Coming June 2026

Storm Warning

Gerry Wilson

Against the backdrop of Georgia's barrier islands, where ancient tides carve away memory and hurricanes reshape both landscape and lives, Gerry Wilson's Storm Warning unfolds eleven luminous stories of families weathering the storms that define us. From a psychic medium losing her gift while searching for a murdered child, to a lighthouse keeper haunted by spirits of the drowned, to a minister fasting through his own spiritual crisis, these tales explore the liminal spaces where the living meet the dead, where faith confronts doubt, and where love persists despite devastating loss.

Wilson writes with profound empathy about characters standing at thresholds—between marriage and divorce, sanity and madness, staying and leaving. A young woman inherits a hurricane-damaged bed-and-breakfast and must decide whether to rebuild or abandon her family's legacy. In each story, Wilson reveals how ordinary people navigate extraordinary grief, finding moments of transcendence amid the wreckage.

Set primarily on the fictional Yemassee Island, these interconnected stories create a rich web of place and character, where the natural world—storms, tides, lighthouse beams cutting through fog—becomes both sanctuary and threat. Shared characters move between tales: Connie, who works at the Island Escape Inn while caring for her psychic grandmother; Keith, a veteran handyman rebuilding his life one repair at a time; the Graves family, whose bed-and-breakfast serves as a gathering place for souls seeking shelter. Wilson's prose marries Southern Gothic atmosphere with contemporary insight into trauma and renewal, creating fiction that honors both the beauty and brutality of coastal life.

Storm Warning is literary fiction that confronts mystery and seeks meaning in the spaces between what we know and what we hope. These are stories of people learning to rebuild after the storm has passed, discovering that sometimes what appears broken can be made whole again—not unchanged, but transformed by the very forces that threatened to destroy it.

About Gerry

Gerry Wilson is the author of a literary historical novel, That Pinson Girl  (Regal House Publishing), and a short story collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories (Press 53). Her short fiction has most recently appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Persimmon Tree, and December magazine. She was a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Artist Fellowship in 2025.

A seventh generation Mississippian, Gerry’s “native soil” is the beautiful but harsh red clay hills of the north. Deeply influenced by that place and by Mississippi authors William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, she often draws on her roots and family myths in her fiction, but she is also attracted to coastal landscapes—thus the setting for the stories in Storm Warning—where she has found mystery and solace since she was a child.

Like many young women of her generation, Gerry married right after college, and until her first marriage ended, she was a stay-at-home mom to four sons. At fifty, she completed a master’s degree in English, and around that time, she published her first short story. For more than twenty years, she taught English and creative writing to high school students. She loves staying in touch with students who seem to remember fondly their reading and writing experiences in her classes. She considers becoming an author her “third act.”

Gerry lives in Jackson, Mississippi, with her husband, Austin Wilson, a poet and retired Millsaps College professor.