Tom Rosshirt

Tom Rosshirt was like millions of people chasing peace. He believed he could get it through performance, perseverance, and hard work - attacking both his career and meditation practices with a strict dedication. Instead of peace, his achievements brought anxiety, depression, and a merciless perfectionism that left him overwhelmed and wanting out. He spent his time maneuvering around a list of triggers that grew longer by the day and was guided by his near desperate search for relief. Then, right after another dead-end session with a psychiatrist, Tom found the emerging science of neuroplasticity, which provided a new understanding of how the mind affects the brain and body. Through a support group of individuals equally exhausted by their developed hypervigilance, and following months of research and reframing, Tom started to see his breakdown as a chance for a breakthrough. He realized every thought about who we are supposed to be is a barrier to peace. And neuroplasticity can help us starve the thoughts that create the self-image that causes the suffering. It marks the shift from ''getting what I want'' to ''wanting what I get.'' The first is chasing peace; the second is finding it. Chasing Peace is a personal journey that can inspire anyone who is tired of chasing peace and wants to find happiness in who they really are.

In lyrical, unconstrained prose, debut author Tom Ross tells a story of intergenerational change and conflict in a Black American family in the pre-Civil Rights era.Lorraine ?Rain? Franklin?whose family made their way north as part of the Great Migration and have settled in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York?is lost. She stumbles through a series of questionable romantic encounters and assumed identities, and eventually into an unplanned pregnancy, struggling both to define herself in and against a fallen world and to achieve autonomy from her mother?s repressive anxieties. Rain?s misadventures are a parable of what it means to confront, however imperfectly, the contradictions of a Black community defining itself in midcentury America.For twenty-five years, Tom Ross has been amassing the semi-autobiographical history of the extended Franklin family. Miss Abracadabra is the culmination and first extended publication from this astonishing storytelling project, which?through multiple viewpoints?fractures and reconfigures historical experience into infinite narrative possibilities.