The Grief Forest: a book about what we don’t talk about
ISBN: 978-1-887043-79-3
116 pages
8 x 8
paperback, full color
$25.00
September 2020
What if a gift lived inside 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 travels deeper into the Forest, meeting creatures of the sea and 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 children and adults alike, 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 when we leave it, we are forever changed. 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.
Ghost Swamp Blues
Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-935052-27-2
234 pages
5 x 8
paperback
$16.00
June 2010
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. Weaving together the threads of three women rooted by life or death to this haunted Southern landscape, Ghost Swamp Blues pulls 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.
Fourteen-year-old Lillian Green witnesses the unthinkable in 1949. 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. Hannah is left alone, with only Roberta and her own exceptional singing voice for company. When the truth about what Lillian saw surfaces, no one, living or dead, can prevent what must come next.
Learn more about author Laraine Herring at laraineherring.com.