Folks, I hope you enjoy this episode with psychedelic fiction author Violet De Luna. My apologies for the sub-par audio quality. We had some technical/microphone/zoom issues and I’m working on improving this for next time. Or, watch a video version with captions and visit my new Youtube channel. Or you can read the transcript below. While the audio and video episode is unedited, the transcript is edited for readability. The Spiritual Journeys of Violet De LunaCharlotte Dune: Welcome to Charlotte Dune’s Lagoon. Today I’m talking with another author who’s also written a psychedelic novel and a love story. I invited Violet on because she wrote this amazing book, Walking Each Other Home, and I was reading it on an airplane and laughing and my daughter was like, what are you doing? But all the Miami stuff was really cracking me up.Violet, tell us a bit about your background, about the book, and give people the general gist and then we’ll get into juicier topics, like how much of this is a true story and how much of this is made up…Violet De Luna: Sure. I’m Violet. I’m from Miami, Florida, and I am sometimes a lawyer, but my real passion was to write a book and finally I wrote my first book, Walking Each Other Home.It’s a story of a woman who attracts emotionally unavailable men. In order to open her heart, she decides to travel to Peru to drink a hallucinogenic called Ayahuasca. And once she’s there, she has her spiritual awakening, or so she thinks, in Peru and she decides that she will definitely find her partner.When she gets back, she meets someone. His name is Leo, and she falls in love. But after a very shocking and difficult betrayal, Brooke realizes she has to overcome her lifelong feelings of inadequacy and shame to really love herself.Charlotte Dune: I think all those things are so relatable to pretty much every woman because we’ve all been through betrayal, or had shame, or not felt adequate enough. It really resonated with me. I think it’s one of the most similar books I’ve ever read to my book, but you almost did it better. I’m just going to recommend your book instead of mine because there’s so much in your book!How much was inspired by events in your life and where did the inspiration for the story come from?Violet De Luna: The story is mostly based on my life, so, I’ve changed the names and used a pen name.The Fine Line of AutoFiction Charlotte Dune: There’s always a sensitive balance to maintain when you’re doing what I call autofiction, or work based on a true story. Are the characters in the book directly equivalent to real people, or did you make conglomerates of people? Did you make archetypes or how did you approach your characters? How did you approach the whole thing?Violet De Luna: Because it was a story based on true events, I didn’t really have to outline so much because I knew what was going to happen. But I started off, and I just told the story, the, the correct way, with the names of everyone as they were. Then when I was doing my revisions, I changed details, changed story, order, and then changed all the characters’ names and some and I had to combine characters cause it gets confusing, you know, to separate everyone out. So, I combined characters, but the main character is based on me. I didn’t really change her story much, but everybody else, their information is altered in a way that I don’t think you could figure out who’s who.Charlotte Dune: I was reading it and thinking, oh my gosh, are we in the same circles? Because I feel like I know some of these people in the constellation world. You universalized real people enough that they could become characters in anybody’s life, and that’s the beauty of fiction.Did you also move to Miami from somewhere else, like your main character? And how did you begin your own spiritual journey?Violet De Luna: I say I’m from Miami because I’ve lived here for so long, but I’m originally from Massachusetts, but I came here for law school, and I just loved it. It’s my place.I’ve really been on a lifelong spiritual journey, I would say. I’ve always been trying to find my way home. I love that Ramdas quote, so that’s why I took it for the title of the book.The Ceremony Will Find You“Before plant medicine, my journey was very superficial. The plants forced me to go way deeper than I ever imagined I needed to go, as they often do.”In the book, the focus is on plant medicine and how I found my way there. That is really the story. I was kite surfing in Colombia, and somebody mentioned this plant that can heal things. And I was like, oh, I wanna do that.Then my friend from Colombia was she’s like, oh, I know what you’re talking about. We were at Family Constellations when I brought it up and we were both like, okay, we’re gonna go on a trip. I really did not read about it, which is shocking for me. I don’t know; I think I was just being protected because what would’ve ...
