Unearthing Haunting Secrets: Erica Stern’s Frontier Blends Memoir and Ghost Story in Chilling Harmony
Frontier: A Memoir & A Ghost Story (Barrelhouse; June 2025), is a deeply raw and resonate work, seamlessly blending fiction with memoir with research in the most artful and imaginative manner, its imaginative prowess hovers over the speculative, much like the ghost of the mother from the Wild West who did not survive the ordeal of childbirth and continues to float along the cabin she once occupied and the life she left. This mother watches as her husband remarries and fathers another child, a child she feels should be hers, while her own deceased baby’s brain bobs in liquid in a jar at the physician/midwife’s home. What happened? What went wrong? That’s the main crux of this mesmerizing, genre-fluid expedition into the often treacherous, untamed frontier of childbirth, dovetailing effortlessly with Stern’s present-day glass-and-steel lakefront hospital birth.
