Today my long-time twitter friend and recent publishing sister at last gets to reveal the cover of her first book, Message from a Blue Jay.
Faye Rapoport DesPres is a very special person. I've rarely met anyone as sensitive, as caring, as she is. The way she lured a feral, little white cat into her house and safety, the way she told us about it on Facebook, made her love and compassion shine as bright as a candle in a dark and stormy night.
Faye is – of course – an outstanding writer: She has the ability to seek out the wounds we others try to hide and gloss over, and examine them in the cruel light of day. Her writing is gentle, and yet relentless. It has clarity, and yet never gets too obvious.
Please meet my dear friend, Faye Rapoport Des Pres.
A Message From the Author
Imagine arriving at a train station in the middle of nowhere. On your lap lies a suitcase, and in that suitcase you carry your past. Metal brakes screech, the train slows and stops, and you struggle as you carry the suitcase toward the door and down the stairs to the platform. The whistle sounds and the train pulls away as steam rises from the tracks. You survey the landscape beyond the station and think: Where am I? What now? What happens next?
This is how I arrived at what I call my “middle decade,” the decade between forty and fifty. The suitcase I carried was heavy with memories—not just recollections of my youth and adulthood in America, but also inherited memories from an immigrant family splintered by the events of World War II. Born against a backdrop of displacement, loss, and ultimately hope, I was raised in upstate New York. Over the years I moved from New York to Boston, to England, Israel, Colorado, and eventually back to Boston. I gathered life experiences as if they were pieces of a puzzle and hoped, without realizing it, that those pieces would eventually form some kind of whole. In retrospect I can see that my desire was to find what many of us seek: love, a sense of peace, and a home.
The essays in my book emerged from the pieces of that puzzle that inspired—or haunted—me most. They were crafted in an effort to fashion a big picture from the fragments of a restless life. I examined events in both the present and the past, the history of my family, the start of a second marriage the same year my mother-in-law’s life was drawing to a close, body image, aging, and the passage of time, and the connection I have always felt to animals. I explored these things while at a stage of my life where I had seen a lot of things but still had—as I have now—a great deal more left to see.
You will meet colorful characters (some human, some not), visit places from Canada to Bermuda and the Middle East, and witness the conflict between the desire to examine one’s life and the ultimate need to let go of it all in order to live in the moment. Perhaps you will find, as I did, that the natural world and the creatures who inhabit it—from a humpback whale to an astonishing blue jay—can provide insight in unexpected ways.
As I prepare for the journey toward the next stage of my life, it is time to pack up my suitcase. But because I examined its contents so thoroughly during this phase I feel ready to leave some of the weightier things behind and to move forward with a lighter load.
We’ll see how it goes. The train is pulling in and the whistle is sounding. The future is waiting. Care to join me?
— Faye
From an astonishing blue jay to an encounter with a lone humpback whale, travel with debut author Faye Rapoport DesPres, as she examines a modern life marked by her passion for the natural world, unexpected love, shocking loss, and her search for a place she can finally call home in this beautifully-crafted memoir-in-essays.
Three weeks before DesPres' fortieth birthday, nothing about her life fit the usual mold. She is single, living in a rented house in Boulder, Colorado, and fitting dance classes and nature hikes between workdays at a software start-up that soon won’t exist. While contemplating a sky still hazy from summer wildfires, she decides to take stock of her nomadic life and find the real reasons she never “settled down.” The choices she makes from that moment on lead her to re-trace her steps—in the States and abroad—as she attempts to understand her life. But instead of going back, she finds herself moving forward to new love, shocking loss, and finally, in a way that she never expects, to a place that she can almost call home.
Readers who love the memoirs and personal essays of such rising contemporary writers as Cheryl Strayed, Joy Castro, and Kim Dana Kupperman, will appreciate Faye’s observational eye, her passion for the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it, and her search for the surprising truths behind the events of our daily lives.
Buddhapuss Ink LLC Announces Cover Reveal—Message From a Blue Jay
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 9, 2013
Buddhapuss Ink LLC, a NJ based book publisher, revealed the cover today for debut author, Faye Rapoport DesPres', Spring 2014 title: Message From a Blue Jay: Love, Loss, and One Writer's Search for Home. The book, a memoir, is beautifully constructed from essays DesPres wrote about her "middle decade," from forty to fifty.
“Readers who love authors like Cheryl Strayed, Joy Castro, and Kim Dana Kupperman, will find a new favorite author in Faye." said MaryChris Bradley, Publisher of Buddhapuss Ink LLC. “We are thrilled to be publishing this literary memoir whose words beat strongest when the author is surrounded by nature."
Message From a Blue Jay: Three weeks before her fortieth birthday, nothing about her life fit the usual mold. She is single, living in a rented house in Boulder, Colorado, and fitting dance classes and nature hikes between workdays at a software start-up that soon won’t exist. While contemplating a sky still hazy from summer wildfires, she decides to take stock of her nomadic life and find the real reasons she never “settled down.” The choices she makes from that moment on lead her to re-trace her steps—in the States and abroad—as she attempts to understand her life. But instead of going back, she finds herself moving forward to new love, shocking loss, and finally, in a way that she never expects, to a place that she can almost call home.
Faye Rapoport DesPres was born in New York City, and grew up in rural upstate New York. Her maternal grandparents emigrated to the US from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s and settled in the South Bronx. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, arrived in New York as a teenager after World War II.
She has spent much of her writing career as a journalist and business/non-profit writer. She earned her MFA from Pine Manor College, where she focused on creative nonfiction. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Animal Life, Trail and Timberline, and other publications. Her personal essays, fiction, and poetry, have been published in Ascent, Superstition Review, and Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, among other journals, magazines, and anthologies. Currently, DesPres is an adjunct first-year writing instructor at Lasell College. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and their rescued cats.
BUDDHAPUSS INK LLC is based in Edison, NJ. Founded in 2009, it is led by Publisher, MaryChris Bradley, a 29 year veteran in the book industry. “Our company mission is to ‘Put readers first’ and we are committed to finding and growing new authors at a time when the major houses seem to have turned their backs on writers who don't already have a well-established track record or movie credits to their name.”
Bradley can be contacted at 732-887-2519 or Publisher@BuddhapussInk.com.
Website: www.BuddhapussInk.com
Company blog: http://buddhapussink.blogspot.com
@Buddhapuss on twitter Buddhapuss Ink LLC on Facebook
Links for Blue Jay Cover Reveal
Official Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/MessageFromaBlueJay
Publisher's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Buddhapuss
Author's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/faye.rapoport.despres
Publisher's website announcement: http://www.BuddhapussInk.com
Author's website: http://fayerapoportdespres.com/
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