Who by Fire: Novel
Acknowledgements
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To all my readers here on Substack and those who bought the novel in its first edition and to , who will publish a special edition through her Simon and Schuster subsidiary Empress Editions, I offer my heartfelt thanks. You have given me courage and belief in my writing.
I offer my thanks to my children, Ben and Sarah Hammerschlag, whose lives in their youths and adulthood have enriched my own. I may have come to the writing late while I raised them, but the gift of their lives made the wait worth it. These are words in their honor that are long overdue.
I thank Bonnie Riedinger, poet and friend, who has read the manuscript of this novel while it formed, who has encouraged me when I didn’t think I could write again. Without her help, this novel would not have come to fruition.
Marly Swick loved this book when she read it, when we exchanged manuscripts in the hope of helping one another. She tried her best to get the literary world of agents and big house publishers to take note of it. She gave me courage and is my friend.
Sarah Krouse, friend and former student, continues to teach me.
I thank Anthony S. Policastro, my publisher, for believing in me. In today’s world where so little gets published by the unknown literary writer, he took me on and has stood by me.
The psalm I use as epigraph and refer to inside the text was translated by J.A. Sanders from the Hebrew in the scroll discovered in Cave 11 at Qumran. I thank him for its use from his marvelous book The Dead Sea Psalm Scrolls, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1967.
Now and forever, I owe Del Persinger, my best friend, who understands and whom I thank with T.S. Eliot’s words, for Something given and taken in a lifetime’s death in love/ ardor and selflessness and self-surrender.
Love to all,
Table of Contents
Coming next: Interview with founder of Shelf Unbound: What to read next in Independent publishing.
Only Connect, all sections, and this serial novel come from my heart and soul—and ten years of research. I know the saying ‘time is money’: I couldn’t help but pursue this story. If you have already gone paid, my heart goes out to you with my thanks.
About the author
I’m the author of Who By Fire: a novel and The Woman Who Never Cooked, connected short stories, which won Mid-List Press's First Series Award, and the memoir (Re)Making Love, available here and for purchase on Amazon for the novel and the short stories and the memoir.
My short stories have won numerous literary awards. Experience? spans the worlds of journalism, business, education, fiction and memoir writing. High school English teacher who joined the business world, left me corporate job when I was 50 to earn an MFA degree. Was a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow before that program recently ended. Taught many years at George Washington University, worked with less-privileged populations at the D.C. library on how to get started writing.
I lived for many years in the Penn Quarter in downtown D.C. and now live, write and teach in Los Angeles, California.
What a journey, Mary! Moved and elevated by your delicate and evocative prose. So glad to have discovered you here. Into another intensity.
Oh, Mary, you’ve just made me cry into my keyboard—and not the dainty kind of cry, but the full-blown Diane Keaton-in-a-white-turtleneck gusher. Thank you for writing a book that cracked me open, rearranged my molecules, and reminded me why we publish in the first place. I’m the one who’s grateful (and let’s be honest, a teensy bit smug) to be helping Who By Fire into the world yet again with the kind of literary fangirling reverence it has always deserved. Now let’s go show the world what happens when a woman lights the match and walks into the fire herself. With admiration, mischief, and total joy, A