Bøger af Laraine Herring

In this distinctive guide to the craft of writing, author Laraine Herring shows us how to tune into our bodies and connect with our emotions so that our writing becomes an expression of our full beings, rather than just an intellectual exercise. With warmth and wisdom, Herring offers a path to discovering "deep writing"-prose that is unique, expressive, and profoundly authentic. Lessons and imaginative exercises show you how to: stay with your writing when your mind or body starts to pull you away; explore the five senses in your writing; and approach your writing without judgment. Writing Begins with the Breath will open up a whole world of creativity for people who may not have considered themselves writers before, while also providing keen insights into the craft for seasoned writers.

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.

A novel of San Francisco.On the eve of the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, Helen and Frank Connor arrive in San Francisco to determine the fate of their marriage. A series of unexplainable events sends the couple in separate directions deep into the ghosts of the City's past, which include the fierce, fiddle-playing Elle, who accidentally jumped to her death in 1967 and is now back to reclaim her lost instrument, pulling along with her all the men who stopped their lives for her. This ensemble novel is peppered with classic San Francisco characters like Remmy X, an old hippie poet who publishes a daily paper on his old Remington; Brian, haunter of the City Lights Bookstore, who fell in love with Elle in 1967; Penny Lane, the drag queen of North Beach; and Shep, Remmy's faithful dog. Gathering Lights is a ghost story of five souls suspended in the amber of their grief, and it will have you believing in the power of love and music to change both the past and the future.

Mrs. Abigail Fisher, the South's Esteemed First Lady of Letters, is in a rut. Her writing career has collapsed, and she has become an embittered old woman living alone in a dilapidated house in Georgia. Only she's not as alone as she thinks. One of her characters, Pistachio Simmons, who had been cut from Mrs. Fisher's best-selling novel, The Garden of Gethsemane, Georgia, has returned to demand she be given the storyline she deserves. After Pistachio starts a fire in the kitchen, Mrs. Fisher is forced to summon her estranged daughter, Elise, back home. When Pistachio finds the deleted pages from her book, she begins to create her own chapters separate from the ones her author had given her. As Pistachio flourishes, Mrs. Abigail Fisher fades, and mother and daughter are forced to confront the failed plotlines of their own lives, including the one they've tried hardest to ignore-the story of the ghost-girl in the garden. Part magical realism, part meditation on the creative process, part old-fashioned ghost story, Into the Garden of Gethsemane, Georgia opens up the reader to the intimate world of a writer and the characters, real and imagined, who haunt her in the night.

How far would you go to protect someone you love? Nothing is black or white in the murky town of Alderman, North Carolina, no matter how much the human and ghostly residents of Idyllic Grove Rice Plantation would like it to be. In 1949, fourteen-year-old Lillian Green witnesses the unthinkable. Her choice to remain silent about what she saw ripples into the swamp water surrounding her family's home, awakening the ghost of Roberta du Bois, former rice plantation mistress, who drowned herself in the swamp in 1859. Roberta and Lillian forge a bond based on shame, silence, and an impenetrable loneliness. When Lillian's daughter Hannah is born into the maze of haunted hallways, Lillian has no interest in raising her. Left alone, Hannah discovers Roberta as well as her own exceptional singing voice. The tangled storylines of the three women rooted to this Southern landscape pull the reader into the layers of racism, family loyalties, and hidden relationships that intertwine as naturally as the kudzu that covers the trees where the Swamp Sirens sing. When the truth about what Lillian saw surfaces, no one, living or dead, can prevent what must come next.