Death’s Garden Revisited

My personal essay, Ebb and Flow: Finding My Way Back To Family is featured in Death’s Garden Revisited from Automatism Press

  • Publication date: September 2022
  • Editor: Loren Rhoads

ABOUT EBB and FLOW: FINDING MY WAY BACK TO FAMILY

A touching meditation on the way that cemeteries can bring a family back together, flowing together and apart like waves on a shore.

MORE INFO

PUBLICATION DETAILS

The book Death’s Garden Revisited collects 40 powerful personal essays — accompanied by lovely photographs — to illustrate why people visit cemeteries. With your support, Automatism Press will create the book as a full-color ebook, 8×10 paperback, and as a hardcover.

Genealogists and geocachers, travelers and tour guides, anthropologists, historians, pagan priestesses, and ghost hunters all venture into cemeteries in these essays.

They discover that cemeteries don’t only provide a rewarding end to a pilgrimage, they can be the perfect location for a first date or a wedding, the highlight of a family vacation, a cure for depression, and the best possible place to grasp history. Not to mention that cemetery-grown fruit is the sweetest.

Spanning the globe from Iceland to Argentina and from Portland to Prague, Death’s Garden Revisited explores the complex web of relationships between the living and those who have passed before

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS

  • Cemetery writers/Genealogists/Historians: Anne Born, Barbara Baird, Carrie Sessarego, Carole Tyrrell, Erika Mailman, J’aime Rubio, Jo Nell Huff, Joanne M. Austin, Rachelle Meilleur, Sharon Pajka, Trilby Plants
  • Morbid Curiosity contributors: Benjamin Scuglia, Brian Thomas, Chris LaMay-West, George Neville-Neil, M. Parfitt, Paul Stansfield, Rain Graves
  • Horror authors: A. M. Muffaz, Angela Yuriko Smith, Christine Sutton, Denise N. Tapscott, E. M. Markoff, Emerian Rich, Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito, Francesca Maria, Greg Roensch, Mary Rajotte, Melodie Bolt, Priscilla Bettis, Rena Mason, Robert Holt, R. L. Merrill, Saraliza Anzaldua, Stephen Mark Rainey, Trish Wilson

AN EXCERPT

Like grains of sand scattered by waves along a shoreline, my family sometimes drifts apart as circumstance carries us from one another. At a time when sentiment did its best to overwhelm me, a photo taken in the tiny cemetery of a small town reminded me of the enduring connection I share with those I’ve loved and lost.

© MARY RAJOTTE

READER REVIEWS

“Each personal story is so unique and at the same time so relatable, in my opinion. I loved these glimpses into others’ relationships with cemeteries. It made me feel less alone, and more comfortable in the fact that my own relationship with cemeteries isn’t that out of the ordinary.”
– Chantal Larochelle

Rating: 4 out of 5.

“As lovely and thought-provoking as each author’s contribution might be, reading about death is, after all, a pretty intense and heavy experience. “Grave” subject matter, if you’ll pardon the pun. I found myself either delicately weepy or hiccuping with unexpected sobs after sitting with quite a few of them. It’s a profoundly affecting, powerfully beautiful collection.”
– S. Elizabeth

Rating: 5 out of 5.

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