Pleasuring your mind with (mostly) fiction.
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.
If money was not a consideration and you could do anything with your life, what would you do?
In my September post titled ‘A Peek Under the Bandage‘, I mentioned an interview I did about writing and my novel-in-progress. It is now live and I … Continue Reading Inside the Vase
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 will be available for sale starting September 10, 2019, but you can pre-order now, directly from the publisher Goose Lane Editions, or Indigo Books & Music, OR request/reserve a copy from the following indie bookstores:
Another Story Bookshop, Type Books, Book City (Toronto)
Massy Books and Book Warehouse (Vancouver)
McNally Robinson (Edmonton, Saskatoon)
Audreys Books (Winnipeg)
The Bookshelf (Guelph)
Novel Idea (Kingston)
Perfect Books (Ottawa)
Check with your nearest bookstore if they have Daughters of Silence on order yet, and/or reserve a copy from your local library.
An e-book version is in the works and will become available soon across all platforms.
An audiobook version will take longer to make happen but efforts are under way.
Until September, enjoy these extras!
And get in touch!
