Living Inside Headstone
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.
Like The Bluff, Headstone was never supposed to be a story I shared.
But unlike The Bluff, it didn’t begin as a character study.
It began as me trying to work through something.
I don’t know if you’d call it a journal entry exactly. Maybe that’s part of what it was. But somewhere along the way, it became a story.
And it became one that affected me in ways I wasn’t expecting.
I tend to insert myself emotionally into all of my writing. I think most writers probably do. And I pour my heart and soul into every story I write.
But this one was different.
This was the first story I’ve written where I truly did not know where it was going while I was inside it. Literally living inside it.
I wasn’t writing toward an ending. I couldn’t even see the ending.
I was just moving through it section by section, emotion by emotion, trying to understand what the story was becoming while it was happening to me in real time.
And there were moments while writing it that I had to stop completely.
Because I was overwhelmed by it.
I’ve never really experienced writing that way before.
Headstone became six sections somehow. And when I finished it, I still wasn’t sure anyone else would ever read it.
But eventually I realized this story belonged in Gray’s backstory.
Maybe it always did.
The first half of Headstone goes live tomorrow night on Southern Writers Guild.
(Part 2 of Headstone debuts 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