For author Sandell Morse what started out as a research project became an unexpected rediscovery of identity and faith. Morse had a long career as a writer of essays published in magazines, but this project led to this, her first book at the age of 81. In this haunting memoir, she uncovers long silenced stories of bravery and resistance among the civilians of a small town in France during WWII, and in turn finds deeper meaning and understanding of her own Jewish heritage.
There are times in each of our lives when we make a journey that takes us beyond the physical place we’ve ventured in order to reveal a different, greater sense of ourselves and our place in history.
On May 1, please join Sandell Morse for a book launch and conversation with MWPA Executive Director Gibson Fay-LeBlanc. Morse will also take questions from the audience.
To RSVP and receive a link to this event on Zoom, please fill out this Google Form: https://bit.ly/Sandell_Morse
To order a signed copy of A Spiral Shell, please visit PRINT: A Bookstore.
This event is co-sponsored by Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Mechanic's Hall, and PRINT: A Bookstore.
Sandell Morse is the author of THE SPIRAL SHELL, A French village Reveals its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II. She has published widely in literary magazines including Ploughshares, the New England Review, ASCENT, Fourth Genre, Solstice, and Brevity. Morse has won awards from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and for Best of the Net. She has been an associate artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and been awarded residencies from Wildacres and Hewnoaks. She lives in Maine.
PRAISE FOR A SPIRAL SHELL
“The Spiral Shell is an evocative, probing, heartfelt memoir, as rich in character and detail as the best fiction. There are all kinds of reckonings here: personal, historical, spiritual. There is a vivid present as well as a vividly imagined past, a voice that is at turns charming, grieving, outraged and wry. Sandell Morse illuminates with wisdom and grace Eli Wiesel’s timeless injunction that, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
—Alice McDermott, author of A Bigamist’s Daughter, Charming Billy
“The Spiral Shell depicts two vivid journeys, one inward, as Sandell Morse explores her own identity as a Jew and one outward, as she pieces together the history of French Jews under the Vichy government. Each journey is fraught with reversals, full of unexpected details and betrayals at many levels. Secrecy, Morse discovers, is still rife around the deportation of French Jews. This is a necessary, illuminating and beautifully intelligent memoir.”
—Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture and The Hidden Machinery, essays on the craft of writing