Three Sisters by Bryan Taylor

 

Three Sisters

by Bryan Taylor

About The Author

  Bryan Taylor is a double PK, a preacher’s kid of a preacher’s kid. With that legacy he faced two destinies, being an unhappy triple PK (Jubilees 17:23, “He that is born unto the son of a preacher and himself preaches shall be miserable until his dying day and suffer eternal damnation.”), or being sacrilegious and happy. He decided to forsake the Southern Baptists for Catholicism, but when he applied to join a convent, he was rejected (sex discrimination!), so he decided to do the next best thing: write a novel about the three nuns he would most like to meet. Bryan Taylor was born in Louisiana, grew up in Michigan and Texas, went to school in Tennessee, South Carolina and California, taught in Switzerland for a year, and has traveled to 50 countries, more than any Pope except Saint John Paul II. He now lives in California, which is one of the few places with people crazier than him.

Author Links

Website: http://www.threesistersnovel.com/ Blog: http://www.threesistersnovel.com/blog/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BryanTaylorAuthor
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18246773-the-three-sisters
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/3sistersnovel/books/  

The Three Sisters is a humorous, adult satire about three former nuns who just want to have fun, but when they get in trouble with the law, they become nuns on the run. The three nuns in the novel are Coito Gott, the rebel, Theodora Suora, the intellectual, and Regina Grant, who loves mirth, movies and music. For this guest blog, rather than providing advice for the millionth time on how to write and get published, I have asked one of them to talk about one of their favorite nuns of the past. Your turn, Regina.

Jean Donovan is a nun I admire. Since I was a nun down in Central America, I can understand the sacrifice that Jean Donovan made. Here is a woman who, if she had stayed in the United States, would have been incredibly successful. She earned an M.B.A. at Case Western Reserve University and got a job at the accounting firm of Arthur Anderson.

She could easily have been a supermom and been successful with both her career and family, but while she was helping the poor through the Cleveland Diocese Youth Ministry, she got the calling to join the Diocesan Mission Project in El Salvador. She got her training through the Maryknolls and went down to El Salvador in 1977, working as a lay missioner, and helping refugees from the Salvadoran Civil War.

She was a follower of Archbishop Oscar Romero and often heard him preach at the Catedral Metropolitana de El Salvador. Despite the fact that Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in March 1980, she persevered and stayed on, even as others left. Even the Peace Corps departed the country. Part of her told her to leave El Salvador for her own safety, but then she thought of the children, the poor, the refugees and put them first.

On December 2, 1980, she and Dorothy Kazel picked up two Maryknoll nuns who had flown in from Managua, Nicaragua. Five national guardsmen of the National Guard of El Salvador stopped them on a jungle road several hours later. The guardsmen beat them, raped them, and murdered them.

Their murders became international news, and their murders forced the U.S. Government to face up to their responsibilities in supporting the military regime that ruled Nicaragua. The murderous culture of the National Guard was laid bare. The perpetrators were eventually found and were imprisoned. Nothing like that had ever happened before in Nicaragua.

I’m sure Jean Donovan never wanted to die this way, who would? She was dedicated to her mission, despite the dangers, and ended up doing more for the people in El Salvador than she ever could have imagined. She followed her conscience, did what was right, and that is why I admire her.

About The Book

Genre: Humor, Satire

Publisher: Dragon Tree Books

Release Date: July 23, 2013

Buy: Amazon

    Book Description:   Nuns just want to have fun! But when three former Catholic nuns, Coito Gott, Theodora Suoraand Regina Granthave too much fun and get in trouble with the law, they become nuns on the run. Driving back to Washington D.C. where they work at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Parts, the three sisters are arrested in Tennessee. After defeating the local deputy in strip poker, they escape from jail, and are pursued by the zealous Detective Schmuck Hole, who has personally offered a $10,000 reward for their capture on the 700 Club. Little do they know that when the three sisters visit the Washington Monument, their lives will change forever. Set in 1979, The Three Sisters is a sacrilegious satire that skewers not only organized religion, but the government, the media, intellectuals, corporate greed and every other part of the establishment. Maybe not the greatest story ever told, but possibly the funniest. “Blessed are they who read The Three Sisters, for they shall inherit eternal laughter.” — Matthew 5:66 “The most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of Hell.” — Billy Sunday “Les trois soeurs valent bien une messe.” – Henry IV “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi che leggete Le Tre Sorelle.” – Dante Alighieri Warning: The Surgeon General has determined that reading The Three Sisters may lead to Eternal Damnation.  Side effects may include a renewed sense of humor and a better sex life.

Excerpts

The college I was at had a small Newman Club for committed collegiate Catholics, who still spent most of their youthful years behaving more like St. Augustine than Cardinal Newman. Some of my friends and I set up a Joyce Club as a refuge for lapsed Catholics, and during our years there, we successfully filched several members of the Newman Club and got them to join our own. Whenever this occurred, I could share the great joy the father in the Bible must have experienced when the Prodigal Son returned home, or the shepherd had found his lost sheep. Working with this close-knit group of friends and learning from each other made college worthwhile. Moreover, there were hundreds of naïve young freshmen each year ripe for corrupting whom I could gird up my loins for, exchange jelly for juice, and turn them into cynics with amazing ease.

Academic life also gave me the opportunity to express my artistic talents in ways that impressed my coterie of college friends. When it snowed, a not infrequent event in Chicago, we created chionic masterpieces that lasted until the sun melted them away. Some were conventional, like Marie Antoinette Gets the Guillotine, but when the college was too cheap to build new sidewalks for its students we put together a column of legless snowmen and snowwomen sitting on their carts and pushing themselves along with paper signs on them saying, “Chicago’s disabled demand new sidewalks!” Thus we married the avant-garde to social activism.

We would also create living art, recreating and transmogrifying great works of the past. The one that got me and my fellow artists into real trouble was when we recreated Da Vinci’s Last Supper with me in puris naturalibus as The Naked Maja recumbent upon the table in front of Christ and his disciples. If the college officials had complained about the anachronistic juxtaposition of Da Vinci’s Cenacle and Goya’s Ode to Pubic Hair as the Christ and his disciples argued over who was going to pay thirty pieces of silver for me, I would have understood their objections, but instead they complained about my full frontal nudity, even though I was as faithful to Goya’s original as I could be. Sure, Billy Sunday wouldn’t have liked it, but he had died decades before. We referred to our masterpieces as Mama Art, the indirect descendent of Dada Art.

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