Local writer and author Lisa C. Taylor’s novel “The Shape of What Remains” will officially release on Feb. 18. It is already available for preorder on Amazon.
Taylor described the book as “one woman’s experience with long grief.”
The book starts 10 years after Teresa Calvino experienced the “violent death” of her 6-year-old daughter. To help cope with her ever-present grief, Calvino turns to a monthly book group, the author Chaucer and songwriter Janis Joplin, a love “learned from her long-absent father. Calvino is not only trying to survive her daughter’s death, but coping with her “emotionally unavailable” husband, Luke.
“When Luke plans to spend a sabbatical semester in Oxford, England, Teresa must decide if she can move away from the physical reminders of her daughter, and the tenuous threads that hold her life together,” Taylor said.
This book has been 10 years in the making, and Taylor shared that Calvino’s character is someone she’d want to be friends with, if she were real.
“It’s really her story,” Taylor previously told The Journal. “Ten years later, she is still mired in grief and depression, and her husband has kind of moved on and doesn’t understand why she’s stuck. The novel is about her journey as she comes back, and her husband’s, as he has never really dealt with it.”
Throughout the writing process, Taylor experienced things that made the book even more personal, such as the death of her neighbor’s daughter (who was the same age as the child in the book) and counseling teenagers who had lost parents.
“I think that helped me write the book and helped me understand the process,” Taylor said. “I very much believe that grief is highly individual, and we do not allow people the time they need. You never really get over the loss of a loved one.”
Author Richard Hoffman, who wrote the books “Half the House” and “Love & Fury,” also gave his thoughts on the book.
"This is a novel that engages a reader head and heart as it chronicles ongoingness, which is change, and courage which turns out to be surrender,” Hoffman said. “Taylor is a poet and brings a poet's precision to this examination of a woman’s heart, a mother’s resilience. I haven’t been so moved by a novel in years."
This book is Taylor’s first published novel. Along with this novel, she has also published three collections of poetry, two poetry chapbooks and two collections of short fiction.
She was also on the selection committee for the Four Corners Writers’ first anthology that was published in 2024.
Taylor’s national book tour for “The Shape of What Remains” will include other areas of Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The tour will officially begin in April, but Taylor will do local events before the tour.
Local events include a book launch at Hand in Hand Books and Bottles in Mancos in February, a reading and “book talk” at the Cortez Public Library on March 12 from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. and a reading at the Mancos Public Library on March 18 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The detailed schedule can be found on her website at www.lisataylor.com. She can be contacted for a book reading, book talk, book club visit or other event at whitewaterwriting@gmail.com.
