Sharon Guskin

Sharon Guskin's new novel is The Forgetting Time.

From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

The premise of your novel absolutely haunts me. I’ve been reading about transferred memories for a while now (some quantum physicists think these are cellular memories, handed down like genes) and I actually even convinced a hypnotist friend to regress me to a past life (that’s a whole other story.) What was it that haunted you so that you absolutely had to write this novel? And do you believe in past lives?

I've always been drawn to the question of what comes next. I was a hospice volunteer for a while; death didn't seem to freak me out, so it seemed like something useful to do. And being around people who were facing imminent death woke me up. It wasn't that I suddenly felt more appreciative of life, though that's part of it. It was more a sense of: wait, there's more. Isn't there? More to life than what we're perceiving, and how we're going about our days. Why aren't we talking more about that? I started to read, as you did...And one of the things I read was a book called Old Souls about Dr. Ian Stevenson and his research with very young children who seemed to remember previous lifetimes. I was struck by these amazing cases -- there are almost 3,000 of them; quite frankly they are mind-blowing. Children who give numerous concrete details about other people they seem to remember being -- actual verifiable people who lived and who died (often) just a year or two before they were born. I started to think, what if this is true? What if this happens when we die? What does that mean for us, for how we live our lives? The novel came out of that question.

That question has taken me down my own spiritual path, but I think...[read on]

Visit Sharon Guskin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue