Interview & tour wide giveaway with Ashley Rae

Books-n-Kisses is pleased to welcome Ashley Rae to the blog today!!   Please make Ashley feel welcome. 

Ashley, can you please share with us a little about yourself

I am living proof that dreams come true.  In the past two years I have cured myself of the Major Depressive Disorder that plagued my life, earned my MFA in Creative Writing, published my first book, organized and taught most of the workshops in four weekend retreats teaching divination, healing, and writing (with two to go in 2012), and started a Love Your Life Coaching practice, which is possibly the most rewarding job on the planet.  I get to help people empower themselves to make their lives awesome for a living.  How cool is that?

Have you always wanted to be an author?

Yes, I have wanted to be an author since I was a very little book worm.  When I was young and suffering through the child abuse, I would hold myself and tell me that all my suffering was for a reason and that someday I would write books that would help other people get through and overcome their own hurts.

Who are some of your favorite writers? Who do you feel has influenced your writing?

My favorite author since I was 8 was Jean M Auel of the Earth’s Children series.  I feel those books raised me, though reading them now as an adult I see that her writing isn’t that great, but the story and the mass of information that she imparts through her stories is what makes her series so amazing.  My favorite writers today are the ones whose writing takes me on an emotional journey with clever writing and a fantastic sense of humor.  I love J.K. Rowling, C.L. Wilson, Kim Harrison, PC Cast…the funny thing is, I write memoir but I don’t read many memoirs.  I think reading 50 for my MFA tired me of my own genre.  I’d say the books that influenced the writing of my memoir the most were Two or Three Things I Know For Sure by Dorothy Allison, the poetry of Mary Oliver, and The Liars Club by Mary Karr.

How did you get into writing in this specific genre?  Have you ever thought about writing in a different genre?

I got into writing memoir as an undergraduate in my very first Creative Writing course.  I tried making a short story out of something that had really happened to me, which failed miserably, as I learned that reality just isn’t believable in fiction.  But when I tried my hand at writing my first short memoir, my professor told me that my work was the strongest he’d seen, and that I should pursue memoir-writing.  Memoir definitely comes naturally to me.  But I do write some poetry, and I most definitely want to try my hand at fantasy fiction someday.  I always dreamed of creating this amazing fantasy series featuring two girls who are the soul for a whole new world and go on this epic adventure discovering their inner power.  I even created a language for their world when I was in ninth grade.

What are some of your writing rituals?

Writing my first memoir involved going to Starbucks with my laptop, getting a venti iced coffee with mocha and soy, and typing and crying until I could barely keep my eyes open.  There’s a lot of sad in my first memoir.  Writing it was incredibly healing.  Now when I write, I get up early in the morning, and rush to write as much as I can before everyone else in the house wakes up.  I want to get myself into the groove of enjoying a cup of hot herbal tea, but I so far I only remember the tea after I’ve been writing for an hour or so, and I don’t want to stop to make tea when I’m in flow.  I also write a lot in my head when I’m driving, and then I’ll record a voice memo on my phone or jot down notes at red lights in my notebook, and as soon as I get back to my laptop try to get it all down before it slips away.  When someone else is driving, I’ll write longhand in my notebook and then type it up while revising.

Can you please tell us about your latest book(s)? My first book, Not My Mother: A Memoir is the story of how my unplanned pregnancy helped me, or forced me, to take the first steps to healing the wounds to my heart and mind so that I could be for my unborn child the mother I’d always wanted for myself.  The story starts with the positive pee stick and ends with my incredible home birth, and throughout I explore my biological parent’s lives and deaths, the traumas that I survived up to and during my pregnancy, and what kind of mother I wanted to be.  The book also explores the Buddhism of my childhood and a bit about the Paganism of my adulthood.

How did you come with the idea for this story?

My story started as my mother’s story when I first started writing memoir. Every time I visited her family in Virginia, I would get snippets and pieces of her life from her mother and siblings.  I felt like I was putting together a puzzle, and if I could just get the whole picture, I’d be able to understand her and forgive her.

Then it became the story of my abuse.  But I was still abusing myself at that point, so I didn’t have an ending.

But with my pregnancy, I finally found the frame, or the lens, that I needed to tell that story.  So while I wrote the same material for seven years, I ended up writing the first draft of the book in three months, and then taking another three months to turn that raw emotion into the haunting, heart-warming beauty that I published.

Can you share with us your current work(s) in progress?

Right now a hypnotherapist and I are working together to create a multimedia online program for self-healing.  I’m writing the book, she’s recording the hypnosis tracks.  I’m so excited about this project I’m literally bouncing in my seat as I type this.

I’ve also been working on the sequel to my memoir, which for now I’m calling, Sentence Interrupted: Memoir of a Moody Mama, which is about all the hell my son and I went through in the two years following his birth and how it helped me to conquer my depression and really be for my son the loving mother I hoped and prayed I’d become in the first memoir.  The second memoir will get a lot deeper into my spirituality and the tools and processes I used to heal myself.

Writing the memoir is helping me write the self-healing book.  I explore what happened in the memoir, get the epiphany, make the connection, and write the process in the healing workbook.  I love it!

What would you be if you were not an author?

In addition to being an author, I’m a full-time single mom, a professional psychic, a Love Your Life Coach, a teacher, and a weekend retreat organizer.  I can’t imagine not being an author; writing is breathing.

What is in your To Read Pile that you are dying to start or upcoming release you can’t wait for?

Oh my goodness, too too many books.  I’m reading every book published by my publisher so that I can review them, and I’m looking forward to all of them.  I’ve been putting off reading the most recent books in my favorite series until I can take the time to enjoy them, so those would be the latest by Dianne Sylvan, Kim Harrison, PC Cast, and believe it or not, I am STILL reading the very last book in the Earth’s Children series, which came out like two years ago, one page at a time.  I think I just don’t want the series to be over.  I devoured the last Harry Potter book in one sitting, but I’m only a third of the way into the last book of the series that defined my childhood and young adulthood.  Go figure.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I encourage everyone who is reading this to invest in yourself.  Give yourself fifteen minutes a day to just be.  Take a baby step towards making your own dreams come true.  Give yourself the love that you’ve deserved since you were an adorable stinky baby.

Not My Mother: A Memoir

Release Date: July 13, 2012

Buy Links:

Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Smashwords

By the age of twelve, Ashley Rae had survived incest, child abuse, and the deaths of both her biological parents. Born to Baptists but raised by Buddhists, Rae found peace and healing on a Pagan spiritual path while obtaining her college degree and starting the career of her dreams.

Rae thought the hardships in her life were over…until she lost her job, started a new relationship, and found out she was pregnant with another man’s child all in the same week. Terrified of cesarean surgery, Rae vowed to give birth to her child at home – but first, she had to find one.

Alternately haunting, humorous, and heart-warming, Not My Mother: A Memoir follows Rae over a nine-month quest to break her family’s generational pattern of abuse and victimhood in order to become for her unborn child the mother she had always wanted for herself.

Excerpt:

From the moment Dad rushed us through the dark living room, too quickly for me to see her body, I’d been looking for my mother.  Even after her funeral in Virginia, I kept looking for my mother.  She came to me in my dreams and told me it had all been a mistake, and she wasn’t really dead at all.  I’d wake up and jump out of bed in a hurry to continue our conversation, then freeze and fold in half, hyperventilating as reality hit me.

At twenty-two, I had not yet explored how the violence that I couldn’t remember witnessing affected my life and my relationships.  Ike died when I was five.  Mom hated him.  His mom loved him.  I, on the other hand, had never given myself permission to have feelings about this man who’d loved me and killed my mother. Until I saw him staring back at me through my mirror in the flickering light of a white candle.

Giveaway #1:
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Giveaway # 2:

a Rafflecopter giveaway