Blue Joy

Deborah "Deb" Brannock Guerdat was the eldest of five sisters from a small Appalachian town deep in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. Deb possessed a gentle maturity well beyond her years as she cared for her younger siblings with a profound reverence and sacred purpose that would come to be her trademark in life - mothering. Like her father, Deb delighted in the natural world, the ocean, the mysteries of heady, southern, summer nights, lightning bugs, swimming, campfires, and music, especially in the form of camp songs sung in palpable rounds beneath starlit skies. Like her mother, Deb was independent and strong-willed, unconventional, and forever marching to the beat of her own drum. Deb raised three spirited daughters of her own in their Dilworth home in Charlotte, North Carolina from the 1980s into the 2000s. A well-loved and highly sought-after creative writing teacher, she volunteered at Dilworth Elementary School throughout these years, inspiring and encouraging the most diminutive sized writers. Deb was a brilliant thinker, multimedia artist, poet, writer, and conversationalist. She had wit in spades, an affinity for pun and wordplay, and a deep, enduring love of the absurd, evinced by her taste in authors - her favorite among them Richard Brautigan. Originally penned in 2008, Deb's memoirs precede her death by fifteen years. An array of laughter, triumph, loss, and longing pulls us into a world of a near prophetic awareness of her own mortality... yet her colorful stories capture the richness and complexity of a life well-lived and of the legacy she leaves behind. Deb passed away at age 75 from pancreatic cancer in July of 2023.