Susan Beckham Zurenda on "No Way Out But Through"
About this Event
For this event, she will be joined in conversation by fellow award-winning author and IU professor Angela Jackson-Brown.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Two women of different generations—one scarred by an abusive teen marriage and the other by an alcoholic husband—come together to grapple with their inner demons and confront their untold stories.
When author Shannon Irwin meets Grace Ferrall and agrees to interview the younger woman and tell the story of Grace’s forced child marriage and harrowing youth, these very different women begin an unlikely relationship. Grace’s ordeal starts in Louisiana, with an alcoholic father and a mother whose mood swings are often intolerable. When Grace is barely fifteen and living in Oklahoma, her mother manipulates her into marrying Rafe, a scurrilous, older man. Pregnant at sixteen, Grace is soon living in a truck near a river in Oregon with Rafe’s cult-like family.
After years of abuse and multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, with the help of an unlikely ally, Grace escapes. But her newfound freedom is fragile, and she is forced to make impossible choices to protect herself and her two daughters. Trust builds between the women as Grace shares details she has never told anyone, while Shannon, with a daughter Grace’s age, and ridden with guilt about her former marriage, reveals the dysfunction in her own life and the remorse she suffers.
A searing and compassionate exploration set in present-day Pawleys Island, South Carolina, and 1990s rural Oklahoma, No Way Out but Through is inspired by the real life of an ordinary woman who survived extraordinary circumstances.
ABOUT SUSAN BECKHAM ZURENDA:
Susan Beckham Zurenda taught English for thirty-three years at the college level and at the high school level to AP students. She is the author of the Southern literary novel, Bells for Eli, which received several awards including first place for Best First Book—Fiction in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her novel The Girl from the Red Rose Motel was the recipient of the 2024 Patricia Winn Award in Southern Fiction and first place winner for Southeast Fiction in the 2024 Independent Publisher Book Awards, among others. Zurenda has won awards for her short fiction, including the South Carolina Fiction Prize, twice. The author lives in Spartanburg, SC. Learn more at www.susanzurenda.com.
ABOUT ANGELA JACKSON-BROWN:
Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright, and the Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University Bloomington. She also teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She is the author of Drinking From a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down, The Light Always Breaks, Homeward, and Untethered. House Repairs won the 2021 Alabama Library Association Poetry Award. When Stars Rain Down was a finalist for the 2021 Langum Prize, longlisted for the Granum Foundation Award, and shortlisted for the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. Homeward was shortlisted in 2024.
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