Rhode Island Author Expo Spotlight – Rachael L. McIntosh

This post was originally posted on Martha Reynold’s blog and has been reposted here with author permission, minor revisions have been made.

I graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a B.A. in painting in the mid 1990’s. I lived in a non-live-in painting studio in Boston’s North End when mafia were still huddled at the coffee shops and before the place was gentrified.

That’s when I started Entropy Press to make my artists books and zines seem more legit. Entropy Press grew. My artist’s books appear in the collections of MIT professor Noam Chomsky, jazz musician John Scofield, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Library. The online version of the zine was getting more hits than the satire site The Onion at that time. Soon a real bricks and mortar gallery, with a digital recording studio, and a black box theater cropped up under the EP brand.

In 1995, my father was in a plane crash and although the Coast Guard searched for days, they never found him. The only thing to confirm his death was a running shoe and his business ledger checkbook. Those things were found floating in the water and collected by a lawyer on his yacht on his way to the Bahamas.

It was around this time that I was suddenly afflicted with a mysterious malaise which turned out to be Multiple Sclerosis. I left Boston and my loft and sought out a “normal” life in Connecticut.

I ended up working as a marketing director in Hartford, Connecticut. I also worked part time as the Urban Artist Initiative Coordinator for Norwich and New London. Ultimately, I secured a full time job, via a temp agency, at a defense contractor agency because I knew how to use email. (I kid you not.)

Then things got sticky. 9/11 happened. My job at the defense contractor became more defense-y. Generals and mercenaries were floating through. I was the youngest person there. My world became almost schizophrenic. Between not feeling my feet and legs and not knowing how to defend my day job to my artist friends, my marriage was falling apart.

Long story short: I was unexpectedly pregnant and became hugely concerned about the future. Maybe it was to avoid thinking about my miserable state of affairs, but I threw myself with all my creative and intellectual might into the Ron Paul campaign. I wanted to end the war and fix all the stuff I had seen at the defense contractor’s. I was elected to be an alternate delegate for the state of Rhode Island and attended the Republican National Convention.

My experiences at the RNC prompted me to write the Security through Absurdity series. I wrote every night for almost two years to produce the equivalent of 4.8 novels. I submitted it to a publisher who told me that they were going to break it down into a trilogy. They also told me to get life insurance. The books, although closer to Contemporary New Journalism, are funny in parts and are listed as fiction so that I don’t get thrown in jail.

The Security Through Absurdity series is #1 on Goodreads Best New Series. The books are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks, as well as in libraries and high schools in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Visit Rachael’s website, her Facebook author page, and follow her on Twitter.

Rhode Island Author Expo Spotlight – Elda Dawber

This post was originally posted on Martha Reynold’s blog and has been reposted here with author permission, minor revisions have been made.

Got secrets? Of course you do! Like it or not, our lives are rich with personal, professional, and family tales that could keep readers awake deep into the night. But do we dare risk the telling? If there is a story that needs to be told, then perhaps the time has come to listen and give it voice.

In writing my novel Wait Until I’m Dead!, I placed my main character in the center of this dilemma. A successful romance writer, Donna Jean Brava, has written an autobiography which provides the backstory of how she dealt with her own childhood abuse by her father and uncles while suffering the cold indifference of her mother. Her recovery shows how love and friendship bring about her healing even though evil acts still lurk behind the door. As her family reads the manuscript and begins to unravel buried family secrets, the title of the novel becomes painfully appropriate. Hate and love vie for the upper hand as victims and perpetrators fear the same fate: What if people findout?

The book is also filled with humor—which works as comic relief in the classically tragic sense—mystery, unexpected plot twists, revealed secrets and intrigue. Presented as a memoir within a novel, readers move through the main character’s history. But it is her actions in the present that propel the story through a series of compelling revelations affecting numerous characters in unforeseen ways.
Secrets often beget more secrets. So, why go there at all, one might ask? Well, like everyone else, I’ve had secrets, told secrets, kept secrets, and even spilled a few. But nothing on this earth prepared me for the damage and long term suffering visited upon children when secrets about abuse prevail.

I am, by profession, a clinical social worker who has been working with children and their families affected by childhood trauma. When I retired—or, semi-retired as it turned out—I felt compelled to do something to honor the courage of the youngsters I had worked with who had faced overwhelming situations and yet had prevailed. And so grew the concept of a novel that could both educate as well as entertain. I wanted a book that professionals would value, but that the average reader could respond to as a page-turner full of compassion and hope.

I have finally come to understand what people meant when they said, “Write what you know.” What I know—from years of working with children in trauma—is hard stuff. Getting it onto paper took time (almost six years), and it also took a good deal of emotional energy. I once had a Creative Writing professor in college who told me I had to choose between social work and writing because social work would take over my life and render me unable to commit the time and focus needed to become a “real” writer. Social work did, in fact, consume me for decades, but eventually it also gave me this story of secrets from all the children whose voices I am trying to honor. And another gift as well: the much deeper understanding that secrets revealed can also heal.

Elda lives in Rhode Island, surrounded by an amazingly loving and diverse family, covets a good mystery, gardens in milk crates on her back deck, loves to travel, still trains her fellow social service professionals, and – truthfully – hates secrets that keep children unsafe. Her novel  Wait Until I’m Dead! recently won the Independent Publishers of New England 2015 award for literary fiction. She is currently hard at work on the sequel. Find her on Facebook, LinkedIn, and here.