Episode #15: "Hilarious, Compassionate, and Irreverent"
On this episode, we're excited to bring you Amanda Peters and Sheri Reynolds.
Amanda Peters is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry. Her debut novel, The Berry Pickers, was the winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Amazon First Novel Award. Peters is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has a certificate in creative writing from the University of Toronto. She lives and writes in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, where she is an Associate Professor in English and Theatre at Acadia University.
Sheri Reynolds is a NYT bestselling author of seven novels including Bitterroot Landing (Putnam 1994), The Rapture of Canaan, a New York Times bestseller and Oprah book club selection (Putnam 1995), A Gracious Plenty (Harmony 1997), Firefly Cloak (Shaye Areheart/Harmony 2006), The Sweet In-Between (Crown 2008), The Homespun Wisdom of Myrtle T. Cribb (Turner 2012), and most recently The Tender Grave (Bywater Books 2021), which won first place in regional fiction at the Independent Publishers Book Awards and was a finalist for the Library of Virginia Award for fiction. Her full-length play Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow won the 2005 Women Playwrights’ Initiative Award and was published at Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature & The Arts in 2006. She’s also published shorter nonfiction and fiction in anthologies and journals. Sheri teaches humanities classes at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, and returns to Cape Charles, VA, each summer to write and float on the Chesapeake Bay. For more information, check out her website at www.sherireynolds.com
Read Along!
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Carnegie-Winning Author • Winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize • A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
From the bestselling author of The Berry Pickers, an unforgettable novel about a woman who must confront her family’s buried truths and memories of passionate young love when her grandmother’s death leaves her as the only guide to her community’s future
Born under the shadow of a birthing tree sacred to generations of Mi’kmaq women, Aliet Paul grows up outside a small Nova Scotia town with her fierce, loving grandmother Kiju. Her mother died bringing Aliet into the world under that very tree; her father remains a mystery no one will name. Aliet’s childhood is shaped by seasonal apple pickers, the medicinal wisdom of the old ways, and the quiet, steadfast presence of John, a boy who becomes her anchor.
But the world beyond their community is changing. Traditional midwifery is condemned, prejudice deepens, and when the wrong person witnesses a birth, the consequences are disastrous. As Aliet comes of age, she navigates love, loss, and a personal tragedy that veers her from the path her grandmother wanted for her. She becomes a nurse trained in modern medicine, yet she carries Kiju’s teachings close, tucked beside memories of the tree that once welcomed new life.
Years later, when the call comes that Kiju has died, Aliet returns home to a crumbling house, a community scattered, and a past she thought she’d outrun. As Aliet restores the house room by room, something inside her stirs awake: the threads of her lineage, the old ways of her grandmother, and the mystery of her own bloodline.
As Aliet digs to uncover who her family really is, each revelation pulls her deeper into a web of long-guarded silences, dangerous loyalties, and generational wounds that refuse to stay buried: Someone knew the truth about her mother’s final moments. Someone knew what happened in the orchard all those years ago. And someone wants the past to remain undisturbed.
Spanning decades of loss and reclamation, this sweeping yet intimate novel follows one woman’s journey to protect the land, the traditions, and the memory of the women who came before her—and to decide which parts of her inheritance she will carry into the future.
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Independent Publisher Books Awards (IPPY) Gold Medalist in Mid-Atlantic-Best Regional Fiction
From the author of the New York Times #1 bestseller, The Rapture of Canaan, and steeped in the rich tradition of Southern writers like Carson McCullers and Sue Monk Kidd, The Tender Grave is the gripping story of two estranged sisters who find their unlikely way toward forgiveness—and each other—through a disturbing set of circumstances.
Dori, at age 17, participates in a hate crime against a gay boy from her school and runs away to escape prosecution—and her own harrowing childhood. In her pocket, she carries the address of an older, half-sister she’s never met. She has no idea that her sister Teresa is married to another woman. When Dori and Teresa finally meet, they’re forced to confront that, while they don’t like or really even understand one another, they are inextricably bound together in ways that transcend their differences. Together, the sisters discover that shifting currents of family and connection can sometimes run deeper than the prevailing tides of abandonment and estrangement.
In The Tender Grave, Sheri Reynolds weaves complex themes of parenting, forgiveness, guilt, and accountability into a lyrical and lushly-woven tapestry that chronicles our enduring search for heart, home, and healing.
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