Another Place

Traversing realms on the path to hope

Hope felt too weak to go on. After years of suffering physical and emotional abuse  at the hands of The Man, she was left a fragile shadow of a woman, bone thin and locked in anxiety and depression. She wanted peace. She yearned for freedom. But in order to survive, she had to shed the shackles of victimhood and patriarchy—without destroying herself. 

With only a flimsy foothold in her real world of horrors, Hope constructs from the shattered pieces of her frail life another existence. In Another Place, her mental realm, she coexists with her alter ego, Sarah St. Vincent, who equips her with the emotional tools to battle The Man. Yet as Hope becomes addicted to the catharsis of escape, her altered reality threatens to imprison her and trap her from her true existence. Only through self-discovery and her own personal evolution can she bring Sarah’s inner strength to the real world. 

A dark and ambitious fiction debut, Another Place experiments with imagery, poetry, and realms of existence to explore the internal landscape of mental illness and the process of recovery and self-actualization.

*****

This story, set in New England, centers on a young, reclusive female who must reclaim the task of reshaping her fragile reality in the modern world of patriarchy.  The psychologically intense experiences of the protagonist, a creative and deeply sensitive soul, upon which multi-dimensional states of being persist, compel a mind-bending, emotional catharsis.  The protagonist, Hope, a symbol and persona for the trials and tribulations in the self-discovery process, seeks a place apart where inner peace is possible and victimization ends.  When the antagonist, The Man, a complex blend of faces, who is the lifelong catalyst for suffering, encounters the alter ego, Sarah St. Vincent, a stronger, more integrated sense of self gradually arises in Hope to replace former ego fragmentation.  This book focuses on the imbalance in relationships that cuts deep into the wells of the unconscious.

Tina Shyver-Plank lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with her husband, Todd Plank, and her dog, Lilith. She is a proofreader for a marketing agency in Philadelphia. She graduated from Millersville University of Pennsylvania with a BA in philosophy with a minor in English.