Grace Cannot Stay Here
Opera Rose and Other Devotions is featured Thursdays at 6PM Central
I’m very excited and honored to share that Opera Rose and Other Devotions—
a triptych, novelette-length collection—
is being showcased on Southern Writers Guild over the next several weeks.
I hope you’ll read along.
And if you don’t want to miss an entry, you can subscribe for notifications.
I’m really floored by y’all’s response to last week’s installment of Headstone, the second movement of Opera Rose and Other Devotions. I truly appreciate you walking into this difficult space with Grace.
Last week, I sort of mentioned that I knew this story belonged on Southern Writers Guild because I think Grace is the epitome of a younger Southern widow. Relatively speaking, anyway. She’s not twenty-three—she’s a woman already carrying a life behind her.
While writing it, I realized that for a while, widowhood became the identity she wore. Not just grief, but the rituals of it. The weight of it. The responsibility of carrying someone’s memory forward.
But I also realized she can’t stay there forever.
This week, she’s still deep in it. But maybe she turns a corner.
The next installment of Headstone goes live tomorrow night on Southern Writers Guild at 6PM Central. I hope you’ll stick with me and see what it means for Grace to carry love, grief, memory, and still somehow keep living.
Also, the proof copy of Opera Rose and Other Devotions is supposed to arrive later today, which honestly feels surreal. Fingers crossed everything looks good. I’ll keep y’all posted.
And truly—thank y’all for reading, commenting, sharing, and encouraging me through this project. It’s meant more than you probably realize.
(The final movement in this series drops next week.)
Opera Rose and Other Devotions is a triptych of a life—Southern-rooted, grief-marked, and stubbornly alive.
Before she was Gray, she was Grace. A girl who learned early how to care for everyone else, how to keep her own heart tucked away beneath layers of old paint. Home was always a moving target—a series of temporary arrangements: a suitcase at a cousin’s house, an empty bed, a makeshift safe place of bean bags and Christmas lights.
In The Bluff, a young girl stands on the edge of something she doesn’t yet understand—watching the boy she loves dance with gravity, already learning how to survive.
In Headstone, a woman finally opens herself to love—and discovers that healing doesn’t mean you won’t be asked to pay for it. What follows is not just grief, but the unraveling of everything she thought she had already sorted through.
In Opera Rose, she is left with what remains: memory, ritual, and the quiet, deliberate choice to feel again—or retreat into the safety of what she knows.
This is a story about midlife becoming—not the kind that announces itself, but the kind that happens quietly, in kitchens, in cars, in the space between who you were and who you’re still becoming.
It’s for the keepers of prayer candles, the makers of analog mixtapes, and anyone who has ever had to learn that human emotion doesn’t run your life—it runs beside it. And that is more than okay.
—from Opera Rose and Other Devotions