Woman Finds Strength from an Unusual Source During Her Husband's Fight With Cancer

BRUNSWICK, Maine - Aug. 18, 2016 - PRLog -- Shanti Arts Publishing announces the release on August 15, 2016 of Sherry Horton's Witness Chair: A Memoir of Art, Marriage, and Loss, both a poignant story of a marriage and an example of one woman's courageous journey into loss.

Witness Chair is a beautifully written personal memoir and a compassionate guidebook to the art of living in the face of suffering and death. What makes the book unique, however, is the connection made by the author between her experiences during the final year of her husband's life and the historical events of the Salem Witch Trials. In his last years, artist Christopher Horton, the author's husband, worked on the design of sixteen "chair" maquettes in preparation for an art installation to commemorate the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. In reflecting on her long marriage and the difficult months before her husband's death from leukemia, author Sherry Horton draws on the unsettling yet powerful significance of the various chairs, seeing her life and the death of her husband through the concepts of accusation, displacement, rumor, captivity, and heaven.

Leah Leatherbee describes Witness Chair as a "quietly searing account of the unspoken," and Bernie Siegel soberly remarks: "In love's service and the process of life and healing, only the wounded soldier can serve. Read Sherry's words and understand why."

Sherry Horton retired from the the University of Hartford (Connecticut), where she was director of the Center for Reading and Writing, taught in the writing program, and co-authored a textbook challenging traditional approaches to composition entitled Reading Our Histories, Understanding Our Cultures (Allyn & Bacon 1999; 2003). A co-founder of the East Hill Writers' Workshop (www.easthillwriters.com), she is currently working on her mother's oral history of the 1920s and '30s in the remote Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Mother of two sons and twice a grandmother, she spends as much time as she can outdoors. Horton lives in Unionville, Connecticut.

Witness Chair: A Memoir of Art, Marriage, and Loss is a publication of Shanti Arts Publishing in Brunswick, Maine. The book may be purchased through all major online booksellers and may be found in select bookstores. A digital edition is available through most sellers of ebooks.

ISBN: 978-1-941830-36-9 (print; softcover; perfect bound); $21.95 USD
ISBN: 978-1-941830-37-6 (digital); $3.99 USD

http://www.shantiarts.co