Re-releasing Ghosts Found

Re releasing Ghosts Found feels like opening a window in a house I once boarded shut.

When I first wrote this book, it was during the height of the pandemic. The world had gone quiet in that eerie way we all remember. Sirens too loud. Streets too empty. The air thick with statistics and fear. In that stillness, I lost my grandmother. I lost two friends. I lost my cat. Grief did not arrive politely or one at a time. It came in waves, sometimes layered so tightly I could not tell one loss from another.

Ghosts Found was born inside that pressure.

I did not write it with strategy. I did not write it with marketing in mind. I wrote it because the words had nowhere else to go. The pages became a holding place for shock, anger, love, memory, and that strange suspended feeling of being alive while so much was disappearing. What emerged was raw and unfiltered. Emotional. Poignant. Sometimes jagged.

At the time, releasing it felt less like publishing and more like survival.

Now, bringing Ghosts Found back into the world on Amazon, on Etsy, and in store at Card Carrying Books & Gifts on Market Street here in Corning feels different.

Bittersweet is the only word that fits.

There is pride in it. Growth in it. Distance in it. I am not the same person who wrote those pages. Time has softened some edges and sharpened others. I can see the craft now, not just the catharsis. I can recognize the bravery it took to be that exposed.

But reopening that work also means touching that version of myself again, the one who was grieving in isolation, who was trying to make sense of absence through language. Releasing it publicly again is an act of honoring her. Of honoring my grandmother. Of honoring my friends. Of honoring the small, beloved creature who kept me company through long, uncertain days.

There is something especially meaningful about it being available locally. To walk down Market Street and know that Ghosts Found sits on a shelf at Card Carrying Books and Gifts, in a store that holds community, conversation, and care, makes this release feel grounded. It is not just an online listing. It is a physical object in a shared space. A story returning home.

Putting it back and revised on Amazon and Etsy is about accessibility. Putting it in a local bookstore is about belonging.

Grief changes shape over time. It does not disappear. It integrates. Re releasing Ghosts Found feels like proof of that integration. The book no longer exists solely as a document of devastation. It now stands as a testament to endurance. To the way art can hold what we cannot carry alone.

If you pick it up now, whether online or in person, know that you are holding something that was written without armor. Something that came from a season of profound loss. Something that helped me survive.

This return is not about revisiting pain for its own sake. It is about acknowledging that even in isolation, even in heartbreak, something was created. Something honest. Something alive.

And in that way, perhaps the ghosts were not only found.

Perhaps they were honored.