How does a 5-year old girl navigate deep loss after a tragic car accident leaves her motherless? Charting a life-long process of sifting through grief and rediscovering hope, Memoirs of a Mask Maker honors the women who stepped in to help the girl stitch together a beautiful life-a grandmother, a neighbor and a pharmacist in Japan...
Years later, when the global pandemic forced Kathryn Graven and everyone else inside, she responded by sewing hundreds of colorful masks for family, friends local mail carriers, friendly and not-so friendly neighbors, teachers, nurses and complete strangers. Each one included a note of encouragement as she discovered that making masks required not only artistic skills but re-learning how to tend grief and reclaim joy.
Now, as global society faces immeasurable individual and collective grief, these lessons are gathered for a new crop of motherless daughters facing grief, and to begin a new conversation with readers about how we gather our tears and mend the tears.
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
ISBN: 9781788649544
Number of pages: 302
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
Memoirs of a Mask Maker is a powerful, moving testament to meeting monumental loss with passion, determination and outsized creativity. In this tour de force memoir, Kathryn Graven delivers a paean to the ability of artistic endeavor to transform grief into beauty. Again and again, she shows how choosing love over despair can transcend cultural differences and ancient wounds, creating healing connections, a matrix within which to build a triumphant, generous life. — Susan Deborah King, poet, author of Coven, One-Breasted Woman, Bog Orchids and Moon Dance.
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