Writer, Interrupted
stories that light up the empty places
Our House is Not Our House
What happens when you tear down a fence?
Choices and the Coronavirus
My son was married on Saturday…
A garden in the midst of grief
It was days ago. It was ages ago…
Falling for a brick
Nature doesn’t teach from a distance
Living on the earth…
A crocus in the time of the Coronavirus
T.S. Eliot famously called April the cruelest month. He did not live in Minnesota.
Welcome
It is March 22, 2020….
The Empty Places
A NOVEL
COMING SOON
THE EMPTY PLACES
A NOVEL BY MARY MCCLUSKE
Three women. Their story fills a century. Norwegian immigrant Berit raises a family on the harsh edge of the Dakota badlands. When beautiful Millie marries her son, Berit finds a soul mate. But as Millie seeks to tame the demons of a troubled past, her daughter Linda struggles for a lifetime to break loose from the twisted dance with her mother’s madness. In her sixties, faced with an unbearable loss, Linda’s life becomes a wasteland. Can she will herself to heal? To fill the empty places with the gifts of the mother and grandmother she never truly knew?
THE WOMEN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary McCluske holds an MFA in writing from Hamline University. She has worked in philanthropy and as a literary publicist. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in literary magazines and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The mother of two adult children, she lives in St. Paul with her husband. The Empty Places is her first novel.
