Like so many people do, I let the day to day tasks of living distract me from my lifelong dream. Fast forward to 2010....I buried my father and my husband eighteen months apart. I was reeling with no idea of what to do with my life...So I started writing more stories featuring characters from my literary short stories and Ghost Country became the result.
Looking back, I remember being terrified about everything. What would happen to me and my daughter? What was I supposed to do with my life now?
At times, the fear would become so bad that I couldn't even breathe. I couldn't speak to anyone about it because it was all on me now....I was supposed to be the strong one....I had my daughter and my mother to take care of and I couldn't show any weakness. So to keep from screaming, I wrote....And wrote.....And wrote.
I think I would have just given up if it wasn't for working on those stories and as I did, I remembered the way I used to feel about writing and the sort of person that I used to be. Little by little the fear went away and I figured out how to make my life work.
Ghost Country will never be my most popular work, but through it, I paid homage to my Native American roots and got back to the person I used to be.
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Carrying echoes of Amy Tan and Rebecca Wells, Ghost Country takes the reader into the lives of three Cherokee women and the lives of their modern day daughters. Told in a series of vignettes that alternate from the era of the Civil Rights Movement, Woodstock, and the Vietnam War, to the present day. Each story carries the reader through a world where a birthday wish can make people disappear; where a child, after being told that she is nothing, can find her way back to the forgotten Cherokee traditions; and where a woman can give her daughter a treasured bit of advice thanks to a dead rock star.