Author with Monroe Connection Coming to Atlanta for Book Tour

By Paula Smith Elsey, History4All, Inc. Publisher

As the holidays approach, our focus turns towards family. Beloved or despised, adored or ignored, our families indelibly make a mark on who we are. Director and screenwriter Terrell Tannen's life story, WHEN BLOOD IS GONE: A memoir of Time, Place, and Family (History4All; November 1, 2013), is the sort of star-studded, action-packed family drama that Hollywood loves to release just before Oscar season. From venturing to a remote Mexican peninsula to meet storied director and actor John Huston (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/08/finding-john-huston.html#livefyreand) to surviving one of America's worst train crashes to hanging out with guitar legend Link Wray as a teenager, Tannen's story is full of almost unbelievable encounters—except they're all true.

But the greatest adventure in Tannen's memoir is family life—and death. The son of an intelligence officer and a military nurse, Tannen and his older brother Bob spent their summers at Azalea’s Acres, their Cofield grandparents’ farm in Monroe, Georgia. They also lived in an Indiana college town, desert New Mexico, the government employee communities of Washington, D.C., and post-war Naples, Italy. While on a car trip through Italy, Tannen's father suffered a heart attack and passed away in his son's arms. This event initiated what would become, for Tannen, a strange, close association with death, culminating in the eerily similar death of his brother decades later, and serving as a counterpoint to the challenges of assisting his aged mother through the last few months of her life.

In WHEN BLOOD IS GONE, Terrell Tannen describes:

● How he flew, drove, and finally took a fisherman's boat to reach John Huston's isolated compound on the Mexican coast to convince him to take a small role in the first film he directed;

● What it was like to survive one of the worst train crashes in American history;

● How Hal Ashby refused to let him be alone in the day following the crash, and how they drove through three states, talking, eating, and doing everything together;

● Learning the importance of family during summers spent with his Monroe, Georgia, grandparents in the 1950s;

● The challenges of dealing with end-of-life care for his beloved, terminally ill mother;

● How his mother, father, and older brother all died in his arms;

● Realizing the need to deeply explore our relationship with family….past, present and future.

Although Tannen's life story is unique, his experiences of family life are universal. WHEN BLOOD IS GONE is a sweeping, cinematic ode to his departed family, filled with enough excitement and emotion to keep readers on the edge of their seat, and enough heart to keep the story in their minds long after they've turned the final page. 

Tannen will be staying in Athens November 9-November 13, while promoting WHEN BLOOD IS GONE and also to attend the induction of his cousin, Judson Cofield Mitcham (Poet Laureate of Georgia) into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Tannen will also visit the Savannah College of Art & Design Digital Media Center, 1611 W. Peachtree Street at 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 14 for a talk and autographing session.