memoir – Julia Park Tracey

December 1, 2022May 22, 2023

Announcement!

Publisher’s Weekly Shelf Awareness (Dec 1, 2022)

(https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=4370#m58402)

Four women with extensive book world experience have launched Sibylline Press, which will focus on publishing “the brilliant works of women authors over the age of 50,” including memoirs, narrative nonfiction and fiction. Sibylline Press will release six books in fall 2023 and six in spring 2024 and will be distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West. The company also has an unusual publishing model, which involves Sibylline authors being deeply involved in the promotion of their books and other Sibylline titles.

The Sibylline founders are:

Publisher Vicki DeArmon, who has a publishing, bookselling and entrepreneurial background that includes founding Foghorn Press at age 25. (Foghorn was distributed by PGW.) After 13 years, she sold Foghorn to Avalon Books, now part of Hachette Book Group. She was also marketing and events director of Copperfield’s Books in Northern California for eight years, and has consulted to California independent bookstores, creating the “Everyone Gets a Book” holiday program that is still used by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance (CALIBA).

Rights and special sales director Anna Termine, who has worked in both trade and academic publishing for more than 30 years, specializing in rights and licensing. Termine and DeArmon established the Independent Travel Publishers Association together 35 years ago.

Design director Alicia Feltman, who is a web designer for the American Booksellers Association’s IndieCommerce platform and CALIBA as well as for Copperfield’s, where she worked with DeArmon on various projects.

Under the Sibylline publishing model, authors of all of a season’s titles will participate in shared tours, advertising and a promotional strategy that “celebrates the brilliance of women over 50.” Authors will contribute to the marketing budget and receive a generous royalty until their contribution is paid back at which time the royalty returns to a traditional one.

DeArmon commented: “We are a traditional publisher. But even as a traditional publisher, we’re pushing against some long-held lines, giving our authors unheard of support and access. We believe that the better an author understands the industry, the better she can work within it and with us to achieve success for her book.”

Sibylline Press’s Fall list includes three memoirs and two works of historical fiction and one mystery series:

These Broken Roads: Scammed and Vindicated: One Woman’s Story by Donna Hayes, the memoir of a Jamaican immigrant who gets scammed and robbed of her life’s savings by the “love of her life” met on an online dating site, but overcomes hardships to find success.

Becoming Maeve: Coming Out in Corporate America by Maeve DuVally, the memoir of coming out transgender in one of the most high-profile financial institutions in the U.S.

Reading Jane by Susannah Kennedy. After the suicide of her domineering mother, the author discovers diaries spanning 45 years that challenge and upend long-held truths in this memoir.

The Bereaved by Julia Park Tracey. In 1859, after her husband’s death, a grieving mother tries to support her children in New York City, losing them to the Home of the Friendless and the Orphan Train, then sets out to reclaim them. Based on the author’s family experience.

The Pocket Book by Patricia Reis. In this work of historical fiction, upon the death of her cold father, a suppressed 50-year-old woman begins an ancestral quest in Ohio in the 1800s, awakening secrets and herself.

The Rotting Whale: A Hugo Sandoval Eco Mystery, the first in a new mystery series by Jann Eyrich. Steeped in the noir of The City, the old-school inspector with his trademark Borsalino fedora, is a media darling, reluctant bachelor, and people’s hero fighting the good fight in a modern era that attempts to eclipse the old San Francisco Sandoval loves. In his first case in the series, he must find his sea legs before he can solve the mystery of how a 90-ton blue whale became stranded twice in a remote inlet off the North Coast.

October 13, 2022October 27, 2022

Marching through Georgia

It was a rainy kind of day, starting with light drizzles, turning pretty nasty, dumping buckets of rain, lighting and thunder and a few spinouts (by other cars). Not what we’re used to in dry California. It was lovely and a little alarming, but afterward, the skies broke open and beautiful sun rays flashed across the clouds as the sun set. What a pretty thing to see. We started out from Jasper, Alabama, and went to Birmingham to pick up my sister from the airport, and then headed east to Atlanta. Stopped to pick up coffee and snax from a gas station (gas $3.26/gallon).

From the back seat of the rental car, I caught a glimpse of a soggy cotton field — many, in fact, but the rain was almost torrential at that point so I got just a quick photo from the car window. I have a deep curiosity to see a cotton field in bloom, as well as a tobacco field, to give me a chance to wonder at the scope of work they entailed, and what my ancestors so hungered for. I like to see things, not to believe them, but to give life to the memory or the idea.

Our intention was to go to the cemetery in upper Atlanta and see our 2x great-grandparents’ grave. But we tried to talk out what memories we had of them and their descendants, stories we had heard from our mothers, and it seems the grandpa, William, though respected in the community, was not well liked at home. Neither was the grandma, Hester. I have a portrait of her, a 40-ish smiling woman, hanging on my wall, a pose taken in the 1900s or 1890s. Someone, perhaps a naughty grandchild? has poked holes in her face where her nostrils are, so she looks like a pig. I can’t imagine this was a sanctioned act, as photo portraits were not cheap and there might have been a spanking involved. I don’t know a thing about Hester, but I wonder what she was like, or how she treated people, why her photo was so defaced. Who gets turned into a pig? Not a saint. Not a beloved grandmother.

My own grandfather Rae Bailey was christened William Raeford, named for his grandfather, and Rae so despised William, an itinerant Baptist preacher who Rae called a “hypocrite,” that he changed his name to Raeford Luther, taking his own father’s name instead. Imagine so despising your namesake that you changed your name?

Between dumping rain and unfamiliar roads, the idea of tromping through a cemetery to visit the graves of two not-so-beloveds helped us decide to skip that visit. Instead, we headed to the hotel for naps, poring over maps and documents for tomorrow’s adventure into the next state, and then a delicious Southern dinner in a Kennesaw tavern. Shrimp and grits? Um, yes ma’am. Also, locally brewed beer in cans, and a grapefruit Ricky (pink gf with vodka and elderflower, so tasty!)

When we arrived at the tavern, awaiting some more cousins to join us, I heard a bird calling, and held up my Merlin app. We heard the beautiful call of a Carolina wren — and a cardinal! I looked and looked…

…And there she was. A Northern cardinal–Red head, more brownish body, and I caught her in a photo. You’ll have to trust me. Today I added seven birds to my life list: Carolina chickadee, golden-crowned kinglet, blue jay (not our Western scrub jay or Stellar’s), tufted titmouse, Eastern phoebe, Carolina wren and Northern cardinal.

Huzzah! #birdnerd

By the way, I specifically named this post “Marching through Georgia,” because my Southern great-grandmother Willie-Doris detested the song. She refused to hear it played. She was the founding member of the Daughters of the Confederacy chapter in Portland, OR, and she was very proud of her Southern roots, Southern accent, and her alleged relation to General Robert. E. Lee. Although I remember this great-grandmother, who lived to age 99 (she was Doris Bailey’s mother), and she gives me my long-life genes, I find her white supremacy impossible to excuse. She was the epitome of a charming Southern hostess, wherever she lived — and a perpetrator of some of our family’s worst snobbery and affectations. “My sons will never work with their hands” or “My sons will never wear dirty collars*,” she was known to say. (*back when collars were detachable).

I have a lot of thoughts about this lady, whose china sits in my cabinet, whose genes linger in my cells, and the genes of her forebears, generations of folks who disdained their servants and slaves, and anyone who looked like them. I can’t change what was, but I can expose it, I think, and hope sunlight will purify it, somehow. Anyhow, we did not go visit her parents’ graves today.

And I’m #notsorry.

November 16, 2015

Slingshot: This Is Not Where I’m Supposed to Be

I waken at about 1 a.m. and stare at the wall, trying not to look at the clock, its white number so stark, so painfully truthful. It’s past midnight. Hours loom before me.

You’re not asleep. This is not your house. This is not your bed. Those are not your children down the hall.

There are no children down the hall. No sighs, no whimpers, no calls for a sip of water. The girls are in their own beds, in the next town. Their father is the gatekeeper. The divorce is not going well and he has decided to keep them all, against their will, against mine, to make me suffer for whatever sins he thinks I’ve committed, most of all, leaving him.

The girls cling to me when I see them, when I turn up at school to catch them before they walk home. The other mothers sneer and turn away. I’m a gorgon, the Medusa who will freeze their blood and bones if they speak to me or smile. Divorce must be a norovirus you can catch by sharing the same bench, standing under the same overhang.

Roll back the tape six months and I was on the PTA, co-chair of the Reading Carnival, helping at Catechism on Thursdays. Girl Scouts on Saturday and dance class on Monday and Wednesday at 4. I took his elderly mother shopping and to the doctor in the mornings, mowed the lawn and cleaned house, whipped up dinner for five each evening. He’d come through the door and pour the first scotch-rocks before he set down his briefcase. It must be a lot, I guess, meeting the endless wants and needs of the wife and three children and the mortgage and minivan he said he wanted.

What he wants is not this. Not us.

I sneak to see them. I promise I will fight. But I don’t know if I can. He’s that powerful, and I’m that weak. During the one year of solitude without my children, I drive back and forth to work each day along the long stretch of road by the airport, around the shorelines of San Francisco Bay. I have to keep my face on for work, as I chase down stories and cover school board meetings. I have to keep it together at my shared apartment, because a weeping woman, especially an older one, is really boring, to say the least. But in my car, each day, I sob and choke my way from home and work, thinking, “I could take some pills,” “I could buy a gun,” or, perhaps most satisfying of all, “I could drive to the bridge, stand at the edge and just let go.” First the terrifying plunge, but then – cold deep water, darkness, silence, an end to everything. I have no idea if I will ever get my children back. I think I’ve lost them forever.

In the middle of the night, the world has stopped for me. There is mayhem and destruction everywhere, not just in my own little life. But I am dead to the world’s events. I don’t care about any of it. I write the news, watch terror and sadness on the television, in the newspapers, with no other feeling than shame, that I am not with my girls, I cannot reach them, I cannot protect them, I cannot mother them, I cannot shelter them, I cannot cry with them, I have become this useless slag, I have failed at the one thing I am biologically equipped to do, I have scorched the earth black with my own misdeeds, so that death and disasters on a global scale mean nothing to me. I’ve been catapulted out of a slingshot on a trajectory I could never have planned, with no way to slow my momentum.

I lie alone in my bed and stare at the black of the wall, the tilted shadows from the street. I think I should pray, but that tank is empty, too, something else to feel guilty for. I lie there counting my failures, my inability to act. Eventually, when the sky begins to pale, I fall into the darkest of dreams, an hour of madness before the morning bell.

This is not what I asked for.

From my unpublished memoir, Wedlock.