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Hello from the downstairs studio at OurWriteHouse, where I, Carol, have completed a draft of  my latest project. With the help of Beethoven and Chopin, Rachmaninov and von Williams, I am now in revisions of a book-length manuscript, Smoke of a Great Fire, a non-memoir memoir meant (no first person) to explore the treachery of truth and doubt, faith and proof from several (medical and lay) points of view. Like my earlier book-length manuscript, The Question of Empathy, this, too, is a non-apologetic hybrid form that relies on metaphor to straddle fiction and non-fiction. Smoke of a Great Fire still belongs to literary non-fiction, but borrows from the novel without asking permission. Not an experimental form, this, but an approach that feels right to me—a means to tell a story, mine. Here's the pitch:

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Smoke of a Great Fire:

A Novel, A Memoir, A Truth

by Carol Jeffers

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At sixty-five, a pair of unlikely twins known only as “O.S.” and “O.D.” suffer yet another loss, one that leaves them in a wobbly world searching for a new identity before they are gone forever. Time is short, and with the help of their live-in care-giver “C.J.” they navigate between memory, truth and hope as they work to write a memoir that will explain what the medical world could not. They struggle mightily with fundamental questions—Had they made things happen, or had things just happened to them? Had they been the fire or the smoke? Had they seen too much or seen too little? And like most everyone, they wondered if they would be remembered for who they were or who they weren’t. Their story, surreal as it seems, was a chance for healing, for accepting a new identity that could give some comfort to C.J., friends, neighbors, colleagues and doctors who care about them. In his author’s note to Moonglow, Michael Chabon says “In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refuse to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” And so has Carol Jeffers in Smoke of a Great Fire.

Odd, though, when the writing is going well and the structure feels sound, the music falls away, only to resume its rhythmic play as a dialogue or descriptive passage nears its end.

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REALLY BIG NEWS!

Published by Koehler Books,Carol's book is now out!The Question of Empathy: Searching for the Essence of Humanity. Available on Amazon in hard and soft cover, as well as eBook formats.

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Other News

Carol’s The Question of Empathy manuscript  was named a semi-finalist in the 2017 Pirates’ Alley Faulkner Narrative Non-Fiction Book length contest.

Carol's short memoir piece Covenant will be published in Persimmon Tree in 2018.