The people you find in LOST GRAVEYARDS

by Craig Ferguson

fevers and misadventure.

Skafte’s focus on the personal and poetic might frustrate history and genealogy buffs, two other sorts who wind up in cemeteries for their own reasons. But he also includes the GPS coordinates of each location for anyone looking to investigate these places themselves.

The Dead Die Twice takes its title from a sentiment that’s been attributed to everyone from Banksy to the ancient Egyptians: that we die first when our heart stops beating — and a second time when our name is never spoken again. Or, as Skafte writes in the book’s opening pages:

“The dead die twice first for the living then again in the forgetting”

That’s what draws Skafte past the edge of the clearing and deep into the woods. It’s the secret longing that motivates anyone who writes down their thoughts and shares them with anyone else. We don’t want to be forgotten. Skafte wants these people, these places — and himself — to be remembered and understood.

He writes: “Everyone wants their bones laid low, but nobody wants to sink their story with them.” ■

Violet Browne’s debut novel, This Is The House That Luke Built , grew out of decades of grief aft er she lost her husband at sea off the coast of Newfoundland. In the fi cti on version, the mother and her young family struggle to go on in the half-built house Luke left behind aft er dying at sea. In real life, it was an experience endured by Browne and her three children. Her daughter, Meghan Careen, shared her thoughts with Atlanti c Books Today on a book born of many hearts.

by Meghan Careen

This book, for me, is a testament to my experience that when one parent dies, you lose two. You are both orphaned by grief and raised by it.

How would you feel if your mom published this book? Every feeling. Fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Confusion. Fear, while also helping her birth it, chanting in her ear, holding her legs, cutting the cord of this sibling. Welcoming.

This book started as scraps of paper scattered across my childhood, pasted into poems through my adolescence and later began its gestation into novel. When I read the first very rough manuscript I said, “Mom if you want to publish this story, now is the time.” I said it is a book I’d read for myself and recommend to my friends. People will like it. I am her biggest fan and toughest critic.

It was a romance novel. It was not this, what became a mapping of our bodies and minds. I encouraged my mother’s story because I craved, for her, the healing and empowerment that it could bring. Also hoping that her healing could trickle down. Now, we gape at our raw wounds splayed for public consumption. We agreed to the ghosts, we were used to those. We didn’t know they could hurt us further.

You know that only 10 per cent of the iceberg is visible. The teeny tiny majestic tip drawing boatloads of oohs and ahhs from onlookers. You know that it is the 90 per cent unseen which sinks ships and gouges the face of the earth. The monstrous mass concealed by the glossy splashy sea. Of course this book is the tip of the iceberg.

She calls this book a love song to us, her children. I’ve told her, her love is like clanging symbols to my ears (you’ll find that on page 157, as her pages are infused with my words, hours, labour, ideas, criticisms, tears, chiseling.)

The love song is this: I believe in the power of stories, and in writing one’s own ending. The love song is in the stories of a line of women before me and around me who took pain and synthesized it into art, and taught me that magic. It is my inheritance.

Pain is beauty. Bloody feet in spike heels.

Hot wax. Hair ripped from the root. Needle-pricked fingers. Paint fumes. Wrists sliced over the page. We’ll smear dirt into a masterpiece.

We never were songbirds. ■