I am admittedly horribly behind in blogging this season. Please know it is because I am hunting nearly every day and working hard to raise money for wetlands conservation. I have embraced my renewed falconry zeal whole-heartedly. Stories to come!!

In the meantime, I wanted to share a little project I’ve been working on. (Although yes, I am diligently working on my novel and may have a stand alone piece from it in this project.)

New ebook Coming!!

So… Coming soon! A companion ebook of essays and short stories that complement and add to the story of LIFT. This book will be free to anyone who has read LIFT (you’ll be given a code if you can answer the qualifying question!) or you can support the author (Me!) and download it on Amazon for $2.99. Check back for release date and online events!

Also, note the amazing cover art by my brother, Raymond Swanland. He is a lauded fantasy artist whose work is pretty much ubiquitous these days.  If you’re a fan girl or fan boy (Lord knows, I am.) he’s done covers for Priest, MTG cards, WOWC cards, an album cover for Disturbed and consistently has art in Spectrum. I especially love his art on the promo posters for the David Fincher remake of Heavy Metal. Check his website for these!

So needless to say, “little bro” or not, I’m in love with this cover. I hope you like it too!

.22s by Ashe-Villain

There is a part 5 to my Desert Duck adventure, but for now a small digression.

It occurred to me that there must a reason and perhaps even a very good reason that I am afraid of guns. I love to hunt. I love hunters. Anyone who doesn’t, should agree to just forgive me for that. It won’t change. And yet, the feel of a gun in my hand causes a similar reaction to the unexpected sound of a rattlesnake vibrating a warning in the brush.

Drop everything and run.

Not that I do run, but it’s a battle between brain and body to still and reason. Only, I think perhaps it’s the same battle from opposite sides of my being when confronted with a gun. My body tells me that I have complete control, but a whisper in my psyche turns into a scream about what a gun can do. I have always known what a gun can do.

The grandmother I never met taught me much about guns when I was very young and then taught me more when I was old enough to understand loss and the ripples of mothers torn from daughters. This story wasn’t in LIFT, but my mom lost her mother, Barbara Jean when she was only six. She lost her to a gun.

My mother and I have talked about Barbara Jean often, especially after mom read “Motherless Daughters” by Hope Edelman and realized what an atom bomb this was to the women in our family. She wanted to fix it before every mother left every daughter down the line and into eternity. We wondered if my mom left me for a while because she thought that that’s what mothers do. She came back in a few years though and I didn’t lose my mother, but the gun stuck with me. Guns aren’t just weapons against the things we need protection against. Guns are simply what we make them. I don’t distrust guns. I distrust myself with a gun in my hand.

Death Certificate

I’ve thought about this a lot in the last few weeks and so I asked Mom to send me Barbara Jean’s death certificate.

This is what I know for certain about my grandmother:

She was 27 years old with three little girls only a year apart from one another. My mom was six years old and the middle child. On July 16^th, 1958 in Seattle, Washington sometime before midnight, she died. Her cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head with a .22 rifle. The coroner deemed it suicide.

This is what is ambiguous and maybe rumor:

They returned from a party and a bitter fight. It was said my grandfather was taking a shower when my grandmother went into a closet and shot herself. She was an artist and her family said she was “unstable”. Yet, it was 1958 and women with a young family didn’t shoot themselves, even with small caliber rifles. Maybe this is why there are rumors that my grandfather was gone for a year to defend himself in a civil murder trial. Maybe this lends some credibility to the neighbor’s story that she wrote a novel that my grandfather destroyed upon her death. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Yet, I have no doubt that the ripples of her violent death were deep enough to contribute to my grandfather’s alcoholism (no matter the level of his culpability) and to also affect us all, even now three generations in.

I’ll never get to read my grandmother’s novel, but I need to know.

When I have the money, I need to hire a PI. I need to see the autopsy report, I need to interview the bits of family who don’t know I exist, but know the rumors and tiny warped truths about Barbara Jean. I want to tell her story and I want reconstruct her novel for her and I think I could do this all in one book, one alternating chapter at time. My grandmother deserves to have her say.
In the meantime, I’m going to buy a .22 and teach myself that there is a lot of me that isn’t Barbara Jean. I will finish the novel I’m writing and dedicate it to her and my other grandmother, Mary Evelyn who did spend time in psychiatric care, but never embraced a rifle. I am both of these women and neither women and will shoot rifles and stay strong and love them both desperately like only a granddaughter can. And when the time is right and I’m brave enough, soon I hope, I will publish the story that my grandmother wrote in my genes.