WHEN A QUAINT GEORGIA TOWN REFUSED TO BURY ITS GHOSTS, I DID TOO 

By Jan Heidrich-Rice

The ghosts came to town in 2020. October, to be exact. That’s when I contemplated taking a stab at my first National Novel Writers Month (NANOWRIMO), the challenge to draft a 50,000-word book in the month of November. The experience resulted in the first whispers of SECRETS OF THE BLUE MOON. My debut novel follows Marnie Putnam, a grieving woman who battles her own personal ghosts as she chronicles the haunted history of a quaint Georgia town. 

Did I set out to write a ghost story? No. The tale began as balm for my soul at a time when I’d grown tired of people spouting their thoughts on vaccines and Presidential politics. Many were shouting; few listened. Travel was off the table, as was visiting favorite restaurants and funky shops in the lake town near where I live. I mourned my old life. Yet I considered myself lucky. I didn’t have to get up each morning, go out into the world, and face the unknown.

When I sat down to write, I created a town like the one I was missing. I named it Lake Gardner. Then Marnie appeared to me. She said her marriage was rocky after losing two pregnancies and a job. To heal, she briefly fled to Lake Gardner for space. There she was haunted by past regrets and an unknown future. Something more sinister too. Something not of this world.

Enter the ghosts, who came in myriad forms, appearing as flames, orbs, and even a crow. They represented fear and longing, sorrow and guilt. And maybe—maybe?—even hope.

At first, I thought those ghosts came from nowhere and for no one in particular. Later, I realized that they came, in part, for me. They came to buffer me from my obsessions of too many lives lost. They came to distract me from thoughts of my own death. They came with a kick-butt warning: “Don’t you lose hope, old lady! Your grandkids still have plenty to teach you.”

Each of us needs to find a way to process our fears during uncertain times. My way was to write.

For more than a year, I honed Marnie’s story, struggling through workshops and major revisions, beta reads and edits. When a small press offered a contract, I was elated. But it came with two caveats: Take the pandemic out and remove any references to the Presidential election. “No one,” the editor said, “wants to re-visit the events of 2020.”

I pondered that because those very events drive Marnie’s story. She loses her job due to COVID. She runs to Lake Gardner when her husband isolates himself from her mourning yet another loss. In Lake Gardner, she experiences even more separation and division. 

And then there’s the blue moon. In 2020, it rose on Halloween night, an anomaly that happens only once every nineteen years. 

Marnie’s search for peace is interrupted on Halloween night 2020 when a tragedy occurs in Lake Gardner. It mirrors another horror that happened there in 2012, under another blue moon. It stirs up spirits, old and new, who refuse to leave Marnie alone until she helps them find the answers they desperately seek. She believes helping them will help her too. If she can survive.

When the ghosts came to town in October 2020, it’s true, they helped me process my fears in unthinkable times. But they came for Marnie too. The pandemic and pesky politics, coupled with ghosts, all factored into her journey. They affected her judgment and faith, as well as her sense of purpose. They influenced how she experiences life and how she’ll move forward. 

Given all that, how could I bury those ghosts, those ghastly 2020 references that clung to my pages?

If a quaint town in Georgia could refuse to bury its ghosts, I decided I could too. And I did. 

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SECRETS OF THE BLUE MOON 

Redemption awaits her…but only if she confronts all her ghosts.

Marnie Putnam is devastated by her husband’s seeming indifference over her recent miscarriages and job loss. Trying to avoid the inevitable, she makes a temporary move to quaint Lake Gardner, Georgia, to record some local oral histories and find some space. But when noises and visions plague her at night, Marnie grapples to know if it’s her own past regrets that haunt her—or something more sinister here in the house where two women died under the blue moon years earlier.

Deciding to confront her fears, Marnie stays, embracing the town’s quirky stories and characters. She even begins to face ghosts of her own—psychological and real—that she thought she’d buried long ago. But when another blue moon rises and yet another heinous death takes place, Marnie knows her life is in danger.

If she returns home to her husband, she’ll be safe, but without the answers she desperately seeks. But if she stays, will she survive?

BUY HERE

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Jan Heidrich-Rice writes contemporary women’s fiction laced with what-ifs. Sometimes haunting, often funny, her work is always spiked with hope and heart. Her stories often unwind in small lake towns like the ones she experienced growing up in Michigan and now in Georgia, where she lives with her husband near Atlanta. A 2019 Hambidge Fellow, Jan is active in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and the Atlanta Writers Club. In addition to fiction, she writes creative nonfiction, frequently focused on family and always capturing the wonder and humor of everyday life. She’s currently wrapping up work on a humorous memoir: ONE WRONG TURN AT A TIME ~ Life Through the Lens of Fifty States, Forty-Five Years, and One Marriage. 

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Tags: . women writers, featured

Category: On Writing