Does Your Fabulous Book Have A Life After It’s Published?

The “Afterlife” of The Fix: A Father’s Secrets, A Daughter’s Search

The question “What does recovery mean to you?” was written on a hand-out I recently received at a recovery meeting where I was invited to present the proposal, “Expressing Our Creative Selves With Step Four of the Twelve Steps,” a workshop program I hope to share at recovery centers in my area. Though I was just a guest at the meeting, I was asked to respond to the question along with everyone else. It was a good way for all of us—staff members, regulars, drop-ins, and guests—to introduce ourselves.

So why did I suddenly feel so insecure, as if I were back at my very first recovery meeting eight years ago? Why was it so hard for my brain to assemble my definition of recovery? Aren’t I a veteran at recovery now that I have written a published book about being the adult daughter of a father who suffered from heroin addiction? Not only that. After KiCam published my book six years ago, The Fix: A Father’s Secrets, A Daughter’s Search, they gave it further life by arranging for me to be interviewed by talk-show hosts and to write articles for magazines emphasizing different slants and approaches to my topic, how a parent’s substance use disorder affects the entire family.

So why, I asked myself again, am I so beset with the jitters? The truth is I will always be in recovery, and this meeting I was attending, intent on offering what I had to share, was also where I needed to be in order to deepen and sustain my own recovery.

“I am the adult daughter of a father who suffered from heroin addiction,” I announced when it was my turn. “I was seventeen when my father died of an overdose of bad stuff, and I still feel guilty about never having confronted him about his problem. I’m recovering from excessive self-blame.” Of course, I realize now, at age 78, how silly it is to still feel guilty about a problem I had no control over. Nevertheless, the emotions do not always grow up with the adult.

The first way I thought of giving my book a life beyond publication was to think of what would have helped me as a teen in my pressure-cooker family. I wished back then I could have brought out the shameful secret I was harboring inside myself. I wished I could have lifted my burden and found other teens who wanted to share what they were going through. Writing and keeping a diary was my way out, but surely other kids had other outlets for letting out steam. I never let my secret out until very late in life, after I retired from teaching, when I wrote and published the book I thought would magically change my life forever. Inevitably, though, the year one’s book is published does not freeze the flow of time. As the initial fanfare of publication receded and the huge emotional weight I had been carrying lifted, I asked myself: What’s Next?

With my book in hand, I thought of helping teens in my community. Writing helped me; maybe other forms of art could also be healing. So, I organized workshops in different kinds of creative expression, workshops in storytelling, improv, music making, painting, paper maché, dance, cuisine, and others, to channel teens’ fears and anxieties.

My book became my credential to show to parents, teachers, guidance counselors, grants, and funding sources. Collaborating with a committed group of artist-teachers, a museum that wished to host our project, and a school district that wished to address teen despair during the opioid epidemic, I coordinated Creative Outlets, Finding Your Voice Through Arts. I led a writing workshop using selections from my book as prompts. For four years, and especially during COVID when our program went online, we engaged hundreds of teens.

Life is always changing. I had to stop coordinating this fulfilling program that required full-time hours. My husband of thirty-six years had a stroke, and I became his full-time caregiver. Once again, my insecurities reared up. I never had children of my own; I was too afraid of repeating destructive family dynamics. My husband’s children were already adults. Could I be the competent caregiver my husband needed? Would he have enough trust in me to keep him alive and safe if I had never been a mom? My worries piled up.

I steadied myself by going back to my book and re-reading it. This time, I connected my adult self in recovery to the teenager I was in the book. And here I thought I was over that trauma of my father’s death! But no, I’m still thinking my husband’s death—from aspiration pneumonia—is on me. Isn’t there something more I could have done to prevent my husband’s dying? The emotions do not always grow up with the adult.

So here I am now, proposing a series of three workshops to recovery programs, not only to strengthen my own recovery but also to prepare for an exciting new venture: turning my coming of age story into a movie that has the potential to reach wider audiences.

In the workshops, Expressing Our Creative Selves With Step Four of The Twelve Steps, participants use prompts from The Fix to use their inner talents and skills to clarify self-doubts, externalize them, and transform them into positive, creative forms of expression: writing, visual art, song, improv, storytelling, video, and others. It’s a mini-Creative Outlets for adults in recovery.  One thrust of the workshops will be for participants to represent in their own ways a “searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves” (Step Four of the Twelve Steps).

I was fortunate to find a script writer interested enough in my book to turn it into a script. By combing my mind of all those people I knew throughout my lifetime who had anything to do with film production, after one year, I finally found two women filmmakers who want to produce The Fix. They have interviewed me to find fuller answers to questions raised in the book and the film script. And they have asked me to identify the scenes in the book and the film script that are the most significant turning points in my life. In the recovery workshops I hope to lead, I will ask the participants: If you were to make a movie of your own life, what 5 turning points are the ones that stand out?

And what about you, the reader of this blog? If you made a movie of your own life, what 5 experiences would you select as having the strongest impact? Now try arranging them in a storyline, and you have the beginning steps for creating a narrative feature film.

Feeling good enough about myself to follow through with the decision to make this movie is my sign that happily, I’m still on the road to recovery. Hopefully others will benefit from learning about my journey.

 

 

About the Author:

Sharon Leder is the award-winning author of The Fix: A Father’s Secrets, A Daughter’s Search. Sharon taught English, women’s studies, and Jewish studies on several campuses of the State University of New York before beginning the second half of her life as a fiction writer and poet. As a teacher, she wrote books and articles on women writers, on the literature of the Holocaust, and on women in academia. An earlier draft of her novel, The Fix, was a finalist in Merrimack Media’s Outstanding Writer Award (2015). As an advocate for addiction recovery, Sharon provides vital resources to teens and adults in the Cape Cod area who have been impacted by addiction, offering support, guidance, and providing a space that encourages creativity as a way of healing.

Celebrating Excellence: Intertwined named Finalist in the American Legacy Book Awards

We are thrilled to share that Intertwined: A Mother’s Memoir, by Kathleen English Cadmus, has been named a finalist in the American Legacy Book Awards! This honor is a testament to the dedication and talent of our authors.

Intertwined delves into the intricate and deeply personal journey of motherhood, offering readers an intimate glimpse into the joys, challenges, and profound connections that shape the maternal experience. Through Kathleen English Cadmus’s eloquent prose and heartfelt reflections, readers are invited to embark on a transformative journey filled with love, resilience, and profound wisdom.

The recognition of Intertwined as a finalist in the American Legacy Book Awards is a testament to the book’s remarkable literary merit and its power to resonate with readers. It is a celebration of the universal themes of love, family, and the bond between mother and child that permeate the pages of this extraordinary memoir.

As a publishing company committed to sharing powerful and inspirational stories, this recognition reaffirms our mission to bring important stories to readers. We are proud to have played a part in bringing this exceptional book to life, and we extend our heartfelt congratulations to Kathleen for this well-deserved recognition. Her ability to craft a narrative that is both deeply personal and universally resonant is a testament to her talent as a writer and storyteller.

We also express our gratitude to the American Legacy Book Awards for providing a platform to acknowledge and honor exceptional literary works that enrich our understanding of the human experience.

To our readers, we invite you to discover Intertwined: A Mother’s Memoir, a book that has captivated the hearts and minds of the American Legacy Book Awards judges. Experience the beauty and emotional depth of this memoir. It is a journey that will leave an indelible mark on your heart and soul.

Thank you for your support and enthusiasm for our authors and their work. You can purchase a copy of Intertwined here. And if you prefer audiobooks, you can purchase that here.

You can find a full list of the finalists and winners for the American Legacy Book Awards here.

Salvation on Death Row cover

Author Post: How 3 Heart Attacks and 2 ‘Cabbages’ Changed Me

John Thorngren headshotJohn T. Thorngren, author of Salvation on Death Row: The Pamela Perillo Story, has survived three heart attacks and two open-heart surgeries and has a more open, loving heart to show for it. Here’s how those experiences shaped John’s view of life.

How Three MIs and Two ‘Cabbages’ Changed Me

I must assume that anyone who has had heart problems, especially open-heart surgery, becomes a changed person. Poems, literature, and even our speech reflect that the heart is the center of our being, both literally and figuratively. One does not undergo having his heart chopped on without questioning his mortality and the purpose as to why he is still alive. Oh yes, after any life-threatening surgery, especially open-heart, one notices that the sky is “bluer,” the birds sing louder, flowers are gorgeous—all of the above—and yet depression is often a side effect. Mortality is now a striking reality, and one wonders what to do in what little precious time that might remain.

As a survivor of three heart attacks and two open-heart surgeries, I know too well those mixed feelings of gratitude and terror, the sense of wanting to do more with my life but perhaps not being entirely sure where to begin. So like many before and many to come after, I began searching for my Creator and found redemption in Christ.

Life-altering Experiences

I had my first heart attack—or myocardial infarction (MI)—in 1980 at age thirty-nine and married with two children. Shortly after that, I had a coronary artery bypass graft, a CABG, otherwise referred to as a “cabbage.” In my case, it was a Cabbage X3—three grafts. Within ten years, I suffered two more heart attacks and then a Cabbage X4.

A cabbage is a brutal operation. You are cracked open like a crab being prepared for consumption. Veins are removed from your legs and grafted in to replace those pieces clogged with plaque. The life function of your heart and lungs are being performed by a machine. You are officially a dead robot. Has my life changed from those experiences? How could it not?

Every Life Is Precious

Salvation on Death Row coverThe most notable change is a deep understanding that every life is precious and a special gift from God. I found this in my search for God while spinning the dial on my car radio. A televangelist, Dr. D. James Kennedy (deceased), was preaching on abortion, a devastation about which I felt indifferent. I listened. The passages he quoted from Jeremiah about knowing him before he was in the womb tweaked my spirit. A turning point. I knew instantly that life from conception is precious. And later by another divine series of events, I found life on Death Row equally as precious. This is the subject of the book, Salvation on Death Row: The Pamela Perillo Story, about Pamela’s redemption, her scheduled execution and her reprieve, and about the three other women with Pamela on Death Row for twenty-plus years, who also found salvation but were put to death by the State of Texas.

No entity, no state, no government, no kingdom, no person should ever take the life of a prisoner in revenge. Even after the first homicide recorded in Scripture, the killing of Abel by Cain, God did not inflict the ultimate punishment on Cain. Although Scripture gives the state the right to execute, it does not give us (those whom the state represents) a mandate. How can we call ourselves Christians and have no compassion, no mercy, and no realization for the sanctity of life?

‘A Lamp to Those Searching’

Does it take a sickness, a calamity, a fall to the bottom—such as what Pamela and her three fellow Death Row inmates experienced—to realize our purpose on earth, to comprehend the meaning of our life as well as that of others? No. I have seen others come to redemption through a simple curious nature, to find out what will fill that spiritual hole that we all have.

Pamela and I hope this book is a lamp to those searching, to those bound in drugs, and to those who are indifferent about the death penalty.

John Thorngren, a Texas writer and graduate of the University of Texas, has enjoyed a myriad of life experiences, working everywhere from basements to boardrooms. He is a songwriter published in Southern Gospel and an author of several patents, technical articles, and a nonfiction book on probability and statistics, in addition to Salvation on Death Row. John and his wife of more than five decades live in Shady Shores, Texas, on Lake Lewisville, where their livestock freely roam the grounds.

The Fix: A Group Study Guide

The FixSharon Leder’s novel, The Fix: A Father’s Secrets, A Daughter’s Search, is such a personal story, it took her some thirty years to complete the book.

Why go to such great lengths? Because Sharon knew in her heart that her story of growing up the daughter of a heroin addict would resonate with readers of all ages and backgrounds.

In particular, Sharon sought to connect with young readers, children and teens who are experiencing the confusion, pain, sadness, and anger common in households battered by addiction.

As a companion piece to The Fix, Sharon created a brief study guide designed to stimulate reflection, discussion, and even role-playing in a communal setting. This could be a classroom, an addiction-recovery group, or a support group—any gathering of people who want to better understand the causes and effects of addiction in order to find peace and healing.

To access the two-page study guide, simply click here: The Fix Study Guide.