This is a book full of ghosts… once, during the deathwatch, my mother looked up at me (she was perfectly lucid) and said who is that woman behind you? there was no one, and I said so, but she insisted, oh yes, she
has her hand on your shoulder… the death of a parent is enormous.
“We are all victims of our childhood…” I read somewhere.
as I sat by my mother’s bed those two weeks while she was dying I knew the thing I’d feared most as a child, her leaving me as my father had done, was happening and I became that child again…
a child who, nevertheless, could sit at her bedside
in a darkened room and scribble in my black journal…
didn’t know why I was doing it, never thought it
would become a book…just knew I had to
it started as my mother’s story…but my father needed to be in it too, though I didn’t know him…how can I write about him?
I did…and began to feel as if I had known him. certainly better than I ever had… felt compassion for him… would not go so far as love, but, more importantly, forgiveness the realization that in my own life, in a different, yet same way, I’d done the same as he…
…the more I wrote of their failed love and marriage, the more I understood it, though much, of course, was imaginary…who can ever know another person’s heart?
– Sharon Auberle
Barbara Luhring featured in Broadside Beat #7: DRAWING STORIES
Drawing Stories by Barbara Luhring
A ‘How-to’ on graphic writing/the creative challenge. “Processing my ‘visual brain’ is the way I lead myself through the act of storytelling – pictures first – words second. It has always come through in the clutch for me with only one major obstacle…DISTRACTIONS!”
E-mail Norb Blei to order a special signed and numbered copy of the book Saturday Nights at the Crystal Ball, bundled with a copy of his latest Broadside Beat #7 for a discount price of $17 plus $2 shipping & handling – but only if you order before November 24.
