With Her Debut Novel "Slow Hope," Anita Swanson Shows that the Cycle of Child Abuse Doesn’t Have to Be Repeated in Later Generations
With all the media attention on the "not guilty" Michael Jackson verdict, victims of child abuse can feel disheartened about changing their lives. However, in her first novel "Slow Hope," author Anita Swanson shows how a child abuse victim can eventually heal. Swanson says, "I wanted it to come out that child abuse doesn't have to be generational. If you were abused, the cycle can end with you." Just as her book is being released, the author has taken the prestigious Taproot fiction award.
(PRWEB) June 15, 2005 -- With all the media attention on the "not guilty"
Michael Jackson verdict, victims of child abuse can feel disheartened about
changing their lives. However, in her first novel "Slow Hope," author Anita
Swanson shows how a child abuse victim can eventually heal. "If you're someone
like me who was abused, you don't get any extra points if you don't abuse your
own children," Swanson points out. "But with my book I wanted it to come out
that child abuse doesn't have to be generational. If you were abused, the cycle
can end with you." Yale University researchers Joan Kaufman and Edward Zigler,
Ph.D., have in fact reported that only 30% of people who were abused as children
go on to be abusers as adults.
In the novel "Slow Hope," the main
character's mother is terribly emotionally abusive, undermining her daughter
Anne at every opportunity. Emotionally damaged by WWII, her distant and
sharp-dressing father abuses Anne sexually while she is quite young and
physically as time goes on. This abuse in the family sets Anne up to take abuse
in her marriage to a flamboyant and attractive choir director and from the
Christian church.
"There are so many reasons why parents are abusive that
I didn't want to go into a lot of 'the why' this happens to Anne,' the author
explains. "Instead I focus on how she deals with this issue later in her married
life and eventually moves beyond it. How much personal perseverance she has. How
much ordinary courage. Anne knows there is a cleaner way to live, and she is
determined to break through the wall and get there."
Just as Swanson
begins the novel's promotion, she's learned that a piece of her short fiction
has been chosen for special recognition in a prestigious annual writing
competition. Her fictional essay "Crazy about Fish" (about a failing marriage)
has just taken the Taproot Literary Review's top fiction award over 45 other
works. "Her story was surprising... The directness. How she crafted it," Taproot
editor Tikvah Feinstein recalls about the essay. "It is exactly what we look
for, and exactly what is so hard to find."
It is Swanson's hope is that
her novel "Slow Hope" will reach women of various backgrounds who are too
frightened to change. "Readers need the encouragement of reading a story of
someone who made it through change, especially in these times," Swanson
reflects. "Sometimes women will do anything but think, such as drinking,
overeating, etc. They don't want to think about what is really going on in their
lives. I know, because for a long while I was one of them."
The newly
released novel "Slow Hope" (Ivy House Publishing Group, ISBN 1571974350, 250
pp., $15.95) is available through Amazon.com and www.slowhope.com. "Crazy about
Fish" will appear in the "Taproot Literary Review, Eucalyptus Edition 18,"
available thru Amazon.com by mid-July. Commenting on the novel, Maureen Murdock,
author of "The Heroine’s Journey," notes: "Swanson's writing is timely and
courageous." And Reverend Donn D. Moomaw, D.D., former senior pastor of the
Bel-Air Presbyterian Church, says, "The honesty, humanness, strength and
vulnerability all were so brilliantly recorded… I was hooked from the very first
page."
Swanson’s writing has been selected for such influential
anthologies as "Ship’s Log: Writings at Sea," "Whispers from Heaven" and "The
Chrysalis Reader." She is a commercial and SAG actress.
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/6/prweb251535.htm