Mary Judith Ress's "Blood Flowers" honours sisters killed in 1980 in El Salvador

Mary Judith Ress is pleased to announce the publication of her novel Blood Flowers. Her publisher iUniverse has designated it an  "Editors' Choice." The book is available on Amazon.com and BarnesandNobel.com.

Says Judy: "I have been writing this novel since 1983. It was inspired by the assassination of the four religious sisters in 1980 in El Salvador -- especially by the life of Ita Ford, who went from Chile to El Salvador as a missionary. I was a member of the mission team in El Salvador in those years, you see -- and two of the women killed were my "compañeras" -- one of them actually replacing me. So in a real way, this novel is to honour their memory. While it started out as an historical novel, in the end I concentrate more on the relationships among my characters -- always complex, always surprising."

 

Judy Ress is a journalist, editor and ecofeminist theologian, as well as a member of Santiago Writers, a Chile-based group founded by Canadian writers Ellen Hawkins and Susan Siddeley. Judy has previously published non-fiction; Blood Flowers is her first novel. She was a participant in my 2010 Santiago, Chile memoir workshops as part of Susan Siddeley's Los Parronales Writers' Retreat.