Pleasuring your mind with (mostly) fiction.
I was too young to know that every country had one of those - airlines, that is, and the pretty ladies that went along with them, not to mention the dashing pilots. I was too young to even know that there were such things as other countries. There was Ethiopia, that was that. That was the world.
Early on in my writing of what became DAUGHTERS OF SILENCE, I used to call up funeral homes under the guise of being a potential customer and ask them detailed questions about exhumations and body repatriations.
All I had to do was summarize a nearly 10 year creative and personal journey into ten minutes...I remembered to breathe, feel my feet on the ground and more or less the rest of my body above, and most of all to focus on what was going on at present, not what I would have to do minutes from now.
Habesha dudes usually open with: Don’t I know you? I said, “Have you met me?”
I walk on down a street I have never known.
“A story of trauma and reckoning, of flight and return, told honestly, written boldly.”
– Tessa McWatt, author of Higher Ed
Ash from the Eyjafjallajökul volcano fills the skies. Flights are grounded throughout Europe. Dessie, a cosmopolitan flight attendant from Canada, finds herself stranded in Addis Ababa — her birth place.
Grieving her mother’s recent death, Dessie heads to see her grandfather, the Shaleqa — compelled as much by duty as her own will. But Dessie’s conflicted past stands in her way. Just as the volcano’s eruption disordered Dessie’s work life, so too does her mother’s death cause seismic disruptions in the fine balance of self-deceptions and false histories that uphold her family.
As Dessie reacquaints herself with her grandfather’s house, familiar yet strangely alien to her diasporic sensibilities, she pieces together the family secrets: the trauma of dictatorship and civil war, the shame of unwed motherhood, the abuse met with silence that gives shape to the mystery of her mother’s life.
Daughters of Silence is now available for purchase, either directly from the publisher Goose Lane Editions, or Another Story Bookshop, as well as Indigo Books & Music, and independent bookstores across Canada.
An audiobook version will take longer to make happen but efforts are under way.
Enjoy these extras!
And get in touch!
