Longing for Home
Seventeen-year-old Irena clutches all of her belongings, waiting to be processed through Ellis Island in 1892. She hopes for a better life than she had as a Slovenian maid.
“Life in America is difficult and unsettling,” she thinks. “I had the sensation of disintegrating. I felt myself in little pieces. Was I Slovene, American or even maybe Irish? Catholic or Pagan? For a moment I wasn’t sure even if I were male or female. I felt myself dissolving into the mountains and the fresh blue sky.”
Against the backdrop of the Wyoming cattle wars, an Irish neighborhood in Chicago’s meat packing district, and through the depression of the 1890s in Durango Colorado, Irena must tap into unknown strengths and learn to love herself and her husband in order to find her way home.
Longing for Home is a tale of exploration, love, hardship, resilience and finding one’s place in the world, set against the backdrop of the great American Age of Immigration.
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Lisa M. Wayman is a Ph.D. nurse who has published multiple works of nonfiction including chapters in Creativity and Madness: Psychological Studies of Art and Artists (Volume 2) and The art of grief: The use of expressive arts in a grief support group. Lisa’s nonfiction work uses prose, poetry and visual art to explore resilience in the context of the death of her twelve-year-old son. Lisa employed her more than 20 years of nursing experience and her personal experience of resilience to develop the multifaceted characters in her first work of fiction, Longing for Home.
