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Local Author Night: Memoir

Local Author Night: Memoir

R.J. Julia fully supports local and independent authors and takes pride in their success.  It is our pleasure to dedicate this evening to local and independent authors, each unique in their writing styles and stories.  Please support our local writing community and join us for a wonderful evening of story-telling and friendship.

All books will be available for sale during the event.

Please register for this FREE event here.

 

Shawn Elizabeth George, My Journey to Live from the Inside Out

In this compelling memoir, Shawn Elizabeth George is transparent about her struggles with anxiety and depression, and other stumbling blocks along her journey in life. She lived with fear as her core, seeking anything outside herself to bring her peace. When she fell into her deepest pit of depression, hitting a wall with her spiritual walk with yoga, she was turned upside down.

It was when she began to mingle with her Christian roots she started gaining traction back in her life. When she started infusing God’s love into her marriage, parenting, finances, and more, her life was transformed.

Shawn’s story will encourage you to stop living defined by your struggles and inspire you to live from the inside out with love as your core. 

Shawn Elizabeth George is passionate about her faith, her family & connecting with others; encouraging people to grow into the person they were made to be. She loves to share inspiring messages to infuse hope into the hearts of others. Shawn is a stay-at-home-mom, author, blogger, and inspirational speaker. She lives in her hometown in Connecticut with her husband, three children and their black lab.

 

Sherry Horton, Witness Chair: A Memoir of Art, Marriage, and Loss

The poignant story of a marriage as well as a gallant journey into loss,Witness Chair is both a beautifully written personal memoir and a compassionate guidebook to the art of living in the face of suffering and death. In his last years, artist Christopher Horton, the author's husband, worked on the design of sixteen "chair" maquettes in preparation for an art installation to commemorate the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

In reflecting on her long marriage and the difficult months before her husband's death from leukemia, author Sherry Horton draws on the unsettling yet powerful significance of the various chairs, seeing her life and the death of her husband through the concepts of accusation, displacement, rumor, captivity, and heaven. Leah Leatherbee describes Witness Chair as a "quietly searing account of the unspoken," and Bernie Siegel soberly remarks: "In love's service and the process of life and healing, only the wounded soldier can serve. Read Sherry's words and understand why."

Sherry Horton is a retired English teacher. At the University of Hartford (Connecticut), where she wasdirector of the Center for Reading and Writing, she taught in the writing program and co-authored a textbook challenging traditional approaches to composition entitled Reading Our Histories, Understanding Our Cultures (Allyn & Bacon 1999; 2003).

A co-founder of the East Hill Writers’ Workshop (www.easthillwriters.com), she is currently working on her mother’s oral history of the 1920s and ‘30s in the remote Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Mother of two sons and twice a grandmother, she spends as much time as she can outdoors. She lives in Unionville, Connecticut.

 

Cindi Michael, The Sportscaster’s Daughter

Millions of people watched sportscaster George Michael each week on the Sports Machine, including his daughter Cindi. Cindi Michael appears to live a charmed life: she’s happily married, has a successful career, and is a loving mom to two wonderful children. Yet she longs for a father who hasn’t spoken to her in twenty years, and even secretly watches him on TV when the longing becomes unbearable. 

When Cindi was eleven, her father fought for sole custody of her and her siblings, raising three children on his own despite being a bachelor and rock ’n’ roll DJ in New York in the 1970s. But with his rising fame as the host of the popular show Sports Machine, his 80-hour-a-week work schedule, and his second marriage, the close relationship Cindi shared with her father began to crack; she did everything to earn his love and attention, but for perfectionist George, it was never enough―and when she was eighteen and a freshman in college, in a burst of anger he told her never to come home again. 

 As the years went on, Cindi struggled to steel her heart while still remaining hopeful that they would one day reconcile, just as her father did with his own dad, and transcend painful family patterns that span generations. Candid, moving, and ultimately hopeful, The Sportscaster’s Daughter is a family story of forgiveness, faith, and strength.

After moving from Maryland to Switzerland to Texas to Michigan, Cindi Michael now lives in rural New Jersey, not far from where she spent the golden years of her childhood. She’s happily married to an Englishman and is a die-hard football and swim team mom. Her day job as a technology and big data expert takes her to clients around the world, and she is the author of five business and technology books. She holds a BA in English from the University of Maryland and an MBA from Rice University. She has won two creative writing awards for her short stories.

 

Roni Beth Tower, Miracle at Midlife: A Transatlantic Romance

They first meet in Paris in the spring of 1996. David is a divorced American attorney living on a converted barge moored on the banks of the Seine; Roni Beth is an empty-nested clinical and research psychologist working from her home in Connecticut. Now in their fifties, both have signed off on loving again―until they meet each other.

Miracle at Midlife tells the inspiring story of Roni Beth and David’s intense and transformative transatlantic courtship. Along the way, David the loner, living amid the beauty, freedom, and pleasures of Paris, brings Roni Beth, a responsible and overextended professional haunted by earlier loss and trauma, back to her core as a woman, while she helps him reclaim connections that tie him to a larger world. They wrestle internal demons (mostly hers) and external threats (friends, family and different perspectives) as they share adventures in their respective worlds.

Throughout their journey, stories of courage, joy and integrity bring hope and delight to those who wonder how romantic love appears and evolves; inspiration to people in mid-life who, knowingly or unknowingly, have completed a chapter in their lives and are ready to move on; and comfort to anyone who longs to wrestle and conquer the demons of fear, born of history or of the unknown, and win. Testimony that love is real.

Roni Beth Tower grew up in Akron, Ohio, majored in religion at Barnard College, and earned her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Yale University. Later in life she taught clinical psychology to graduate students at Teachers College, Columbia University.

As a psychologist, she published seventeen articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, six book chapters, three entries in Blackwell’s The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychology, work for hire in three books edited by Mark Levine and Stephen Pollan, and one book review; presented her work at national and international professional conferences; was President of American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery and on the boards of Connecticut Psychological Association and Yale Alumni Fund. Miracles at Midlife is her first memoir. She and her husband live in Tarrytown, New York, within easy visiting distance of their six grandchildren. She loves yoga, dance, quilting, and bringing comfort and joy to people.

Please register for this FREE event here.

All books will be available for sale during the event.

Event Date: 
Tuesday, February 7, 2017 - 7:00pm EST
Event address: 
R.J. Julia Booksellers
768 Boston Post Road
Madison, CT 06443