Present Tense: A companion to When Words Fall Silent
About this audiobook
When Lorraine Johnson dies, she leaves her four grown children a single, terrifying inheritance: an empty chair at a table she filled for thirty years.
Devonne can't stop reaching for her phone to call a woman who will never answer. James burns the biscuits again, the way his mother always did, and can't explain to four hundred thousand strangers why he can't stop crying about it. Maya can't walk past someone else's grief without sitting down beside it. And Terrell — the baby of the family — inherits the hardest job of all: teaching a daughter who isn't born yet who her grandmother was.
Present Tense follows the Johnson siblings across ten years of learning that grief doesn't end — it changes shape. What begins as four people drowning separately becomes, slowly and without any of them quite planning it, a kitchen table, a support group, an archive, a book: a whole architecture built out of one ordinary woman's extraordinary way of loving people.
Told in the present tense, because grief, done honestly, never quite becomes the past — this is a novel about what we build when the people who built us are gone, and about the strangers, neighbors, and found family who end up, unexpectedly, sitting at the very same table.
Discover more
About the author
Tiffany Solter, PhD is a mental health professional, educator, advocate, and lifelong seeker of magic whose writing explores the boundaries between life, death, justice, and the profound connections that define us. Born into a family of mountain people spanning Wyoming and Colorado, she grew up shaped, largely, by two grandmothers who taught her, one through train journeys across the West, the other chasing shooting stars across the plains, that anything is possible.
A survivor of a near-death experience in 1996, Solter spent decades integrating what she encountered in that "warm place where light is everything" into a life of healing work, academic achievement, and fierce advocacy. She holds a doctorate with a dissertation on grace and recovery, and has worked alongside peer counselors, nurses, and mental health teams she considers among the most transformative teachers of her life.
Her advocacy voice is unflinching and deeply personal. In "Be a Man": The Violence Society Ignores, Solter turns her clinical expertise and lived experience toward a crisis our culture has long refused to see: domestic violence against men. Drawing on research, survivor accounts, and her own family history, she challenges the archetypal and institutional blind spots that leave male victims invisible, unbelieved, and without adequate resources. The book is equal parts gripping fiction, Jungian psychological analysis, and practical call to action. It is complete with resource guides for survivors, supporters, military families, and children. It is the work of someone who has sat in clinical rooms with these men, loved them as family, and refused to stay silent.
She lives in what she calls Camelot, a home she and her husband Jeff manifested in childhood whispers, surrounded by family, familiars, motorcycles, and what she simply calls the magic.
“Between Worlds” is her memoir. "Be a Man" is her battle cry.
Live Authentically & Create Magic!!
