Ghost Swamp Blues - Softcover

I began thinking about Ghost Swamp Blues through the voice of Lillian, loosely modeled on my grandmother, in an attempt to understand her and find some way to connect with her. I invented the situation which became Lillian's inciting incident - witnessing her brother Tommy lynch Gabriel. I followed that thread - what would happen if a young girl saw that? How would she be affected? What secrets would she keep? What detachments would be necessary? From that initial question, that first attempt to reconcile myself with my now deceased family, the novel took form.
 
Growing up in the south, I witnessed many deeply divisive belief systems. I saw Klan rallies, nice church going women throwing rocks at the buses that brought the black children into our schools in the 1970s, and watched as our "friendly" neighborhood stopped speaking to us and literally built fences between our home and theirs when we sold our house to an African-American family.
 
As I became engulfed by the melody of Ghost Swamp Blues, I asked deeper questions. What price is paid by the dominant culture in an environment of dominance? In other words, what is the soul price for an individual who owns another? What songs and shadows still cling to the land? This novel is my journey to understand the shadow of my family, my homeland, and the shadow within myself.

In my writing process, I usually begin with a place and a voice. I've never yet begun with a story or plot. It's always been a place and a sound. Someone will speak to me or make some sort of noise, whether it's dragging a shoe across a wooden pier, or an actual line of dialogue. For Ghost Swamp Blues, the first thing I got was a woman in a pink feathered hat walking into a swamp. She turned out to be Roberta Du Bois. The rest of the book unfolded from that image and that place. From there, I got Lillian's voice. "I stopped speaking when..." I was curious. I wanted to know why she stopped speaking. What happened? And the desire to answer those questions brought me the story.

Laraine Herring holds an MFA in creative writing and an MA in counseling psychology. She is the author of The Writing Warrior: Discovering the Courage to Free Your True Voice (Shambhala 2010); Writing Begins with the Breath: Embodying Your Authentic Voice (Shambhala 2007); Lost Fathers: How Women Can Heal from Adolescent Father Loss (Hazelden 2005); and Monsoons: A Collection of Writing (Duality Press 1999). Her fiction has won the Barbara Deming Award for Women and her non-fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.