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THE DELTA SERIES
The Delta Series grew somewhat organically out of my first novel, By the Oaks of Mamre,
which began with a story that my grandfather shared with me shortly
before he passed away. I worked on it in fits and starts for years,
often closing my office door and eating my lunch out of a brown bag as I pecked out another chapter on my laptop. In
2014, I retired from the corporate world intent on completing Beside Still Waters as it was now titled.
By the fall of 2015 after countless rewrites, the manuscript was
complete. It had grown far beyond what I had expected, incorporating
many of the stories and characters with which I had grown up, and I was
delighted with how it had turned out. But what next after a long held
and nourished dream is finally realized? The answer was simple: I had
more stories to tell.
So, I began work on Celester and The Captain. Set over 60 years after the events in Beside Still Waters,
it tells the story of an aging white sheriff and his young Black
driver who are faced with solving a series of unspeakable crimes even as troubling events from the past arise to challenge their friendship.
Having
written two novels set in the Delta, one in 1905 and one in 1967,
I had spent a lot of time, at least in my imagination, and
although I considered my father's family a typical Delta family,
that was not always so. My father was indeed born in the Delta as were
two of his siblings, but it was not until 1919 when my grandfather
purchased Friendship Plantation and moved there with my grandmother and
their five children that the Catledges came in to the Delta.
From that grew Into the Delta,
a novelized account of my family's life from 1919 until 1940. Although
primarily based on stories I heard countless times while growing up,
there is the ocassional passage, while true to the charaters'
personalities and events of the day, is ficticious.
© 2017-2022 jgcatledge studios
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