These Winter Months: The Late Orphan Project Anthology

This is the introduction and a chapter of an anthology of 25 stories written after the death of a parent. It is an honest assessment of how the death of a parent impacts the child.

The fact that the child is also an adult is what makes these stories so rich. They are filled with regret, with questions left unanswered, with late admission of the depth of the parent's love, or the ever-present understanding that this relationship, between parent and child, is one of the most complicated of our lives: sometimes satisfying, often incomplete. The stories cover a broad and varied view of the days - and even years - after a parent's death. A period referred to here gently as "these winter months."

Prompted by a need to express the impact of the death of my father in the fall of 2015, The Late Orphan Project is a vibrant celebration of real life. Poetry, essays, journal entries - each writer facing the days after the services, the burials. Some days are better than others, some events are easier than others, some anniversaries are impossibly hard.

The idea that the impact of this close loss is felt somehow less by an adult losing an older person is easily refuted.

Forthcoming: September 2016
Book Launch: October 8, 2016, Q.E.D. Astoria