A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens

by Laraine Herring

A ghost is not what you think it is, says Raven. A ghost is a commitment. When Laraine Herring receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven, setting off a magical journey into complicated grief, inherited trauma, and ancestral healing. As she struggles with redefining her expectations for her life, she slips further and further underground into the ancestral realm, where she finds herself writing a play directed by her father-as-raven. Raven says, It will be a cast of only you and me and my mother and my father, and we will speak until there are no more words between us. And then you can decide the ending. Tick, tock, write. A Constellation of Ghosts takes the reader into the liminal spaces between one world and another, where choices unspool into lives, and the stories we’ve told ourselves fall apart under the scrutiny of multiple perspectives like flesh from bone, reminding us that grief is the unexpected ferryman who can usher all of us back together again.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Spirituality, Grief

236 pages, Paperback

Published October 19, 2021

About the author

Laraine Herring holds an MFA in creative writing and an MA in counseling psychology. Her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in national and local publications. Her fiction has won the Barbara Deming Award for Women and her nonfiction work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She currently directs the creative writing program at Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona. She is a member of the Author’s Guild and the American Association of University Professors, and she volunteers with Hospice Family Care.

Reviews

[Leslie Lindsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly unique slant to a traditional genre, A CONSTELLATION OF GHOSTS is just that--a cacophony of voices from the past, present, and maybe future--surrounding strong themes of life, death, grief, ancestry, shunning and estrangement.

A CONSTELLATION OF GHOSTS (forthcoming Oct 19 2021 from Regal House Publishing), is unlike any other, inviting you to think deeply about your ancestors, loss/death, your body, and more. Like a murder of crows or an unkindness of ravens, A CONSTELLATION OF GHOSTS is just that: a boisterous and magical exchange of voices in the dark, from within and with...out. It's a bit poetic in a sense, but also marries several distinct aspects of the author's life: a battle with colon cancer, her unresolved feelings about her father's heart attack (and past polio diagnosis), a history of being in an emotionally and physically abusive relationship, as well as ancestral trauma. There's a lot to unpack here and it's artfully done.

When Laraine receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a talking raven. Here, we travel along with "Raven" and "Me" as the author has a sort of conversation, a two-person play with her father-as-raven. Sounds a little...weird? Magical? It is.

I found the reading experience ofA CONSTELLATION OF GHOSTS almost meditative in nature, like being in Middle Earth, a liminal space of unconsciousness ; I could almost hear the drum beat. We surface to the 'present,' which takes place largely in hospital room as Herring is receiving surgery and treatment for her colon, her recovery, and then back down--and in--we go.

Alongside these conversations with father-as-raven, we learn about Herring's ancestral past in North Carolina, the farm/land that raised generations of Herrings, the creek 'that gave dad his polio,' her grandmother's fundamentalist Christian views, more.

And yet, A CONSTELLATION OF GHOSTS is about shunning and estrangement, displacement, and more. Herring posits that perhaps grief is a great unifier, that in the afterlife, or deep work within and after a loss, one can mend the fabric of our being.

I was reminded of the work of Gayle Brandeis in her THE ART OF MISDIAGNOSIS: Surviving my Mother's Suicide, but also a touch of Helen Phillips' AND YET THEY WERE HAPPY, a bit of Kat Chow's SEEING GHOSTS.

For all my reviews, including author interviews, please visit: www.leslielindsay.com|Always with a Book.

Special thanks to Regal House and the author for this review copy. All thoughts are my own.

[Melissa Grunow · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is absolutely stunning. Laraine Herring has done was so few can: written an engaging and thoughtful speculative memoir. A CONSTELLATION OF GHOSTS is a master class in the genre.

[Cathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. So many aspects of it related to me, especially the emotional experience of dealing with a cancer diagnosis and surgery. The structure of this memoir and the inclusion of the ravens add so much, and while I know Laraine and consider her a friend, I think anyone would appreciate this story.

[Diana Renn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Just . . . wow. This beautifully written, page-turning memoir completely changed my understanding of the genre -- and the refreshing possibilities of the speculative memoir genre in particular. It also made me think deeply about people I have lost, family, and the way that relationships can endure - and even evolve - after a loved one has passed. There are so many intriguing paths in to this book -- grappling with a cancer diagnosis and going through treatment, living with grief (and reconfiguring a relationship to grief), dealing with inherited trauma, freeing oneself from abusive situations, and becoming a writer (and experience a creative rebirth). As soon as I finished reading, I wanted to start over again right away, and I'm sure on a second read I would gain even more insights and appreciation for this story. The speculative elements (father and other deceased relatives returning as ravens?) absolutely worked for me - the constellation of ghosts, the family members, are all riveting characters with distinct voices, and the truths they reveal about the family dynamics - and also about life (and death) - really resonated with me. Please read this book. Let Laraine Herring's amazing writing work its magic on you. You will come away from the final page looking at the world a little differently, and perhaps with greater compassion for others and oneself.

[Candi Sary · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have become obsessed with an old Snoopy cartoon. Snoopy and Charlie Brown are sitting on a pier looking out over the water. ‘Someday, we will all die, Snoopy!’ says Charlie Brown. ‘True,’ says Snoopy. ‘But on all the other days, we will not.’ My story lies in all the other days. The hospital, my diagnostic codes, my survival statistics will not write my story.” What a magical memoir this is! After Laraine Herring is diagnosed with colon cancer, her deceased father returns to her as a raven, and their imagined conversations guide her through her grief and healing—physical, emotional and ancestral healing. It’s much more philosophical than story driven and yet its intensity makes it a page-turner. The writing is SO BEAUTIFUL! I highlighted so many passages and really felt like I was on the journey with the author. It’s called a speculative memoir and it’s explained in the author’s note in such a wonderful way, I want to share the quote: “I am more than a touch witchy, and I gravitated to fiction first because it was a place I could plant all my ghosts. But then those ghosts stretched into my regular life, and to write non-fiction without including the very elements that make my own life’s lens sparkle would have been the biggest lie of all.”

[LC Reading · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gobbled this up on vacation and couldn't put enough thoughts together to write a review, but it's a very worthwhile read, even though some things didn't entirely gel with me- but that's the nature of the deeply personal memoir, even when it uses ravens and ghosts to illuminate and move the story.

What will really stay with me is the crafting of an intergenerational memoir, tracking the traumas and pains that travelled through parents and grandparents and stick hard in this body. That's giving me a lot to think about.

[Jenny Forrester · Rating 5 out of 5]

What's the best way to grieve? We could conjure ghosts, write and re-write our stories, collect history, quantify, create rituals, let go of that balloon, promising us comfort, at long last. Maybe our fathers will become ravens and speak to us until we no longer need them. Maybe we can sing a death lullaby, somehow putting our grief to rest. Through time, from her father's quarantine and affliction with polio, to the horror of cancer, and myriad violences, Herring asks and answers the question of how to let go. She commits to it. A generous literary act.

Herring offers up this creative gift of her grief and a family portrait, lyrical and magical and real. She writes, listening to the ghosts of generations, as they speak of the epidemics, the day to day realities of their lives, and to violence. With poetic and philosophical might, Herring seeks to interrogate grief and answer the question, how do we let go?

Poetic. Magical. Philosophical. A lyric and creative memoir of grief. A commitment to going on living.

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

i really really enjoyed this

the choice to break up the normal memoir format and add in a play was refreshing - and it makes me excited to see writers playing with form in a genre that oftentimes follows a strict format and rules

it also very much infiltrated my brain and my thinking for a bit - i started feeling energies and thinking deeply about my inherited history - which was kinda disturbing to say the least

i think this book will stay with me for a while, and i think it is definitely worth reading (especially if you’re willing to open your definition of memoir a little further than usual)

[J.G.P. MacAdam · Rating 5 out of 5]

What drew me to this book was the fact that it called itself a "speculative memoir" as well as the fact I am myself in the pre- pre- draft stages of just such an endeavor. My own Speculative Memoir idea is something of an amalgam between the formula of Ta-Nehisi Coates' letter to his son, Between The World And Me, and the substance of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and the past-is-presentness and amnesia-ghostliness of The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Much of the speculative element in Herring's A Constellation of Ghosts arrives in the form of a raven who talks to her in the voice, the spirit, of her heartattacked father. In her Author's Note she states that she possesses a witchy disposition and tends to see the world in a much more imaginal way (to borrow the term from another book I'm reading about religion). However I found myself most absorbed in the sections where she talks quite straightforwardly, in typical memoir, nonfiction fashion, about having most of her colon removed due to cancer.

I appreciated the raven-as-father insistence of the book, the theater-like interjections of the raven, herself-as-daughter, the raven's father, the raven's mother, everyone with speaking parts, but the most mesmerizing passages were the ones where the speculative was imbued within clear, obvious, inexorably modern and hyper-rational reality. For instance, heading into the cancer treatment clinic post-op, feeling the claustrophobia of the walls of the clinic, the maxim to place herself in the role of the patient rubbing up against her own personality trait of being eager to please, and her having to "trust her gut" despite it almost literally killing her and force herself not to take one doctor's prognosis but seek a second opinion, and the double doors sliding open, and she seeing herself on the floor as a little girl, defiant, unafraid, in Red Riding Hood clothes, telling her fifty-year-old self as she's walking into the clinic that she can handle this—that, for me, is how a speculative memoir can work best. The past doesn't just become present, it affects our decisions, whispers in our ear like a sprite to dare choose the less traveled road. Ghosts, aliens, goblins, God, spirits of the woods, witches, Jesus, archangels and fallen angels and djinns, are real. They have a bearing upon what is, yes, indeed, a very true story about how we live our lives, and try to stay alive, in this country we call reality.

A few other takeaways: Illness changes you. Herring: "Once an illness bites you it leaves its saliva in your blood." Death lies within each of us, from the moment we're born, though usually dormant, and unthought of, until we get sick, or tired, or begin doing the math and realize that we're almost certainly past the halfway point. "I was born with Death inside of me, like every other living thing..." A worthwhile read.

[Wendy Fontaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is unlike any other I've ever read. A bit strange at first, it quickly settles into a narrative that weaves deeply emotional and expertly rendered personal essay with something more imaginative - something that feels like a a re-envisioning of the author's past to help heal present. My favorite parts were the stories of Laraine's journey through cancer diagnosis and treatment and coming to grips with an abusive relationship. The hospital scenes are very compelling and heartbreaking, yet at the same time so thoroughly empowering.
The section where Laraine revisited her old apartment was absolutely stunning. I could not read it fast enough! Even there the author used a creative approach to heal the past.
This memoir sits in a category of its own (at least for me, as this was a new reading experience for me). It explores how we grieve, how to care for ourselves as we are grieving, how trauma moves from one generation to the next, and how we have to talk and tend to ourselves in order to stop further migration of that trauma. I absolutely love this book.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ghosts, just like those of us with shells of skin, need a constellation. 1 Corinthians 15:41 says something similar: “There is the radiance of the sun and differing radiance for the moon and the stars. Even the stars differ in their shining” (The Passion Translation). So just like Herring’s Raven, Hunger Visions is a ghost. It is a whale-shaped ghost, telling the story of who I want to be and why. A whale-shaped constellation in my gut leads the way, a star shining by starlight, one by one. There is the open, haunting call of the whale radiating in my fingers as I type. I want to be this girl who tells the truth by layering stories over stories.

[Patricia]

I had to read more than 50 pages of this book before I settled into enjoying it, for it is most unusual. Eventually, however, I came to trust both the authorial voice and the strong character voices. As a writer, I was intrigued by the "speculative" aspects and the archetypal arc. A Constellation of Ghosts is actually one of those books, I'll read again because of it's many layers and my initial inability to apprehend how it was all working together. I know a second read will feel very different, but even a first read was moving and thought provoking and pushed me to expand the edges of what I want to know, see, and feel.

*I don't rate books. I can't make the method work for me.

[Finn Schubert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gayle Brandeis' review of this book said that it “will rock you to the marrow and leave you changed,” and I have to say, this was my experience of this book, a book that is both magical--following her cancer diagnosis, Laraine's father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven who not only speaks, but smokes Pall Mall cigarettes--and so real it settles in your chest and won't leave, even when you're done reading. Laraine explores themes relevant to all of us--grief, ancestral trauma, family, ghosts, and healing.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unusual chronicle of personal and ancestral healing through Herring's work in the imaginal realm. Very interesting to see done with the written word what I have been doing with mixed media/collage formats in creative depth work groups. Herring captures well what is rarely a linear process, that peeling away of trauma's legacy and recollection of aspects of self lost, or in hiding. All the more powerful for me, having "grown" a 4" polyp necessitating a colon resection at about the same age... We're lucky to have her as part of our Central Highlands community.

[Dahlma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this memoir which uses speculative techniques to enhance the story. After an unexpected diagnosis of colorectal cancer, the narrator is rocked to her core. She begins by taking care of the practicalities of her situation; treatment, family and professional responsibilities. She seems astounded into silence until she is visited by the Raven spirit of her father and other family members. From them, the reader and the narrator get a broader perspective on her life. The language is beautiful, the narrative hypnotic. Well done.

[Beth Bonness]

Where to begin with this book ... Using a raven and stage play format between essays pulled me in as Laraine explored grief. So many favorite quotes captured on my iPhone:

"I have nowhere to look but the past, which does not die, but reinvents itself, masquerading as new thoughts, laughing at our feeble attempt to quiet its fury,"

"...we rarely consider what stories might be lurking in the understory of our operation system."

Thank you Laraine for allowing us to come along the journey of your grief and speculate how others process it too.

[Carole Duff · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We all have two lives, and the second beings when we realize we have only one.” This quote attributed to Confucius begins Laraine Herring’s speculative memoir about past ghosts who haunt her during her cancer treatment. Her journey is filled with commitments: to ghosts (her father’s and his parents’), cancer, home, memory, family, place, illness, abuse, travel, and finally to living. This is an amazing book—I’ve never read anything like it.

[Michele Dawson Haber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Constellation of Ghosts is a luminous, insightful, and bold memoir about the continuum of life and loss. I couldn't put it down. Each new chapter had me gasping at the author's fearless innovation and imagination. I've been curious about speculative memoir and found this book—my first foray into the sub-genre—sublimely rewarded my anticipation. Brava, Laraine Herring! This book was an inspiration for me.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I agree with the many reviews that say this book is like nothing you’ve ever read or will read. This isn’t a book that you can’t put down though. At least it wasn’t for me. In fact, I think putting it down helped me internalize the messages and really follow the story. What I can say: this speculative memoir rocked me. It’s a book I will read again and again for the many messages contained within it. A masterpiece on every level.

[Mariah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was drawn in by the beauty of the cover and the speculative aspect of the memoir! This is poetic prose that is so carefully crafted into a lyrical manner to talk about death, the grief, and how we choose to cope. Whether or not you believe the raven is her father is irrelevant because you get lost in how this story is shaped around healing.

I discuss some problematic areas in this book on my blog on 4/15 https://brujerialibrary.wordpress.com/

[Sheridan Dillan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book!

Mind blown… Amazing combination of surreal and real. The author’s treatment of intergenerational trauma is ingenious. This is a book I will definitely be re-reading for it’s beautiful poetry, message of resilience, and reminder that we can all find ways to manage the ghosts we carry.

[Shari · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't stopped thinking about this since I read it. The story is about so many layered things -- grief, illness, loss, healing, reckoning with the past -- and the language and structure work so beautifully. I don't want to try to explain much more than that, but this was a powerful, immersive reading experience and I can't recommend it highly enough.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is truly stunning. It is imaginative and heart-wrenching and gorgeously written. Laraine Herring is a pioneer of the speculative memoir genre and this book illustrates the possibilities of the form.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love memoirs with unusual structures, and this book fits the bill! The weaving of the Raven stories in with Herring's fight with cancer fascinated me. Her writing is lyrical and poetic. And I love the idea of speculative memoir to get across emotional material in a creative way.

[Susan Wadds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enter the liminal space between fact and the dreamworld. A devastating diagnosis. A long-dead father returned in raven feathers to counsel and comfort.
I loved this book - its longing and lyricism, its honesty and its other-worldiness. A memoir like no other.

[Jeannine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This unconventionally written memoir communicated directly with my psyche in ways that were healing.

[Lori Goshert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard this author speak on a webinar, and I immediately wanted to read her work. This is the first speculative memoir I have read, and I loved it.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can find a review of this book on Rain Taxi Review of books, here

https://www.raintaxi.com/a-constellat...

[Ronna Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It will haunt me and I will love the haunting. Haunting is a commitment.
Also, I would love to go to a museum with the author's mother.

[Amanda Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting memoir that is memorable and authentic. I admire the challenging writing for at and the journey the author shared. Thank you