Projects

Eat the Fish, Spit Out the Bones

It all started with a virus, and the whirlwind of emotions, melancholy, and despair that began to bubble up inside my gut. Well, it was the virus, the lockdown, and the fact that I was fast approaching sixty. My memoir, Eat the Fish, Spit Out the Bones, is a collection of personal essays, in which I reflect on the loss of both my parents as a teen, and my journey to Black womanhood, navigating the world on my own terms. It is also a mature coming-of-age story—for a woman who, over the course of the pandemic, has traversed the menopausal landscape. I explore how my traditional religious practices gave way to dietary preferences; and created spiritual experiences that merged together to create a sense of self which has left me enthusiastic, and intrigued by what more life has to offer.

The Convergence of Time and Memory

When someone anonymously donates a check for $2000 to her struggling nonprofit, Chazona Dempsey’s dormant childhood gift of intuition [GW2] is awakened. She travels two and a half hours south to her hometown in the boot heel of Missouri in search of clues . Having been born into a family peppered with Baptist ministers, a traumatic event as a little girl causes her to reject a budding divine intuition that a spiritualist predicted to her mother would create another family prophet. But her mother’s hopes are dashed when Chazona becomes pregnant at age 16. And so, years after leaving her home in Dempsey Falls in 1976 as a disgraced teen mother and wife, this St. Louis social worker, is confounded by a donation to her nonprofit. In my novel, The Convergence of Time and Memory, Chazona Dempsey is driven to discover the skeletons in a town named for her family of broken preachers.