Thank you Georgia Center for the Book, for including my debut novel, The Peach Seed in your 2024 list of Books All Georgians Should Read! This big news just went live yesterday, and our extended Peach Seed family is thrilled. This news is also timely as I will embark on another NYC/GA book tour from Feb 10-26. Check my Media Page for details.
Storytellers broaden our minds; engage, provoke, inspire and ultimately connect us.
Robert Redford
Imagining the book out in the world for six months now—still very much a baby, in the life of a book— I think often of how much like raising a child this book publishing experience is. Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.” Every line of this exquisite poem can be applied to my relationship with my novel, for I am not my book and my book is not me.
The Peach Seed is its own self. Out in the world, engaging, provoking, and hopefully inspiring people in a way that only it can—as a singular entity in the universe. Just as every person is. Every work of art. Every living thing, and every nonliving thing. My book is able to go places that I could never visit— not even in my dreams, to paraphrase Gibran—because people can not engage with me in the same way. There’s far too much baggage in the air between mere mortals to allow us to connect on as a deep a level as a reader and a book may be lucky enough to experience.
A book seems safe enough; as reader you feel you’re in charge. You made the choice to buy or borrow it. You decide when you’ll start reading, and if you’ll finish. Although, should you fall under its spell, you may end up powerless and truly unable to put it down. Then you realize the book, its characters, and the story are running the show. A show that would be extremely different if you and the book were both humans. You’d get bogged down in the myriad of implicit biases that travel with every human, especially as we read and listen to stories. Like cream, engaging in story causes our humanity to rise to the top. everything we think we know about family, race, gender, age, caste, etc, on the surface and deep below the surface, becomes raw and ready: begging to be managed. This is the magic of fiction! This is why I write.
With this distinctive honor from Georgia Center for the Book, I hope many more readers will find the The Peach Seed, and discover ways that it resonates.