My book was lost in the holiday mail traffic but I wanted to share this with you regardless. I have a guest post by Kathryn down below also. Go check out the other reviews on the tour!
“Kathryn Craft will send personalized, signed bookplates to anyone who requests one! Just email your name and snail mail address to: kathryn@kathryncraft.com”
“Kathryn Craft will send personalized, signed bookplates to anyone who requests one! Just email your name and snail mail address to: kathryn@kathryncraft.com”
January 2014
ISBN 9-781-4022-8519-6
$14.99
Trade Paperback
Contemporary Fiction
Now that her dreams are in tatters, Penny must find a way to rebuild what is broken
All
Penny has ever wanted to do is dance--and when that chance is taken
from her, it pushes her to the brink of despair, from which she might
never return. When she wakes up after a traumatic fall, bruised and
battered but miraculously alive, Penny must confront the memories that
have haunted her for years, using her love of movement to pick up the
pieces of her shattered life.
Kathryn
Craft’s lyrical debut novel is a masterful portrayal of a young woman
trying to come to terms with her body and the artistic world that has
repeatedly rejected her. The Art of Falling expresses the beauty of movement, the stasis of despair, and the unlimited possibilities that come with a new beginning.
Author Information
Kathryn Craft serves on the board of the Philadelphia Writers
Conference.. She is also a contributing editor of the Blood-Red Pencil
blog. She lives in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, with her husband. Visit her
website at www.kathryncraft.com.
_______________________________________________
Kathryn Craft
Feb. 8 guest post for Dew on the Kudzu
Describe your process for writing this novel.
If you asked me at a cocktail party why it took me so long to write
The Art of Falling, I might say it was a fast draft mess
that took eight years to pull into workable shape. We’d have a good
laugh; you might pat me on the shoulder and say, “Try not to do that
again.”
If
pressed, I might add that I usually need three unrelated elements to
spark the kind of creative leaps that will start a story percolating,
and in this
case those were 1) a newspaper account of a woman who walked away from a
14-story fall with only a broken arm; 2) an anecdote about a man with a
never-say-die spirit whose body was failing from heart disease, but
whose hospital roommate was a young man with
a flagging spirit whose body would not succumb when he put his head in
the oven, blinding him instead; and 3) our society’s growing obsession
with the body beautiful. Like any other author, I put those notions in
the mental pot and let them stew.
But you still wouldn’t know the key to my success.
Here
I’ll share the most important thing about my process, the part that saw
me all the way through to publication: I was powerless to quit.
The Art of Falling was more than a path to publication for me. It was the source of my healing.
I had to tell this story.
I turned to writing fiction
after my first husband’s suicide, sixteen years ago. I had a
lingering need to use my writing to form a more hopeful story from the chaos of those events.
Anyone
familiar with the stages of grief knows of its anger, and with our sons
only eight and ten at the time, I had a slow burn of it that for years I
just couldn’t
purge. I sensed I needed to forgive him, and that the path to
forgiveness lay in empathy. Yet I’d always been an optimist, looking for
the silver lining in every situation. I had no way to relate to someone
getting so low that they’d consider self-destruction.
Penelope Sparrow was my path.
I
placed her in a harsh environment—in a dance world with even harsher
expectations about a woman’s body than those of our celebrity-driven
society—then watched as
inner conflict about her imperfections imploded her dreams and
relationships. I dismantled her support system. Gave her talent and
passion and exclusive training then whittled away at her faith and
resolve with years of rejection. Then I gave her a taste of
success, a taste of love, then yanked both away at the same time.
Finally, at that point, I thought,
maybe.
But
I wasn’t sure. So when Penelope wakes up at the start of the novel in a
Philadelphia hospital room, and learns that (just like the woman in the
clipping!) she had
landed on a car parked below her fourteenth story penthouse, what
happened on that balcony remains a mystery that Penelope must reckon
with.
There
were times, while writing this book, when my anger held Penny back, and
I’m sure there were times her anger held me back. But I had faith in
her, because when
I made Penny’s loss of movement physical, an odd thing happened: she
started to fight back. I knew then that I could not only bring her back
from the edge, but from the depths of her fall.
How
did I know I could do that? Because, while writing about Penny’s
journey of healing, I too was returning from the depths of my grief.
###
Follow the tour!
Jan 20
|
Review + Guest Post
| |
Jan 21
|
Review + Guest Post
| |
Jan 21
|
Giveaway
| |
Jan 22
|
Review + Guest Post
| |
Jan 23
|
Review + Interview
| |
Jan 23
|
Giveaway
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Jan 24
|
Review
| |
Jan 24
|
Giveaway
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Jan 25
|
Review + Giveaway
| |
Jan 26
|
Review + Guest Post + Giveaway
| |
Jan 27
|
Review + Guest Post
| |
Jan 28
|
Review
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Jan 29
|
Interview
| |
Jan 30
|
Review
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Feb 1
|
Review
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Feb 2
|
Guest Post
| |
Feb 3
|
Review
| |
Feb 4
|
Review + Interview
| |
Feb 5
|
Review
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Feb 6
|
Review
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Feb 7
|
Review
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Feb 8
|
Review + Guest Post
| |
Feb 11
|
Review
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