Rebecca Duncan

Secrets of Gray Lake: ($20, 190pp, 6X9″, Print ISBN: 978-1-68114-003-2, Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68114-112-1, EBook ISBN: 978-1-68114-028-5, LCCN: 2014922510, May 2015; Purchase on Amazon or Barnes and Noble): Journalist Jenna Harris strives to write her way out of a quaint Great Lakes town and onto the staff of a major newspaper. The town and its people tug back—with old secrets, an endearing ethnic culture, and a lively group of 20-somethings sorting out life in the wake of the loose and experimental 1970s.

“It is the story of recent college graduates finding their way in a small town on one of the Great Lakes” —The News & Observer, Cindy Schaefer, January 2016

“Secrets of Gray Lake is a haunting story that creates its own half-familiar, half-exotic world in a small town in a ‘far, cold corner of Pennsylvania.’ Heroine Jenna is a features writer whose personal investigations take place in a world not absolutely fit for print, at any rate not in a small town newspaper.  Drawn to a house-next-door of free-wheeling young people and their charismatic leader, Jenna is drawn into a life that skims the edge of sexual and nautical adventure.  How much and how dangerously the history of the lake infuses its present is a secret that may never be adequately understood, but its pursuit makes for a story of recurrent and illuminating surprises.” —Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction, Losing Tim

“Excellent storytelling:  warmhearted, intelligent, strict yet conversational.  I love the growing sense of connections between all these people.  Rebecca has that necessary fiction writer’s credo deep in her blood—that a story comes from relationships between characters, not from just the characters themselves.  The details are wonderful and made me laugh many times, but also just paint a beautiful, new, fresh, visionary sense of life.” —Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and other Stories.

Rebecca Duncan is professor of English at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.  She studied creative writing and literature at Florida State University and earned a Ph.D in British literature.  Her publications include nonfiction essays, poetry, flash fiction and scholarly work on contemporary film and literature.  Research and teaching opportunities have led her to Morocco, Bolivia, Mexico and Italy, as well as her homeland in the Great Lakes region of the United States. Among her scholarly achievements, she co-edited Voices of Moroccan Youth.