Under the pen of Marietta native Elyssa East, the 400-year history of Dogtown, an abandoned colonial settlement and the surrounding 3,000-acre forest in Gloucester, Mass., unfolds. Dogtown's past comes to life capturing part of America and American experience that is not well known.

Receiving accolades for Dogtown from Publisher's Weekly, NY Times Sunday Book Review, Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe among others, East's writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, and numerous New England regional magazines. The daughter of Nancy East of Marietta and Sanders Roland East of Barnesville comes home to share her thoughts with readers on her suspenseful historical narrative.

A graduate of Atlanta's Paideia School, East will speak at Kennesaw State University on March 1 at 7 p.m. in University Room B in the Student Center; on March 3 at 6 p.m. at St. James Episcopal Church (located at 161 Church Street in Marietta), and on Sunday at 7 p.m. at Eyedrum (located at 290 MLK Junior Dr, Ste. 8 in Atlanta).

"I love coming back home," said East.

Regularly walking Kennesaw Mountain in her youth, the New York resident said, "Dogtown reminded me a little bit of Kennesaw Mountain in size."

"It's rare to have a place like Kennesaw Mountain or Dogtown where there's just open space where you can go wander for a couple of hours close to a city," she commented. "When I go home I always have to go there. I don't feel like I've gone home if I haven't gone to the mountain."

But unlike Kennesaw Mountain today, Dogtown is not well traveled. East, who originally wanted to be a photographer, set out to find Dogtown after seeing unusual landscape paintings of the area by American artist Marsden Hartley.

"They're not stereotypically beautiful paintings by Marsden Hartley," she said comparing them to Easter Island and Stonehenge. "I thought they had been painted in some really far away place."

Hartley, who claimed Dogtown had changed his life, was riddled with unusual history including pirates, Indian attacks, supernatural sightings during the Revolutionary War, an eccentric character that carved words to live by on area boulders and postmodernist poet Charles Olson, who based much of his epic Maximus Poems on Dogtown.

"I found that a profoundly moving thing to say about a place especially one that was essentially a ghost town," East who received her BA in art history from Reed College and MFA in creative writing from Columbia University's School of the Arts, commented. "I was curious whether this was one of those kind of places that affected other people too."

What East found 25 miles north of Boston was one of the oldest backdrops in America where people were ambivalent or passionate about the area. "I sort of scared myself to death the first time I went," East explains. "People told me I shouldn't go there alone."

While exploring the landscape for Hartley's paintings, East discovered Dogtown's past dovetails with a murder that took place about 25 years ago still haunting the community today. "It's really a history book with a murder in it more than it is a true crime book," East said.

"Murder serves to capture the turning point in the community and how it responded to this random act of coldblooded violence that tore the community apart," she explained.

"People will appreciate it as a story about community and a story about loss and recovery," East said.

To learn more about Dogtown, purchase the book or to view pictures, visit www.dogtownthebook.com.

Published by Simon & Schuster, Dogtown can also be purchased at amazon.com, Borders, Barnes and Noble, indie bound, Books-A-Million and Free Press.