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Health & Fitness

Book Release at Lion & Bull

First time author celebrates long road to publishing with book release party at local restaurant.

It took Haymarket resident Tamela J. Ritter nearly a decade to reach her book release party.

But there she was, March 23 at The Lion & Bull beaming amid friends, family and well-wishers, like Mary Jo Provenzano, who met Ritter through a writing group at Bull Run Regional Library.

“She has a wicked sense of humor,” said Kate Ressman, who, along with Nicole Ethier, meet Ritter every Monday at 7 pm at in the coffee shop of Barnes and Noble on Sudley Road in Manassas for a writing group that formed through National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November, and meets year round.

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“Tam is a very upbeat person,” added Ethier.

Only the pen she fingered nervously in her hands gave a hint to Ritter’s anxiety as fellow author A.J. O’Connell called the crowd to attention and read aloud from Ritter’s first published novel:

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“Arizona, July 1982,” O’Connell read on page 20. “The first time my mother tried to kill me I was six.”

From These Ashes recounts the journey to enlightenment of 16-year-old Native American Naomi West and her half-white brother, Tim. Naomi is in a Phoenix cult recovery center and refuses to talk; instead she journals her thoughts about her life, her brother, a prophesy, and the fire that nearly destroyed them all. Tim finds himself alone in a forest with no memories; only the urge to head west.  On a Cascade mountaintop he encounters the fire that rouses him to the truth and devastating choices of his past.

“Smoke follows beauty,” O’Connell concluded the excerpt. “She had said it in that hateful sing-song way so many times, I’d hear it in my head every time my eyes teared up at the fire. Smoke follows beauty.”

Natalie Foley, the book release party organizer and fellow writer from the NaNoWriMo group, handed out black tote bags emblazoned with a red feather to those who had RSVP’d to the evite. The bags were stuffed with book memorabilia: a bundle of colorful tapers, a homemade dream catcher, a felt pouch with a packet of zinnia or assorted seeds inside. While Ritter signed more than 50 copies of her $10 book, guests helped themselves to skewers of chicken and shrimp and the Lion & Bull wait staff squeezed in with trays of drinks.

New York editor and publisher N. Apythia Morges told the crowd she first saw Ritter’s draft eight years ago [when they both lived in Connecticut and traded manuscripts in a writers’ group called “Pencils” that met every Friday night for dinner and craft talk].

“I couldn’t put it down then,” Morges announced.  “When I got to the climax, I realized I didn’t have all the pages, and I called Tam and told her, get me the rest of it now!”

The two women went on to found Tears of the Phoenix, where they edited and published Ripple Effect, a 2007 collection of original fiction and art to benefit Rebuild New Orleans Public Library after the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. “When the print proof of Ripple Effect came out, we both were sitting in a car, looking at it and crying, we were so proud of what we did,” said Morges.

Morges says Ritter’s draft of From These Ashes stuck with her through the years, but Ritter continued to guard her intensely personal manuscript. When they went separate ways and Morges was working at her own Battered Suitcase Press, she contacted Ritter.

“It’s time to let it go,” she told her. “You have to publish this.”  It took another 18 months to prepare From These Ashes for publication, but for Morges, it was a labor of friendship. “I think readers will connect with From These Ashes because it is a story about life and pain, and there’s not a lot about Native American culture out there. What is a family? What is home? The book addresses both,” Morges added.

After two hours, the party was still going strong. Ritter weaved among the red and yellow balloons tied to chaird by ribbon to pose against a glittering red backdrop in a photo corner set up with props like red and yellow feather boas by Jamie Zunno of Jamie Kay Photography. Above the fireplace, a slide show of family photos, bookended by her book cover, played on the LCD monitor.

“This book is so important and part of my family,” Ritter said with a wavering voice to the crowd. “And you are so important and part of my family, so this is perfect that you all are here.”

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