ANN GOSSLIN

… Countdown to the Launch

So excited to announce that my debut novel, THE SHADOW BIRD, a psychological thriller, will be published on July 15th by Legend Press.

Three months into her new role as a psychiatrist at a clinic in New York, Erin Cartwright is asked to evaluate the case of a man who murdered his mother and sisters at the age of seventeen. Found not guilty by reason of insanity and held in a maximum-security psychiatric facility for twenty- seven years, Timothy Stern is now eligible for release. Upon learning the crime occurred in the same village she once visited as a child, Erin is on the verge of refusing to take the case, when a startling discovery triggers memories she’d rather keep hidden, and a suspicion the wrong man is behind bars.

One of my favourite poems by Claude McKay, a Jamaican-American poet and writer, who was a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and a literary voice for social justice.

I Shall Return

I shall return again; I shall return 
To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes 
At golden noon the forest fires burn, 
Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies. 
I shall return to loiter by the streams 
That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses, 
And realize once more my thousand dreams 
Of waters rushing down the mountain passes. 
I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife 
Of village dances, dear delicious tunes 
That stir the hidden depths of native life, 
Stray melodies of dim remembered runes. 
I shall return, I shall return again, 
To ease my mind of long, long years of pain. 

— Claude McKay

Our sense of time is a slippery thing… shrinking or expanding depending upon our mood or the season of our lives. For the past two months, I’ve been thinking of the strange passage of time as ‘coronavirus time’, where some days stretch out forever, and weeks pass in the blink of an eye.

The ancient Greeks used two different words to describe time: Kronos and Kairos. Kronos (or Chronos) is the time of the clock and the calendar. Sequential time, ordered and arranged to suit our parsing of the days, weeks, and months. Kairos is expansive time, without boundaries or borders, and can be neither harnessed or controlled.

The Greeks depicted Kairos as a winged god, balancing the scales of fate in his hand. How little it takes, with Kairos in charge for things to tip one way, or the other.

Perhaps what we need now, as we anxiously await what the future will bring, is more Kairos time… Time that is outside time. Time that resists our attempts to control and corral it. Time that ignores our desire for the clock and the calendar to shepherd us into the fog of the future.

For the future will arrive in its own mysterious time… whether we’re ready or not.

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