Böcker av Laraine Herring

A ghost is not what you think it is, says Raven. A ghost is a commitment. When Laraine Herring receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven, setting off a magical journey into complicated grief, inherited trauma, and ancestral healing. As she struggles with redefining her expectations for her life, she slips further and further underground into the ancestral realm, where she finds herself writing a play directed by her father-as-raven. Raven says, It will be a cast of only four: you and me and my mother and my father, and we will speak until there are no more words between us. And then you can decide the ending. Tick, tock, write. A Constellation of Ghosts takes the reader into the liminal spaces between one world and another, where choices unspool into lives, and the stories we've told ourselves fall apart under the scrutiny of multiple perspectives like flesh from bone, reminding us that grief is the unexpected ferryman who can usher all of us back together again.

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.

What if writer's block became your most precious teacher? An empowering new process for writers who struggle with the seemingly insurmountable middle of a project, from the author of Writing Begins with the Breath. Writer's block. If you are a writer, you know it can be a haunting, terrifying force-a wolf at the door, a vast conspiracy, something that keeps you up at night, spinning your wheels, going nowhere. But what if we've been thinking about writer's block all wrong? What if, by paying attention to its qualities and inquiring into its hidden gifts, we can release that power?On Being Stuck is an empowering guide to working with your blocks and finding the friend within the beast. Using deep inquiry, writing prompts, body and breath exercises, and a range of interdisciplinary approaches,On Being Stuck will help you uncover the gifts hidden within your creative blocks, while also deepening your relationship to your work and reawakening your creative process.

All writers are faced at some point with feelings of self-consciousness and self-doubt about their work. In this invaluable guide, Laraine Herring offers advice to writers who want to become more comfortable with their writing, face their inhibitions, and gain the confidence to release their true voice. Utilizing the breath, a vigorous movement practice designed to break up stagnation with the body and the mind, and writing exercises aimed both at self-exploration and developing works-in-progress, Herring offers a clear path to writing through illusion. Learn how to remove obstacles in your writing and develop techniques to help you relax into your own voice; discover ways to enter into a compassionate, non-judgmental relationship with yourself so that you can write safely and authentically from a place of absolute vulnerability; and discover the interconnectedness of your personal writing process and the community as a whole. The Writing Warrior will not only help you find ways to develop your writing, but also ways to develop yourself.