BITTERROOT

THE COVER REVEAL. . . AND MORE

Nope, that’s not my cover. It’s a misdirection—and possibly a Bitterroot-adjacent clue. A clue about what, you might ask?

Short answer? How the creepy stories of my childhood merged with my subsequent interests as a creator of fiction.

I was born in Austria. The country that gave us Mozart, Empress Sisi, Hitler and Schwarzenegger. Freud spent most of his life there too, but he’s a Czech product by birth. So, I’m in good company with my frame of reference: a city (Vienna), steeped in complicated history, archaic monuments to order and obedience (in kindergarten, I recall the punishment of a classmate included strapping the boy to a chair via a tether, encouraging taunts in line with public humiliation. The kid’s name was Philip, and ever since, that name conjures the boy’s tear-stained face).

Back to our Struwwelpeter, poster child of slovenly naughtiness as conceived by author Heinrich Hoffmann. Peter is meant to be a caution: with wild hair and unclipped nails he’s a slattern of a boy who suffers consequences similar to Philip’s taunting as his mates ridicule him for his unkemptness. And that’s just the titular tale. Within the German children’s canon lie other stories of consequence: a thumbsucker having his digit chopped off, the starvation death of a picky eater, the immolation of Harriet, who played with matches, and this little racist tale, that conjures a certain now-defunct chain restaurant.

Struwwelpeter aside, we now make the leap to my upcoming novel, BITTERROOT, which will hit shelves May 21^st, 2024. I submit to you, the amazing cover:

Note the little skull nestled in the roots therein. The logline: A forensic artist confronts a crime against her own family, while MAGA politics, racism and violence rage in a small town in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho, promises a bit of violence, does it not? Yes—without spoiling—there will be some of that. But for me, one of the major components for my interest in building this story around my main character, Hazel, has to do with her work as a forensic artist. Talk about rabbit holes!

When researching this profession, I learned that there’re three main disciplines in forensic art: composite art or imagery, postmortem or facial reconstruction, and image modification and enhancement. It was the facial reconstruction part that I found most intriguing. Building a whole face from the sum of its disembodied parts. And as a tangential discipline, my Hazel (and by extension, I) had to have an obsession that drove her to forensics, and after rooting about the web, I decided on Kusôzu: a Japanese tradition celebrating the phases of a decaying corpse.

Dark, yes?

I’m no Heinrich Hoffmann, but I do see value in, what psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (also an Austrian) calls “the uses of enchantment.” Bettelheim (who, post-mortem, has been accused of plagiarism and fabrication), believed that dark fairy tales are useful in helping children navigate existential issues such as jealousy, fear of death, Oedipal conflicts, separation anxiety and so on.

Violence, Bettelheim posits, already exists within us, and instead of sanitizing the monsters in our subconscious, dark stories (and uncomfortable art in general) offer a lens into our own lived dread, thereby liberating us from denial and shame.

As a child, my own terror lay with dismemberment. Possibly the thumbsucker story propelled it, but it also gave me the opportunity to parse that fear through imaginings. I recall summers in my Austrian grandmother’s attic with my sister, scribbling morbid abstracts about maimed children which we anthologized in a sheaf entitled, “This is How it Happened.” Legs, arms, hunks of flesh all sacrificed; consequence of inattention, trespass, misbehavior of some type or another.

In Bitterroot, my canvas has expanded to include generational trauma, accidental as well as disease-inspired death, and abject injustice. A “This is How it Happened” for grown-ups. Hazel, my heroine, is charged with recalibrating her and her brother’s legacies. Despite the horrors they’re confronted with, they must overcome a growing movement that would like them to disappear.

Over the next few months, you’ll see more of this book. Excerpts, blurbs, maybe a fun prompt or two. Even a giveaway! I’m really pleased with how it turned out, and I hope you’ll forgive my occasional SPAMMING going forward.