Slow Burn
Slow Burn
Slow Burn: Reclaiming Yourself After Everything Burns to the Ground, coming March 2024!
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Grab a blanket and curl up around this fire with us.
We made this book as a love letter to our own healing, knowing we are not alone. We have come from all directions to sit vigil with each other's lived experiences. To tell ourselves the truth. To bear witness to the stories swirling in our spirits and onto these pages, holding gently your own stories that may begin to stir between them. Here we are in good company while the shadows grow long and the fire burns low, bolstering each other's courage with just enough light to see by.
This book is for those of us in need of kindling.
Steeped in sorrow and searching for a place to warm the chill deep in our bones.
Exhausted and in need of a place to sit and rest awhile.
Choosing the wilderness for a time.
Pushed outside the walls and into the dark against our will.
This is us partnering with the Earth as she breathes and the Universe as it ever expands. The embers that survived our respective worlds burning to the ground persist with a gorgeous, stubborn glow. Flickering, crackling, refusing to be extinguished, the last tenacious cinders of our souls kept barely alive with what little puffs of breath we had left.
This is us making room for each other.
For the healing pain of newly set bones.
For the growling in our bellies betraying all niceties and announcing our hunger for more.
For the double-edged scalpel/salve of our collective truth-telling.
For the soft light of the moon under which we howl to find each other.
About Slow Burn
How do you pick up the pieces of your life after it's been shattered by systemic corruption?
This is the question long-time friends Sarah Carter and Corinne Shark are forced to ask after joining brave victims and speaking out about their own experiences of religious corruption and sexual misconduct within two different organizations (Willow Creek Community Church and The Exodus Road).
Carter and Shark weave their stories into three sections:
Ruin tells of loss and trauma, making room for the reader to find their own experiences of grief within the pages.
Rise shares their process of emerging from the ashes with the courage to embrace healing, including therapy, breathwork, and unraveling matters of faith out along desert trails.
Return brings the authors home to themselves through the reclamation of the parts buried long ago, inspiring the reader to do the same.
Slow Burn is a fiery beacon inviting the reader to find their way out along the edges and back to their full selves, reclaiming the power of saying yes to what makes them fully alive as they decide they no longer belong to the ideas and systems and expectations they were once handed and instead, they belong to themselves.
About the Authors
Sarah Carter is a writer, poet, artist, and mother.
Her writing explores the evocative dynamic between poetry and life, braiding story, memoir, and myth into a language of faith, embodiment, and feminine empowerment. She resides near a wildlife preserve outside Chicago, writing stories, hiking with her dogs, creating abstract paintings in her studio, and hanging with her husband and kids. She loves the desert and always stands barefoot under a full moon, and nothing makes her happier than witnessing women reclaim their worth and return to themselves.
She co-authors Slow Burn: Reclaiming Yourself After Everything Burns to the Ground. Her poetry and essays also appear in SubStack: To Tell You the Truth and Instagram: @heysarahcarter.
Corinne Shark is the co-author of Slow Burn: Reclaiming Yourself After Everything Burns To the Ground. A recovering rule-follower who exchanged her death-grip on certainty to return to the wide-open wandering of her Arizona desert, she has deep convictions about what constitutes a good taco, stopping for sunsets, and always needs more ice. She is forever sending up flares for women telling the truth about their lives - even if only a whisper, even if only to themselves.