Still Floating: 40 Years of Pennywise contributor Christa Carmen

As I mentioned in my last post, I put what I felt were the two strongest essays leading off and closing out the anthology. Christa's is aptly named for the final essay, "Driving Away from Derry: Memory, What We Were, and Who We Are in the Rearview of IT."

Much like Lauren's essay that opens the book, Christa's is a very personal and sometimes haunting tale of her journey in the twenty-seven years that passed between her readings of IT. I'm not saying I teared up a bit reading it, but I'm not saying I didn't. It's that impactful, and in many ways, so incredibly fitting when you consider the final heartbreaking pages of IT.

Also like Lauren's essay, this one needs to be on all the "best of" lists for short non-fiction as well as all the award final ballots.

Christa will also be participating in the launch party in Bangor in September.

Christa's bio:

Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the Bram Stoker Award-winning and three-time Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island, Beneath the Poet's House, and the forthcoming How to Fake a Haunting, as well as the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell" (Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror), and co-editor of the Aurealis Award-nominated We Are Providence and the Australasian Shadows Award-nominated Monsters in the Mills. She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.When she’s not writing, she keeps chickens; uses a Ouija board to ghost-hug her dear, departed beagle; and sets out on adventures with her husband, daughter, and bloodhound–golden retriever mix. Most of her work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes, and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear.