deranged: three stories

A finalist for the 2016 Indie Book Award for short fiction. Listen to her interview with Caroline Casey on KPFA Pacifica Radio here.

The Inuit say that every story has a yua, a spirit, its person. Through the stories of Anna, Sophie, and Louise, Deranged honors the Spirit of grief, redemption, restoration, and the invisible realm.

“In this terrible, gleaming, penetrating work, we learn what it is to be animal again, and so to be fully human. Nora Jamieson’s true and remarkable voice is so old and so aligned with the old, old ways, it is startlingly new. This is a Literature of Restoration. This is the way of sacred language. This is prayer manifesting in blood, bone, terror, and beauty. This is the language of Creation. These words recreate the holy world and offer it from a fierce heart. Who would have dared to imagine that The Cailleach might be among us again.” Deena Metzger, author, Ruin and Beauty and La Negra y Blanca: Fugue and Commentary

“Like myths, Nora Jamieson’s wild, beautiful, and holy stories resonate with truths from a time when nature and all living things were inseparable. Feeling ‘deranged’ in the modern world, her characters struggle against the forces that separate humans from each other, from the other animals, from the natural world, from the sacred. While the narrative voices bristle with unflinching honesty, they offer solace with the possibility of redemption.” Anne Batterson, author, The Black Swan

“Nora Jamieson’s new book, Deranged, is a basket woven from materials found in the wild and lined with animal fur; a nest for three short stories, strange but true. The stories feature unforgettable old women who live in the shimmering place between civilization and wilderness, women who are in the business of recollecting, reckoning and remembering. Anna, Sophie, and Louise travel the beaten paths of their personal past and keep going, picking their way through the brambles of bygone times, nose to the ground, sniffing for the ragged remnants of the old ways that will bind the sorrows left behind by history.” Patricia Reis, co-editor of Women’s Voices, author of The Dreaming Way and Daughters of Saturn

“A perfect little book about three imperfect women and their life stories, Deranged is a literary gift from a talented author, Nora Jamieson.” Camilla Stein Review

“The writing of these stories is poetic and lush, drawing the reader into the presence of the story and the thoughts and ideas expressed by each mind provoked by their circumstance. We follow coyote, woods, rivers and footfalls of those who walk the earth seeing and hearing. There is a silence in the women’s lives and we are privy to their interpretations of all that is part of their world.” PatriciasWisdom.com

“The crucial task of remembering that Jamieson explores falls largely to women, women who are still living a life in regular contact with a deep sense of home, home as in homestead, a place where families have lived for many decades if not centuries, where the trees are as familiar to them as the bowls in the kitchen. This embodied connection to place and rooted memory is increasingly rare, but Deranged creates a longing for it, and an appreciation for those individuals, fictional and otherwise, who remember for all of us.”   Catherine Svehla, in Depth Insights, Spring/Summer 2016

Weeping Coyote Press, 2015
Paperback, 158 pages
ISBN: 978-09962195-01
List price $14.00
Available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or through your favorite bookstore.

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