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I’m an author, a retired professor, a book coach * focusing exclusively on women over 40, a grief therapist, and a digital illustrator.
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“A searing, searching, and expansive collection, by turns heartbreaking and illuminating. There is something fierce and crucial in the act of women writing and re-writing their selves and lives before our very eyes.”
—Lindsay Lerman, author of I’m From Nowhere and What Are You”
LATEST RELEASE!
According to editor Laraine Herring, “Speculative memoir is an umbrella genre in which the questions of the memoirist’s book are addressed through speculative elements, which may include ghosts, metaphors, what-ifs, imaginative scenarios, and fantasies. It is memoir focused more on the possibilities of the internal world than the facts of the external world.” Speculative has long been accepted in the domain of fiction, but speculative is not in conflict with a lived experience or the story of a life. Speculative essays empower us to claim all of ourselves and our moments—not just the ones the patriarchy or dominant culture wants to reinforce. This powerful collection of seventeen women’s essays grapples with themes of loss, individuation, abuse, authenticity, and identity through speculative elements. Perhaps they will also help you remember parts of your own heart and give you new language to express your singular, magical lives.
Profits from this incredible anthology benefit Girls Write Now, a NYC based non-profit organization focused on those historically disempowered due to their gender or gender identity, harnessing the power of story to shape culture, impact industries, and bridge worlds.
“As haunting as it is beautiful, Laraine Herring busts open the speculative memoir genre with A Constellation of Ghosts to show that even when we thought we had let go, the dead are always with us. Through rhythmic and poetic language, Herring hasn’t just created an engaging read, she’s invited the reader to come in and have an experience. So I don’t know which is more powerful here—the story or the writing. They both gave me chills. Because from rhyming ravens to poignant ghosts, Herring’s words enter into your bones, become a part of you, and will refuse to leave.”
A Constellation of Ghosts is named one of the 35 most impressive independent press titles from the Independent Book Review!
Check out all the other great titles here!
“A ghost is not what you think it is,” says Raven. “A ghost is a commitment.”
When Laraine Herring receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven, setting off a magical journey into complicated grief, inherited trauma, and ancestral healing. As she struggles with redefining her expectations for her life, she slips further and further underground into the ancestral realm, where she finds herself writing a play directed by her father-as-raven.
Raven says, “It will be a cast of only four: you and me and my mother and my father, and we will speak until there are no more words between us. And then you can decide the ending. Tick, tock, write.”
A Constellation of Ghosts takes the reader into the liminal spaces between one world and another, where choices unspool into lives, and the stories we’ve told ourselves fall apart under the scrutiny of multiple perspectives like flesh from bone, reminding us that grief is the unexpected ferryman who can usher all of us back together again.
“I read Constellation of Ghosts in a rush, compelled, unable to put it down. A spiral that bores to the core of life and death, past selves, family wounds, and the relationships within family structures, Herring’s speculative memoir is fearless, moving, profound, and so full of love it overflows. Its real magic is the way it heals, bringing the reader to a still point where she finds herself home at last. This is memoir at its best. ”
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Thanks to The Feminist Book Club for including Constellation of Ghosts in this great article on all things speculative! If you’d like a great starter reading list for speculative memoir, check out the piece!
New Release! The Grief Forest: a book about what we don’t talk about is available now from White River Press!
This 122-page full color illustrated book follows Bunny on her journey through complicated grief.
When Bunny's father dies, she captures her grief in a bubble the color of his soul. She carries this grief with her, afraid that if she lets it go, she will lose her daddy. Bunny's grief leads her to The Grief Forest and Grandmother Bunny, who meets her at the Forest's edge. Bunny is afraid of all the grief she sees there, so she runs away and meets Death, who guides her deeper into the Forest. Each animal she meets expresses an aspect of grief. As Bunny's grief begins to take on a life of its own, she becomes desperate to hold onto it, afraid of who she would be without it. She falls deeper into the Forest, meeting creatures of the sea and creatures of the night. When she meets Cobra, everything she thought she knew about grief falls away and she has to make a choice: hold on to a life that has gone, or learn how to be alive in a new environment.
For all ages, The Grief Forest is a journey through complicated grieving-showing examples of delayed grief, absent grief, PTSD, attachment, disenfranchised grief and many more. Bereavement is a place. When we grieve, we enter this mysterious world and we do not leave it unchanged. And by meeting our grief, sitting quietly with it and listening to it, we can access its deeper wisdom, helping to heal not only the griever, but the whole world.
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Named a “Best Book” for Writers by
Poets & Writers Magazine!
Step 1: Breathe!
Step 2: Write!
“I know that I would not be the writer I am now—a freelance writer, solo performer, and fiction writer, without the impact Laraine had on me and my work. She empowered me to let my story evolve naturally and organically, to be on the adventure with my characters, and to be as surprised as they might be about what happened next."
– Nikki deLeon
Write Outside the Lines.
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