Get to Know Baltimore Through Intimate Letters

Setting the Family Free was not the only book published in 2019 that featured my writing.

 

Katherine Cottle has discovered that one of the best ways to get to know a city is through the intimate letters of those who lived in or visited it. That is well illustrated in her book, The Hidden Heart of Charm City: Baltimore Letters and Lives.

 

She sheds new light on the city through the examination of intimate letters by some of the city's most prominent residents and visitors. From John Adams to Eleanor Roosevelt, Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman, Mark Twain to Ralph Waldo Emerson, F. Scott Fitzgerald to Edgar Allan Poe, Cottle shows us Baltimore as it was to those who experienced it--in a way that only personal letters between friends and loved ones can.

 

When Apprentice House Press asked me if I would write the forward for her book, I instantly said yes. I was interested not only because I know Katherine and her work, not only because I had read and enjoyed this particular book, but also because of my own special love of letters. In fact, I even wrote the forward as a letter to the reader. Here’s an excerpt.

 

As Cottle points out, a letter is more than a communication, more than a phone call, text, or email. The time between writing and delivery gives it an element of time-travel. The letter you write, destined for the future; the letter you receive, a visit from the past.

 

Learn more about Katherine Cottle’s The Hidden Heart of Charm City at her website.

 

https://www.katherinecottle.com

Setting the Endorsements Free

Early readers of Setting the Family free are beginning to weigh in. Allow me to begin setting the comments free.

Katherine Cottle is author of the forthcoming book, The Hidden Heart of Charm City, as well as earlier books I Remain Yours, Halfway: A Journal through Pregnancy, and My Father’s Speech.

Here is what Kathy had to say about Setting the Family Free:

“Setting the Family Free reinforces Eric D. Goodman’s powerful voice and imagination as one of Baltimore’s most riveting and prolific writers. As with his former novels, Goodman captures the human condition through multiple and unpredictable lenses, illuminating our strengths and weaknesses in a presentation which merges past and present stories, intertwining conversations, and metaphorical geographies. However, Setting the Family Free takes that vision a step further, exploring the existence of the animal, both human and nonhuman, when pushed beyond its natural and enforced boundaries. The blurring between caged and free is violently, gracefully, and thoughtfully crafted, a true tale of terror—both within and without real and realized bars.”

— Katherine Cottle, author of My Father›s Speech, Halfway: A Journal through Pregnancy, and I Remain Yours

Pre-order your copy of Setting the Family Free today!

https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Family-Free-Eric-Goodman/dp/162720217X/ref=sr_1_15?qid=1557947379&refinements=p_27%3AEric+D+Goodman&s=books&sr=1-15&text=Eric+D+Goodman

Pregnancy Journal Author Finds Womb "Amazing"

Katherine Cottle's published books include I Remain Yours, My Father's Speech, and Halfway: A Journal through Pregnancy. What does the author of a journal through pregnancy have to say about a novel looking at pregnancy from the inside out?

"It is amazing, what awaits in Eric D. Goodman's latest full-length fiction. Womb, an inventive and eye-opening novel-in-utero, is a cocktail of all human emotion, presented through the impressions and knowledge of the most internally omniscient and instinctual of narrators.  Goodman bravely stakes out uncharted routes in his endearing and enduring account of life, both before and after birth. Fear, love, pain, desire, and longing drive the human minds and voices of this literary crossroads, and their unstoppable drive toward and from each other."

--Katherine Cottle,
author of Halfway: A Journal through Pregnancy