.
Clarissa Trinidad Gonzalez was born in the Philippines, rather aptly on Hallowe'en, and grew up in a world animated by spirits and even the occasional miracle. Celestina's House is her debut novel. She works as a communications professional, and cocoons in her west end Toronto home with her spouse and daughter in between bouts of wanderlust. Learn more here.