Homepage:
Background photo of Blackwater Wildlife Refuge (below)
oh, and I bought the domain: http://www.dredgingthechoptank.com/
Across the top in green or red font like book cover: Dredging the Choptank
Buttons underneath – clouds if I can – same font? - with links to home, text, history, contact pages
In text boxes below (same font?):
Chilling and mysterious folklore comes to life in this supernatural thriller about a writer investigating ghost legend in a town in denial. Stakes are raised when the writer protagonist discovers a Native American burial ground under an Eastern Shore jail and begins hallucinating black shapes and undulating snakes. This poltergeist fable is based upon the spirit myth of Dorchester County as well as the author’s personal ghost narrative. Like a parable with a little bit of dangerous truth, except for the final chapter, the stories are true.
There’s a ghost inside all of us, just dying to get out.
Fall 2010 News:
· Local Authors Reading, Wednesday, September 29, 7pm, Barnes & Noble, Oliver Street
· Reading, Tuesday, October 12, 5:30pm, Red Canoe Bookstore, Harford Road
· Upload of the Dredging the Choptank trailer on YouTube, a film by Anthony Scimonelli and featuring Kimberley Lynne, B. Thomas Rinaldi, Dana Whipkey and Dave Kiefaber, September 28
Thumbnail of book cover and link to Amazon
Text page: Text box over background image
Chapter One, Haunted Hunting
Once, in a place that seems outside time, I wrote a ghost walking tour for a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. As I collected local folklore, a Cambridge resident named Mr. Travis told me this ghost story that happened in his hunting lodge. Hunting’s popular on the Eastern Shore; it’s rural enough for its populace to still use weapons to catch dinner.
“It wasn’t much,” Travis said of the lodge. “Just a couple of bedrooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. Up on stilts because of all the flooding.” The house stood on its stilts on isolated Aisquith Island in the haunted, southern underbelly of Dorchester County. Aisquith hovers only a few feet above sea level, floating between miles of wet fen and the Honga River. Before the lodge was built, its low woodlands were the sacred ground of a Native American Indian graveyard. Before John Smith showed up in 1608, indigenous people had developed a millennia of civilization, and, in the history of this country, live conquering people plow dead people under.
Travis says he regularly hears children laughing when there’s nothing but cattails and marsh holes for miles, and every time he returns to the lodge, the salt shaker has inexplicably spilled over. Things happen there.
One of Travis’ friends stayed with his young son in the lodge. The son got up in the middle of night to get a glass of water in the kitchen. The mattress spring squeaked, and an owl hooted outside. In the living room, a strange man rocked in the rocker. He wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans and had a black plait of braided hair. He was strange only because the boy didn’t know him. He thought perhaps the man was one of his father’s hunting buddies; the ways of the adult world were still a mystery to the boy.
“Hello,” said the boy. The rocker creaked. The man seemed to have shape and weight, like a living man.
The man nodded, and when the boy returned from the kitchen, the man was gone.
The boy tapped his sleeping father. “Where did the man go, Dad?” He asked. “The man in the living room. He looked so real.”
They searched the lodge house and found no one. They looked outside into the wavering, dark pitch of the Eastern Shore night. One lone green ball of light glided over the undulating marsh grass and then vanished. The son asked to leave.
There’s no sanctuary from the past; not even our living rooms are safe. I’m scared to look into my Baltimore living room late at night for fear of seeing even briefly into another dimension. My friend Korinne once slept on my couch and awoke to see a man seated in my arts and craft era sliding rocker.
“Didn’t that freak you out?” I asked the next morning, aghast.
“No,” she said, smiling and sipping coffee. “He seemed very happy to be here.”
“What’d he look like?” I stuttered.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said calmly. “Older guy, white, I think he was wearing a dinner jacket.”
I realized that my ghost stories and Travis’ ghost stories match the collective archetype, that they’re not singular but fall into the same pattern as the rest of humanity.
Korinne was born in Detroit and lives in New Hampshire. She has the long blonde hair of a mermaid and the terrible gift of prescience. She says that something big is going to happen to me, but something happens to everyone.
An audio posting of me reading a different chapter (which one?) – if I can record that in time
Image on top of gravestone in Christ Church graveyard?
History Page:
Text box over background:
From Chapter Six of Dredging the Choptank:
I asked my friend Terri the difference between a historian and a folklorist. She put down the newspaper she was reading and said, “A tie.” She’s from Brooklyn, and she speaks her mind. Even when she’s sleepy, she has fire in her eyes.
Text box over background:
Author Kimberley Lynne has been writing since she was nine. “I began writing to figure out reality and I’m still trying to parse that out,” says Lynne.
Lynne is a graduate of Loyola University with a B.A. in English/Fine Arts. She is currently enrolled in University of Baltimore’s M.F.A. Creative Writing and Publication Design program. Thirty-five productions of her plays have been produced in Baltimore, Washington D.C., New York and Minneapolis. Lynne is a member of Actors’ Equity and the Dramatist Guild.
In spring 2003, the Dorchester Arts Council commissioned Lynne to write a ghost walking tour of High Street in Cambridge, Maryland. (That ghost tour is still operating out of the DAC.) From the collection of all that folklore, Lynne developed her first novel, Dredging the Choptank, the story of a writer who is swept away by a river spirit.
Loyola University’s publishing house, Apprentice House, published Dredging the Choptank in May 2010. Lynne hopes one day to be sold in her alma mater’s bookstore.
Contact page: need text box? Image of Blackwater?
Image of me reading over background image
Links to:
YouTube and trailer
That was very detailed. You are super prepared. I keep having arguments with my boyfriend about my page. (I'm calling that my process.)
ReplyDeleteI think it will be great. So excited for you! And the reading, as I've said elsewhere, was awesome.