Summary:
Trudy Brooks, a five-year reporter for Louisville's Courier Journal, stumbles across a 1920 Kentucky Derby story that leads her to discover Orene and Jessie, creating a heart-warming friendship after she realizes their three blind deceased family members,Autie, Cleo, and J.W., taught their family to maintain faith, compromise, and love from the heart.
Courier Journal reporter, Trudy Brooks, has suffered a year-long of struggles and obstacles. Divorce number two is sealed when her husband admits he’s a manic depressive after preaching on an East Louisville Street corner and is featured in the CJ. In retaliation, Trudy decides to seriously pursue her journalistic career. While researching the CJ archives for her Kentucky Derby tabloid feature, she stumbles across a 1920 Derby story and black and white photo that claims her tabloid story as the favorite, winning a $500 cash bonus.
“An Overcast Day on Slow Track of 17 Horses Brings Surprise
For Kentucky School For The Blind”
“Autie Newsome, a student at The Kentucky School for the Blind, is pictured with other students from the school and her horse, Birdie. Newsome earned a trip to the Derby when her brother, Boyce, and sister-in-law, Jessie, arrived by train from their Golo, Ky., home with Autie’s horse, Birdie, and their younger brother, Cleo,4, who is also blind. Birdie is being housed with other horses at Churchill Downs Back Stretch Stables until they can transport her back to Golo on the L & N. Autie and her friends photographed in the winner’s circle with Paul Jones, after winning the race by a nose and moving past Upset and On Watch.
Discovering Orene and Jessie, life-long residents of Golo, Ky., and the three miles of dirt road that separated them during their childhood days, becomes a path Trudy travels with them when they are invited to appear as guests on Oprah.
When Oprah and her production crew travel to Louisville during the 1997 Derby week and film on location at The Kentucky School For the Blind, viewers are drawn to Orene and Jessie’s bond of friendship that began in the early 1900s. Their story deepens as the history of Orene and Jessie’s’ voices illustrate two dark-fired tobacco farming families in Golo, Ky., supporting death, limited educational opportunities, clinging to deep-rooted spiritual underpinnings, educating three blind children, in a western Kentucky rural farm community that is blessed producing miracles.
While the two run their own swift race galloping as fast as Kentucky’s trademark Derby horses the first Saturday in May, sharing every heart secret that only they shared, their lives take a turn producing the biggest Golo miracle when Jessie’s father, a roving Baptist preacher, earnestly seeks a better education for his blind children during a brush arbor revival meeting.
Knowing her sister, Autie, is extremely homesick for Kentucky after enrolling in The Kentucky School For The Blind, Jessie orchestrates the secret movement of their pet horse, Birdie, to be placed inside a cargo box car on the L & N Train and travel to Louisville to comfort her.
As Trudy follows Orene and Jessie until their last days, she faces her own struggles with a new-found vigor, confidence and love of home she learns from these two women.
Through the journals of the late Helen Orene Newsome (1908-2009) dating back to the 1930s, ancestral documentation for The Kentucky School For The Blind, and family research from Murray State University’s Pogue Library, the literary fiction story of “Orene and Jessie” depicts how their never-ending spirituality, coupled with their strong desire to return home, sustains them throughout their life’s journey.
A promotional savvy fiction writer and a 16-year public relations professional veteran who also conducts “Aunt Jessie Writing Workshops to Jackson Purchase area schools, I am seeking an agent who shares my vision of this unique novel. (Because approximately 10 million Americans are blind and visually impaired and 45 percent of these individuals with severe visual impairment or blindness possess a high school diploma from the numerous Blind Schools located throughout the U.S., it has always been a dream of mine to share the memories of this hard-working class of Americans and provide a portion of book sales in memory of my ancestors to fund scholarships to The Kentucky School For The Blind.)
A Murray State University 1995 Public Relations graduate with a Creative Writing minor, I have been a full-time employee in the public relations venue with the Murray-Calloway County Chamber of Commerce, Murray State University and now The Murray Independent School District, as the Public Information Officer, Broadcast Journalism advisor, and Community Education Director. After self-publishing “Aunt Jessie’s Magic Ketchup,” with Authorhouse in 2004 that ranked in the top 400 of their 35,000 fiction titles and through numerous feature articles published in Back Home in Kentucky, The Paducah Sun, The Murray Ledger and Times, Murray Life, and Journal Communications Chamber magazines, and most recently attending an individual writer’s residency at Louisville Kentucky’s Hopscotch House, I am a credible published author.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Chapters:
