Welcome back to the 1455 Author Series. Our final event for 2022 will be live at Kalero Vineyard (part of our ongoing Wine & Words Series), featuring Sarah Birnbach reading from and discussing her novel A DAUGHTER’S KADDISH.
This month our featured author is Lisa Williamson Rosenberg, author of EMBERS ON THE WIND. This novel was a delight to read, and I’m in awe of its ambition, scope, and achievement. It is also refreshing, in a throwback sort of way, to encounter a narrative filled with layers, characters, voices, and shifting time periods; it’s a story that quite literally travels time and space, taking us from the mid 19th Century to the present day. Suffice it to say, we had ample topics for our discussion, including craft, the obligatory if cliched issue of writing what one knows vs. imagination (hint: the best books adeptly combine both), and Lisa’s slow but steady –and very successful!– path to publication. In addition to a deep dive into this novel, we talked about previous writing, works in progress (hint: we definitely have more writing to anticipate!), and advice for aspiring writers. We packed a lot into a little over one hour, and I’m already looking forward to picking up where we left off sometime soon (hint: to be continued).
As always, it’s our pleasure to partner with D.C.’s historic Potter’s House and we encourage you to purchase your copies of EMBERS ON THE WIND directly from them and help support independent booksellers!
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg’s Embers on the Wind is a twisty tale of women connected by motherhood, the legacy of slavery, and personal histories that span centuries. A story, the roots of which began for the author with the call of a ghost, is at once about the ghosts that linger–like longing–and the ghost threads that connect us to the past.
Whittaker House—the novel’s central, silent main character—stood as a Massachusetts stop on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s. It’s where two freedom seekers, Little Annie and Clementine, hid and perished. Whittaker House still stands. And Little Annie and Clementine still linger, their dreams of freedom unfulfilled. Now a vacation rental in the Berkshires, Whittaker House draws seekers of another kind: Black women who only appear to be free. Among them are Dominique, a single mother following her Grandmere’s stories to Whittaker House in search of an ancestor; her lover, Michelle, who has journeyed to the mountains to heal her own traumas; and Kaye, Michelle’s sister, a seer whose visions reveal the past and future secrets of the former safehouse—along with her own. For each, true liberation can only come from uncovering their connection to history—and to the spirits awaiting peace and redemption within the walls of Whittaker House.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg is a writer, former ballet dancer, and psychotherapist specializing in depression, complex trauma, and racial identity. Lisa’s essays have appeared in Longreads, Narratively, the Defenders Online, and The Common. Her fiction has been published in the Piltdown Review and in Literary Mama, where Lisa received a Pushcart nomination. A born-and-raised New Yorker and a mother of two college students, Lisa now lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband and dog. Visit her online at https://lisawrosenberg.com/
