“If I call you ‘Juliet,’ will you come to me, even if it’s only in my dreams?”
This page shares three works-in-progress on which I’ve worked or am working. My daughter, Corrie, and my son, Hayes, have inspired each project in their own way as they are the greatest loves of my life.
When We Danced in the Rain
The poetry collection inspired by my five-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Corrie, tells her story through verse, and the struggle of a family to stay together after her death.
The poems in the collection are divided into “episodes.” One poem was published by Cordella Magazine on its website in the Field Notes’ section called “Some Mornings on the Farm” during summer 2022. Two poems from the collection were published in 2021. The first edition of The Walled City Journal published “If I Call You Juliet,” a Corrie poem from the collection “When We Danced in The Rain,” on March 31, 2021.
When Tornadoes Come
When Tornadoes Come will tell the memoir of our family from January 2020 through June 2021: Hayes, my son, has said, “I just want to be a normal family.” As I struggle to overcome anxiety about being a good enough educator, a tornado hits my family’s farm. My husband is in the basement, my children in the hallway of their schools, and I stay with my students as water pours through the ceiling. Just as our family attempts to clear the damage after the tornado, COVID-19 causes schools across the nation to shut down. With a daughter prone to pneumonia, I teach from home at the same time as teaching a son with autism. But another tornado strikes when I pump my daughter’s chest in an ambulance in the rain as she goes into cardiac arrest.
When Tornadoes Come was accepted into a memoir workshop in August 2021.
The five going on fifteen-year-old believes with the certainty of a confident pageant princess that her fashion sense does not require an approval. When I enter her room, I spot a rip on the right knee of her pink leggings. She wears dress-up Frozen 2 boots.
Excerpt from “book” about corrie by rebecca t. dickinson
Rise of the Rinsed
When I started writing a diverse, an alternate historical and fantasy Young Adult book called Rise of the Rinsed in January 2020, I believed I’d never touch it again after Corrie graduated to heaven.
I’m very careful about how much I reveal about this manuscript, but I’m proud to announce that Rise of the Rinsed made it to the semi-final round of the Ember Chasm Review’s novel excerpt contest in October 2021. Then it made it to the final round of novels considered in Tatterhood Review’s novel excerpt competition. While it did not win, the manuscript’s strength in both competitions in 2021 encouraged me to finish it.
Rise of the Rinsed, a better and different version of the YA book I wrote and edited from 2006 to 2013 called Sons of the Edisto, inspired Corrie because it has strong female protagonists. She’d sit in my lap, and ask me to read more drafts. She loved the book so much.
Short stories and a poem, “From Red Loam” that told backstories of Sons of the Edisto were some of my first published works outside of journalism.
Each scooped sand from the bottom of the seas, and made their continents. They blew fire across them, so the rock dried, and became lands on which plants grew. Sky created lands of many rivers, and tall trees grew by their side. There was nothing but rock and sand in the darkness, and she said, “When time is done, there’ll be nothing but rock and sand.”
A background story and poem for rise of the rinsed inspired by from red loam by rebecca t. dickinson
Corrie's Season 