Stories Waiting to Be Told: A Guest Post from Marcie Rendon, Author of Sinister Graves

By Marcie Rendon / November 2, 2022 at 4:10 am

Hardcover $27.95

Sinister Graves

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Hardcover $27.95

Finishing the third title in Marcie Rendon’s Cash Blackbear Mystery series had us quickly scrambling to binge-read books one and two. We fell fast and hard for Rendon’s Renee “Cash” Blackbear. The pool playing, beer drinking, hard-nosed 19-year-old Cash is the perfect anti-hero as she juggles a tough exterior that’s protecting someone whose been through a lot. Cash drives this story, and we will follow her down any trail to solve the crime. Keep reading this post from Marcie R. Rendon about the stories that inspire her writing!

There are stories waiting to be told — ones that are too disturbing, too hard to bear, secretive. They exist on the edges of our consciousness, waiting for the right time, the right place, and the right way to be told. Sinister Graves, as a story, began to grow in my creative imagination in the late 1990s, on an isolated Idaho mountainside. I was on a long drive across the northwest states and hadn’t passed a town in hours, so I stopped at one of those gravel roadside pull-offs near a postage-stamp-sized grassy field that turned out to be a family gravesite — a mother and father were buried long after their five children had all been. The burial dates were pre-Spanish flu, and each child had lived a mere two years. I looked up and down the vast mountain and imagined a mother who’d suffered from post-partum depression. In that place of desolation and isolation. Who would have lived close enough, at that time in history, to even question the untimely demise of so many two-year-olds in one family?

In 2003, an emotionally distressed mother of year-old twins, kissed them goodbye, told them she was sorry, and threw them off a high bridge into the Mississippi River. One child survived thanks to a local hero who dove in to attempt to save them both. Another layer to add to the story forming in my mind that would become Sinister Graves.

There are stories waiting to be told in ways that can be integrated, made understandable, to our human minds and hearts. Sometimes reality is too heavy to comprehend, but by using our creative energy, our creative life source, stories can be told in ways that are more palatable to the soul. Sometimes what is incomprehensible can be understood when it is fictionalized. In this way, not only can creative writing be a form of activism to create awareness and bring about change, but it can also be a form of healing. It can be a way for individuals to touch the flame, feel the heat, but not become burned.

We tell truths in our fiction because some stories exist on the edges of our consciousness, begging to be told. Waiting for the right time to be put out into the world. Sinister Graves was written prior to the uncovering of the mass graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada, in 2021. First Nations survivors of the boarding school system told of the atrocities committed by priests and nuns in the name of God when they spoke at the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But it took ground penetrating radar for the stories to be factually documented and believed worldwide. That Sinister Graves was written prior to Kamloops and is about small graves outside an isolated rural church speaks to the concept that stories exist on the edge of our conscious reality, waiting to be told.

There are other Native authors — Linda LeGarde Grover, Louise Erdrich, Angeline Boulley and Ramona Emerson, to name a few — who, when I read their work, I imagine, they too, listen for these stories that are sitting on the edge of time, waiting to be told. They tell stories that create awareness, bring about change, and recognize that our art is healing — for us and others. Miigwech.