"Soul Retrieval" (literary fiction, 61K words) is voice-driven with an innovative literary organization. The chapter headers of "Soul Retrieval" travel the topics of Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet" and tackle all of life's most profound themes, from Love all the way to Death. The shamanistic practice and ritual of soul-retrieval of course being to find those pieces one has lost along the way in life-to recover them and become whole again.
Delivered with the intimacy of a deeply contemplative and emotionally plastic first person, "Soul Retrieval" is an intimate, voice-driven literary novel centering on one woman's self-reclamation. Mary Dixon's soul retrieval came the hard way; through mires of drug addiction and abuse and a family riddled with mental illness.
The novel begins with a present-day frame: Mary is riding a train in France. She doesn't speak the language and can't find her seat. She wanders from car to car with her overstuffed suitcases, helpless and lost, astonished to find herself within this absurdly apt living metaphor. This symbol of life and its sections: train cars for life-stories, connected together. She begins to recall, to meditate, and so the story begins. Along the way, Mary learns to forgive, to let go of her toxic past. And ultimately Mary finds herself, finds her love, finds her home, finds her identity and her own truth.
Auflage
Sprache
Produkt-Hinweis
ISBN-13
978-1-962931-12-0 (9781962931120)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Shanna McNair is Founder and Director of The Writer's Hotel and Founding Editor and Publisher of The New Guard literary review. Shanna writes prose, poetry and scripts and is an award-winning journalist. She recently served as a RISCA Fiction Fellow Competition Judge, and as an Interdisciplinary Study Adviser at Lesley University. Her debut novel, "Soul Retrieval" is forthcoming from High Frequency Press in 2024. Her creative writing has appeared on KGB Bar Lit online, and in Maine Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, Stonecoast Lines and elsewhere; her work in journalism appears on Village Soup. She was selected for writing residencies at Studio Faire (2022 and 2024) and Gullkistan (2024). She has been a writer-in-residence at Hewnoaks Artist Colony, at the Thomas Lynch Cottage and at the Stonecoast Ireland Residency. She is a graduate of the Dartmouth College Creative Writing MALS program, the Stonecoast MFA program and holds a Creative Writing Certificate from Oxford University, via Dartmouth. She has worked extensively in the visual and performing arts. Her play, "Fat Sushi" was chosen as part of Belfast, Maine's One-Act Festival; she directed and produced. Click here to read her latest short story, "Funhouse", on KGB Bar Lit with an introduction by Rick Moody. Shanna lives and works in Maine.
