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A WHITE EGRET IN THE SHALLOWS
? A BOOK ABOUT THE WAY WE WERE ?
by
Paul Estronza La Violette (laviolette@datasvnc.com and www.annabellepublishing.com)
Tbings are changing.
This book is the fourth hook I have written about the life I and my wife, Stella, have led living in a small Mississippi town on the Gulf ofMexico. We've done this in the pleasant company of local friends, a series of large dogs, a black cat, and all the wonders that come with living in a beach house in a southern coastal town.
Preface to A White Egret in the Shallows
These words open my new book, A White Egret in the Shallows. They were written while Stella and I were up on her farm in Pennsylvania, with late December snow covering the long steep driveway, the temperature in the teens and the wind whistling around the old farmhouse.
However, my original preface did not contain that first sentence. On that Sunday in August when Stella and I had packed Holly, our black Tomcat, my old laptop, clothes for three days in the car and fled the coming storm, the finished book was in the laptop. Months later as I sat by the wintry farmhouse window and reread the finished text, I realized a revision was needed.
I realized that what I had written was unique, that the book described a golden era, a wondrous time, a style of life that with Katrina, was gone forever. I began to slightly alter the essence of the book and found that when I was through, I had made a book about Katrina. Not in the sense of graphic descriptions of the brutal debris and confused, almost criminal mismanagement, but of what Katrina took away from us.
I?ve tried to make my revisions as unobtrusive as possible; in fact in the whole book, Katrina is only mentioned twice, and these two times in the next to last chapter. I left the stories much as they were, leaving them to reveal the wonderfully rich ambiance of coastal living. I did, however, reorient them slightly to show the slow social changes (condominiums, casinos, shrimping decline, etc) that had taken place on the coast prior to the storm and finally in the last two chapters, the stark emotional damage of the storm?s aftermath.
It is a book to be enjoyed, but to remember as you turn the pages that what you are reading is not about now but about the way things were.
A White Egret in the Shallows, $20.00, hard-cover, four-color jacket, 176 pages, short stories, non-fiction.
Copies may be ordered directly using our website: annabellepublishing.com (my wife and I two-person publishing house), or e-mailing us at laviolet@datasvnc.com, or writing to P O Box 68, Waveland, MS 39576. Make checks payable to Annabelle Publishing. Indicate in your order if you wish your book personalized.