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Saturday, February 11, 2023

Spotlight of Missing by Cornelia Maude Spelman


PHOTO SOURCE:
TYPORAMA

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MISSING
CORNELIA MAUDE SPELMAN
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ALL INFORMATION IN THIS POST IS COURTESY OF LAURIE MARIE OF LAURIE MARIE PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE AUTHOR.
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A special debut that released earlier in 2022 - MISSING by Cornelia Maude Spelman - about the author's quest to discover what happened to her mother after she was sent away to a mental institution.
 
MISSING unfolds like the mysteries the author's mother once loved. 
 
The author explores family legacies, memory, and heirlooms. 
 
In piecing together the story of what happened to her mother, Spelman speaks to our desire to know our own families and creates a roadmap for how to begin. 
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July 15, 2022  
Ingram Content Group 
FOR LIBRARIES: Libraries (ingramcontent.com)
JackLeg Press
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JackLeg Press employs an environmentally sustainable publishing model and a rigorous editorial process to bring the best new and familiar voices into the literary world.
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PRAISE FOR MISSING:

“A long, intimate journey; the very honest accounting of the way old pain works its way through the generations. One of the fascinations of the whole story comes from the vicarious satisfaction of seeing someone who actually does discover every bit of what is still discoverable, and then who dares to speculate with candor about how it all fits together, not to mention how it's affected her.” –Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After

 “I gobbled the book right up and loved every minute.  I love the details, the interweave, the suspense, the perfect tone of curiosity, enthusiasm, melancholy, wonderment, wistfulness, longing.  What a marvelous book.  It’s as if she tapped all our longing for knowing more about our crazy, mysterious, haunted families.  It’s a book we all can live in.” –Naomi Shihab Nye, author of 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

“The book reads like a novel…a remarkable emotional history of a family...lovely, real, and handled sensitively.” –Angela Jackson, novelist and Poet Laureate of Illinois

Missing is an extraordinarily moving account of a daughter’s search for her mother.  The perfectly apt images carry the strong emotional current of the book from beginning to end.” – Kathleen Hill, author of She Read To Us In the Late Afternoons 

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MORE PRAISE - TAKEN FROM THE AUTHOR'S AMAZON PAGE:

"Cornelia Spelman's gentle, lyrical prose belies the haunting nature of her story, a searing, honest search for the lost pieces of her family's story. Missing is a book that both comforts and astounds. It's memoir writing at its absolute finest." ─Alex Kotlowitz

"A long, intimate journey; the very honest accounting of the way old pain works its way through the generations. One of the fascinations of the whole story comes from the vicarious satisfaction of seeing someone who actually does discover every bit of what is still discoverable, and then who dares to speculate with candor about how it all fits together, not to mention how it's affected her." ─Rosellen Brown

The book is spellbinding. I'm in awe of the research and subsequent detailing that goes into it. It's a moving tribute to that richness William Maxwell talks about in human experience. The American Experience is another strong subject-the losses incurred by our peripatetic lives. I sense the necessity behind the story being told-not just the author wanting to know better her own mother and understand her, but cutting the tethers of the self and soaring into the reader's interest in universal questions. I really couldn't stop reading it, and I'll keep it with me for a long time to come.-Carol Frost

I have spent every spare minute of the last few days reading the lovely pages of Missing. I felt utterly privileged to read about this family in such fascinating detail. One reason that one wants to read a memoir is to be in the company of the narrator and I think Cornelia Maude Spelman does a wonderful job of guiding us through the story, of making us to want to board the night train and go on that journey. I admire the honesty with which she allows herself to be a character in the story and the delicacy with which she treats the other members of her family. A beautiful and enlightening book. ─Margot Livesey

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ABOUT MISSING:

"Cornelia Spelman's gentle, lyrical prose belies the haunting nature of her story, a searing, honest search for the lost pieces of her family's story.
 
Missing is a book that both comforts and astounds.  It's memoir writing at its absolute finest." 
 
Alex Kotlowitz, author of Never a City So  Real and There Are No Children Here "A long, intimate journey; the very honest accounting of the way old pain works its way through the generations.  
 
One of the fascinations of the whole story comes from the vicarious satisfaction of seeing someone who actually does discover every bit of what is still discoverable, and then who dares to speculate with candor about how it all fits together, not to mention how it's affected her."  Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After
 
**BOOK SUMMARY TAKEN FROM THE BOOK'S AMAZON PAGE** 
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cornelia Maude Spelman (a former therapist and an acclaimed children’s author with millions of copies sold worldwide) has exhaustively researched her mother -- a cigarette-obsessed mother of five who loved mysteries and became one herself when she was banished to a nursing home after what was perceived as a paranoid episode (she accused her own son of trying to kill her).

Cornelia Maude  Spelman M.S.W., is a writer, an artist, and  former therapist. She is the author of picture  books for children, including a series called  "The Way I Feel." 

Her work has been  translated into ten languages and sold over  two million copies worldwide. 

Relying on diary entries, telegrams, conversations with those who knew her mother, and interviews with the medical staff who would come take care of her up to her death, Spelman has crafted a memoir that is part fascinating history, part page-turning mystery – an attempt to answer the question:  can we ever truly know our  parents? 

Along the way, she finds out what happened to her long-lost brother. 

Cornelia recently published an essay in Zibby Mag about passing down the story of her mother to her children and spoke with KWMR about finding the past.

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MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cornelia Maude Spelman, MSW, was a therapist with children and families before turning full-time to writing and art. She’s written eleven books for children that help them manage emotion and difficult life situations.  Her The Way I Feel series of books for young children, described by reviewers as “sensitive” and “compassionate,” have sold several million copies and been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, German, Arabic, Turkish, Danish, and Russian. (Photo, above, at a 2013 Cleveland Children’s Museum exhibit, “I Feel,” featuring her books.) She is also the author of the best-selling Your Body Belongs to You.

Cornelia’s memoir, MISSING, a quest to understand the impact of an early tragedy in her mother’s life and its effect on her own life–what Cornelia terms a family’s “emotional legacies”–and the fate of a troubled son who was missing for many years–has been called “memoir writing at its absolute finest” by Alex Kotlowitz. It is now available in paperback  https://JacklegPress.org.

Cornelia has earned awards from the Illinois Arts Council, was a finalist for the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction award from Salem College, and was awarded the Bernard De Voto Fellowship in Nonfiction at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

A daily diary writer for many years, Cornelia is currently writing Volume 250. Her diaries, those of her mother, and personal papers and photographs of her grandmother and great-grandmother and other family members are archived at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University. “The library’s manuscript collections and books document women’s lives and women’s issues currently and retrospectively. Especially well represented are suffrage and women’s rights, social reform, family history, health and sexuality, work and professions, culinary history, and gender issues.” (Schlesinger Library’s description of itself)  http://www.radcliffe.edu/schlesinger_library.aspx .

Hear an interview with Cornelia about the importance of emotion: http://albertwhitman.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/awc-podcast-series-cornelia-maude-spelman/

A mother and grandmother, Cornelia lives with her husband, writer and professor Reginald Gibbons, just outside Chicago.

https://vimeo.com/729760337 One-minute video trailer of MISSING

**THIS INFORMATION TAKEN FROM THE AUTHOR'S WEBPAGE**

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Find more about Cornelia here:  https://corneliaspelman.com/

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2 comments:

  1. Sounds quite interesting.

    Thanks for stopping.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Elizabeth, thanks for thinking of me. Am back now - sort of. See you soon. Carole

    ReplyDelete