The Velvet Bridge
$14.00
This true-to-life rags to riches tale, my first novel, is set during WWII and could have actually happened if not for one thing: Mattie Featherstone never existed, other than between the covers of this 381-page book. But the lifestyles, the culture of the time, and some of the places ring so true, you'll wonder. It's classic 1940's, Dallas, Texas, in and around Oak Cliff.
Too young to be
widowed and too pretty to be alone, Mattie Featherstone is both. Suddenly
impoverished, this confused, tormented woman abandons her children and seeks
refuge in an encampment for vagrants situated near the Trinity River on the
west side of Dallas during World War II.
When a twist-of-fate encounter eases Mattie out of destitution into the
genteel world of her paper doll dreams, she manages to conceal the truth
about her past from her benefactors. She even justifies - in her own mind -
the abandonment of her daughters.
However, everything changes when yet another unforeseen event turns her life
into sensational headline news, revealing more than even she could imagine.
Read an excerpt from the book here in PDF.
WHAT
MAKES ME WRITE
For over twenty years, I have been researching family histories, court files, census records, and other legal documents. My discoveries have enriched my knowledge of history in general, and personalized this country’s development for me in an up-close and tailor-made way. As I traced my ancestors—from immigration onward—I was able to document their progress as they pioneered westward, state by state, to Texas.
The history of my grandmothers and theirs before them, has especially influenced me, and inspired much of my poetry and short stories. Their hardships, their losses, their courage and strength, despite— in most cases—social, economical, and political limitations, intrigue me. The creativity and artisanship displayed in daily chores, common tasks, and family planning activities, often under the harshest conditions, call upon me to honor and dignify them through my writings.
I have stories I never heard, those undiscovered, the ones that didn't happen, but possibly could have, had circumstances allowed. Those are my stories. They live in my fantasies, and finally in my writing. I not only relish writing these stories, about people like the ones my ancestors knew, but also have this odd sense of obligation to do so. If I do not, who will?
I like to encourage everyone to dig into your own fertile histories. Discover your ancestor's participation and contribution to actual historical events. Preserve all the stories, for future generations, for only in the telling will the stories remain.
My first novel, The Velvet Bridge, grew from a short story set in World War II, and it was inspired by facts discovered in courthouse documents preceding my husband's adoption in Dallas County when he was two years old.
Just as my family tree germinated from the fertile soil of absolute facts, growing quickly into a substantial mass of limbs and branches, my fiction takes root in the shadows, in the myths hiding among the twigs and under the leaves, of that same tree. My poetry sometimes rides on the breeze, somewhere between fact and fiction, but more often than not, it is truth personified.
