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Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 202

April 18, 2019

 

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In This Issue

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

This Red Land by Arthur Dobrin

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Huntress by Malinda Lo

More Than the World in Black and White by Birgit Matzareth

Reason's Dream by Roger Mitchell

Blood Work by Sara Paretsky

The Sound of Holding Your Breath by Natalie Sypolt

Short Reviews

Reader Responses

Things to Read on the 'Web

Announcements

Anthologies of Appalachian Writing

Irene Weinberger Books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edith Konecky 1922--2019

Edith Konecky, a member of my writing group and author of many wonderful novels and stories, died on March 28, 2019. Read more here. See some of her books here.

 

 

• Spring 2019 issue (#40) of The Hamilton Stone Review with poems by Roger Mitchell (book reviewed below) and poems and fiction by members of the Hamilton Stone Co-op.

MSW was featured in a general interest online magazine that deserves a look: NFReads.com.

Also MSW's website was reviewed and recommended at an online editing services company. They have a lot of reviews of interesting material and, of course, sell services!

 

 

 

 

I read a fair number of self-published books, not always happily, because many of them are disasters of bad editing, bad formatting, and sometimes bad writing. There are, however, increasing numbers of professional writers and people with powerful stories to tell who choose independent or self-publishing and give us books that are beautiful and satisfying in all ways. The first book reviewed in this issue is one of those books that deserves recognition it probably isn't going to get. It is a memoir by teacher of piano who is also a highly regarded interpreter of Bach and other classical composers. Read my review, and consider seriously getting hold of the book. It is a story of living a life in art.

Other recommended books here include an excellent collection of new poems by the much-published and honored Roger Mitchell; a first collection of extraordinarily accomplished short stories by Natalie Sypolt, and a novel set mostly in Africa by Arthur Dobrin.

And that's just a sample.

 

All reviews and notes here are written by Meredith Sue Willis unless otherwise noted and
protected and shared under a Creative Commons License. See Below.

 

More Than the World in Black and White by Birgit Matzerath

This memoir of family and music and teaching is something of a hybrid-- the story of a life in music, which in the real world means teaching, so it is also about good teaching. It creates a fascinating contrast between life in Europe and in the United States, and above all offers a model of a committed life in the arts.

The story begins in Germany post WWII where Birgit Matzerath's parents are teachers, but her mother, like post WWII American women, has given up her career to be with her children. The family lives in close quarters with grandparents, and young Birgit attends an admirably rigorous school. The school does not, however, make space for young Birgit's desire to connect music and emotion and expression.

Later in the book, we learn of the dark side of the family, and Birgit essentially divorces herself from them. Her marriage too ends in divorce, and friends make up the human difference for her, and she travels a lot in that wonderful European style.

A turning point for her is a high school year abroad in the American Midwest which is difficult, but also where she discovers a teacher who gives her a new way of engaging music. She suggests that it is this joyful connection of music and emotion that finally draws her into life as a musician, teacher, and interpreter of Bach. She then spends time as a young adult in Leningrad-St. Petersburg, learns Russian, which she presents as a way of learning to learn. She teaches in music schools, she researches music education.

After breaking with her husband and her birth family, she makes another visit to the US where she starts work with a new teacher, Seymour Bernstein (subject of Ethan Hawke's 2014 documentary film Seymour: An Introduction). She says that only with Bernstein, in her fifties, does she begin to learn to perform, mastering the first book then the second of The Well-Tempered Clavier. She spends seven years making a living at a music school in New Hampshire, then moves to a railroad suburb near New York City-- Maplewood, New Jersey. There she opens her own studio, teaches, and has easy access to New York City--and to Professor Bernstein.

What I love about this is that the happy ending is not finding a lover or getting rich and famous--but rather the satisfaction of making a life in work and in art. The narrative is gripping, but for me the book is primarily about what makes a successful life in the arts: Matzerath never becomes a household name, and she certainly never makes a living strictly as a performer. She takes teaching as seriously as she does studying and performing Bach. As one shares with colleagues, she tells us, so does one share technique and knowledge with students, who become colleagues as well.

This is such an important message for those of us in the United States who write, play, paint, act, dance and all the rest. We put so much emphasis on flashy success, especially in the media, while at the same time the arts have become increasingly hard to make a living at.

Matzerath shows one path to living and sharing what we love, learning from the living and the dead. This memoir records a true success.

 

 

 

Reason’s Dream by Roger Mitchell

Roger Mitchell has mastered many kinds of poetry in his years as a poet, and he moves smoothly and lightly among them.  Several poems in the first section of this excellent collection, for example, use the 14 lines of a sonnet, and even if they are not strictly Renaissance in style and rhyme scheme, they do have that rectangular shape like a window that invites us to look at specific moments or emotions.

Generally, Mitchell uses uses ordinary words that lead us almost unwittingly into sharp epiphanies. “Dog Moon Turkey" shows us

The thick gristle of the wing bone of

The wild turkey lifting its gaggle off

The ground, the dog in a hopeful ecstasy

Of  chase....

....and ends with the moon playing Jackson Pollack on the grass while “The dog chases what it knows it can’t catch.” It’s a refreshingly happy poem that delights in the natural world.

History and current events appear slantingly in his poems too, so that you have leaves in the poem called “Candles” clustering on poplars “like shivering immigrants/waiting for the last ferry to take them/off the island...and the ferry might not come....”   The leaves wave “stiff little village handkerchiefs/to the rhythm of delirium.”  It’s 14 lines again, and it demonstrates Mitchell’s easy but brilliant dance among observation, insight, and wonderful, oddly unadorned imagery. Many of his comparisons are between things that really do look like each other (those flickering leaves as candles), and this is part of the source of the great directness of these poems--as if there were no words, no poet, just our own apprehension of a moment of being and understanding.

There are apparently difficult poems like one called “This is my Hand," which I don’t claim to get completely, but that hardly matters because of the poem's motion, its surprises and turns: there’s a monster, there’s Lawrence Durrell, there's a gardener’s spading fork.

In later sections of the book, the poems are often long and lean, several in the form of narratives. “Eighty-three Steps” is about a middle American, middle twentieth century man learning about “putting on the harness” of responsibility and quotidian life as he walks over and over the the 83 steps from home to his job. “Selling the Encyclopedia” is about the poet and his parents and starting college and all his confusion and ignorance. In “Charles,” the first year college roommate appears again. There are echoes of Edgar Lee Masters and then a touch of Marcel Proust in “Swann’s Song” as well as a masterful poem about patriarchs across time and space in “At the John Brown Farm.” This one has not only old John Brown the heroic terrorist, but also Abraham the potential slayer and modern Nablus and Tel Aviv.  

There’s humor too, as in one of my favorites, a poem called “Letter to a Thief" in which the poet addresses the person who stole his laptop. He goes off on various riffs like

 

I hear the critics singing a

capello: "So good, his work

was stolen." "The only poet worth

a copyright."

 

The final poem, “The Bat,” is back to the natural world and us in it: a dance among the many animals the poet has known. They speak in their own idiom of ruffs and moos.  He captures a bat in the house and sends it on its way, and us, after this broad and deep journey into Mitchell’s world of precise language and broad sympathy.

 

 

 

The Sound of Holding Your Breath by Natalie Sypolt

This collection of short stories focuses on family disruption, but especially men and women who begin with passion and end with missed connections and sometimes violent disconnections. The stories are set mostly in the northern Appalachian region among people who often live in those much-maligned mobile homes. Sypolt, however, has no patience with and cuts no slack for readers who don't identify with all people. She opens the second story, "Flaming Jesus" (what a great title) by laying out her landscape: "This is a place where no one cares if you live in a trailer. No one even thinks twice about it....My mother always had wallpaper. We'd replace it every spring....the roadsides are thickly-wooded, branches nearly scraping my car on both sides...Only the roadway is light, golden...."

The community where most of the stories take place is called Warm , and Sypolt's character makes the distinction that while fire is hot, ashes are warm, and the narrator's first boyfriend calls Warm a trap and says if he doesn't get out now, he never will.

While the experiences and growing and realizations come mostly to the women in the stories, the focus is often on men, as in in "Get Up June" where the narrator's father, "a man of addictions," first drinks too much, then for a while makes money trying out drugs for a drug company. His final addiction is, perhaps predictably but profoundly appropriate, is religion. The narrator's mother at the end says, "'I hope you will not forget the good parts of your daddy....take those good parts of him and the good parts of me, and try to push out the bad parts....'" That is perhaps emblematic of what all the stories are about: A lot of bad stuff, but Sypolt pushes through to the good, as best she can, without undermining the truth.

One of my favorite stories is "Home Visit," which takes on a clash between the Establishment, as it were– a teacher doing her visits to all the families of her students-- and the student's father. The family lives in a trailer, of course, and the teacher tries to hide even from herself her contempt for people who live in the trailers. She knows trailers, too: "what it would be like inside, long rooms that always looked a little cramped, a little too full of stuff....Sinks leak into the towel cabinets underneath....Ceilings grow round brown circles..." Of course, the trailer she is describing is the one she grew up in, and she finishes her home visit by falling apart in a horribly embarrassing way.

Several of the late stories are about damage to men: In "Wanting a Baby," a woman, pregnant with her dead husband's child, visits his family and feels conflicting emotions about them and her place in a traditional family Other stories are about men damaged by war, mentally and physically. One has lost his arm in the Middle East and seems to have lost his center as well. One, part of another extended, rooted family, goes looking for a white deer to kill, and in the process fills the yard with dead animals.

Many of the stories are told in the present tense, but that last story with the dead animals, "Stalking the White Deer," takes an interesting long, retrospective view. The narrator is speaking from old age, or near it, and it is about why she and her husband have stayed together. That staying together, for better or for worse, is a theme we don't write about as much as about spectacular break ups and violence.

Sypolt's collection is about a deep loyalty to people and a place. Her approach is open-eyed and complex, but for all that, no less loyal.

 

 

 

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

Well, I finally understand something about why J.G. Ballard's work has such depth and magical resonance at the same time there is so much that is ugly, racist, and sexist. Empire of the Sun is the memoir of three years of his childhood and early adolescence in Shanghai during the late second world war when he was separated form his family and interned. The matter of fact details of death and near-starvation, of human brutality and social organization under stress, of survival and exploitation, is stunning.

This was a man whose childhood had a vast stretch on his own. He is smart and lonely and twisted from normal childhood activities, and it is amazing he ended up a mostly constructive adult at all.

He admires his Japanese captors and their kamikaze pilots and Zero planes; he creates small spaces of hope for the future, he learns to feed himself first, then serve anyone who can give him something in payment–and sometimes that payment is just a small place in a prison hierarchy. Some of the adults around him give him some irregular care-- there is a young doctor who insists he do his Latin declensions and algebra homework. There is an occasional (extremely) random act of kindness, usually food, like the doomed Japanese pilot who gives him a mango. His world view is totally twisted but creatively, humanly, stitched together into a serviceable temporary explanation. His fiction is interesting, but this is amazing.

 

I liked this Guardian review from when it came out.

 

 

 

 

This Red Land by Arthur Dobrin

This felt at first like incidents and meditations and slices of life: a body that falls out of a plane; an African boy who seems to have no future and gets involved in a paramilitary group; an African-American family in Brooklyn whose son is a talented singer; a red diaper baby with a rigidly ideological father; an African young woman who struggles successfully to get an education. The various stories twist around one another, often ending ambiguously with large time frames.

Dobrin eschews clever transitions. There is a committed naturalism in the irregular pacing of the stories. They aren't experimental, but the reader gets a sense of a very particular sensibility and a world view that weighs actions with deep moral seriousness. The characters wander through their lives: Junius leaves performing but becomes highly successful in the business of music, and then later moves on from that. Kwamboka's determination to acquire a degree and yet not desert her culture is recounted with sensitivity and a kind of sadness. She goes to the United States and finally back home where she starts a school. Lena wanders through the American landscapes of the nineteen sixties--communes, Greenwich Village happenings, drugs. She withdraws from politics but never loses her deeply leftist mind-set. She really loves books best, though, and becomes a professional librarian.

Not all the characters connect, but there are definite connections, often through places. New York is central to all of them; Japan is an epiphany for some characters. Kenya is drawn lovingly as splendid and beautiful but also venal and dangerous. In the end, it is a deeply satisfying novel that makes no concessions and eventually threads its readers into the braid of its storytelling.

 

 

 

SHORTER REVIEWS

 

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

This was extremely readable, stylistically excellent, and perhaps too self-consciously artful. There is a character based on Philip Roth (with whom Halliday had an affair when she was young). She calls her character Ezra Blazer, and seems to have a crush on him. Roth, of course, famously writes versions of himself into his books.

There is a surprise second part that is the story of Amar and his limbo life in Heathrow airport. What the two stories are doing together seems challenging to figure out, but the New Yorker review below makes a good introduction to what is going on. It says that the novel is really about deflecting the interest in the writer's real life and about making the case that imagining other lives is not appropriation but getting out of oneself. Good topics although not what I read novels for. I tend to be impatient with the self-consciousness and fiction-about-fiction. Maybe I take novels too seriously really to enjoy them as games, however well played.

For more points of view on this book take a look at:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-asymmetry-has-become-a-literary-phenomenon

and   https://www.npr.org/2018/02/15/583438115/asymmetry-is-a-guide-to-being-bigger-than-yourself

 

The True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey

I had never heard of Peter Carey or  the Kelly gang, which is very big in Australian history. The author is big too, a Booker winner, follower of Faulkner, Beckett, Kafka, Marquez. The novel purports to be the hasty writings of Ned Kelly (who did write some kind of memoir while on the run). Kelly is an attractive character as Carey writes him. The novel feels properly researched: the poor Irish immigrants to Australia seem predestined to crime. There are nice passages of Irish history and the hatred for the police-- the "traps." Then there is the bizarre iron "Monitor" armor the Kellys wore for their final gun battle. It's a cowboy story, but Australian cowboys with a kind of historical an class consciousness that you don't get in American westerns.

 

Image of Ned Kelly.

 

 

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

 

This was wonderful, for its strange materialist nineteen fifties atmosphere, and the way Highsmith slyly got you cheering for Tom's success even when he is clearly creepy and a sociopath. It's like the trick Nabokov pulls with Humbert Humbert in Lolita–you are in the head of someone evil, and yet you find yourself wanting him to succeed in his endeavors. Tom is totally without any sense of anything except his own needs. He isn't a natural of making people like him, but you see him learning how to do it as gains confidence (through identity theft, primarily, and taking on a persona). He is pathetic and dangerous and highly entertaining.

Honestly, it's eating another slice of layer cake: you know it's not good for you, but what sweetness!

 

 

 

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

This was way too long, like five hundred plus pages, with competently written but much too long conversations. She is not a bad writer sentence by sentence, and, yes, I very much wanted to know what was going to happen. In spite of keeping reading, though, I got very tired of the multifarious reminders that hunky vampire Matthew is dangerous, and that vampires are predators.

 

 

 

Huntress by Malinda Lo

Young adult fantasy, and Lo is very good at it. There is a small group that goes on a quest; teenage female lovers; and a successful kill of a villain that isn't the end of the crisis. There is good world building, especially of the Fairy Queendom, and a terrific Ice Fortress where fay people are imprisoned-- and the world is in danger.

 

 

 

 

Blood Work by Sara Paretsky

I've read a couple of these, in rough order, and there is a pattern underway: there's the dog Peppy and related witticisms about golden retrievers; Mr. Conteras hovers and tries to help and annoys V.I. and occasionally saves her life. There's a corrupt system, and usually an evil rich guy. V.I. goes off on her own, vintage PI style and gets in trouble. At least once or twice she is in dire danger of dying and ends up wounded, hospitalized, etc

I don't find myself wanting to read five in a row, but I like reading one!

 

 

READER RESPONSES

In the last issue, I wondered about how our reading has changed over time. Here are a couple of responses.

 

"I’ve always been a fiction reader, novels almost exclusively. But this semester, I’m auditing an advanced fiction workshop at Marshall [University] and we are focusing on the short story. I’m fascinated now with the form and have thoroughly enjoyed reading O’Conner, Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Stuart Dybeck so far. I’ll keep reading this form for sure.  On my night stand are Paris by the Book, by Liam Callanan, a beach read by Anne Rivers Siddons, and Fear by Bob Woodward. I can’t read Fear at night else I won’t sleep. On my "to buy" list is I Know Where the Crawdads Sing. Happy Reading!"

 

                                                                                                           Carter Taylor Seaton

 

 

 

"I’m reading as much or more fiction than ever, in spite of the general downward trend in publishing. I read a mix of classic and contemporary novels as well as poetry and non-fiction. For me, choosing among an overwhelming amount of reading is the challenge. Simply reading the novels of Nobel prize winners could keep you busy for quite some time. Then consider the New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, MSW’s Books for Readers, friends' books, friends' recommendations. And then of course there is a mountain of material in literary journals, from big names like The Paris Review to university presses. I understand the pull of journalism in our dangerous political times, and reporting on scientific and medical innovations is fascinating and necessary. New genres in non-fiction are also intriguing. I’ve recently been introduced to the lyric essay, a fresh form with broad possibilities. These shorter forms make sense in our phone-reading culture, but for me the scope of the novel remains the most able form for encompassing the complexities of human experience, especially in an era of the reductive nature of social media and identity politics."

 

                                                                                                                                     Troy Hill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THINGS TO READ ON THE WEB

Check out Suzanne Martinez's new website with samples of her short fiction.

New article in Practical Writing -- the "Raised Relief" method of drafting.

A critique on a common workshopping technique by Beth Nguyen

New poems online by Barbara Crooker

Library of America's 2-10-19 Story of the week was by the late Carol Emshwiller.

The spring 2019 issue of the Innisfree Poetry Journal, is now available at www.innisfreepoetry.org. "A Closer Look at the work of George Bilgere," as well as new poems from nineteen other contributors.

Manuscript Wish List: a website to search for agents (and more)!

See John Birch's short story "A LETTER TO AUSTRALIA  at: www.johnbirchlive.blogspot.com

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND NEWS

Christian Sahner's book  Christian Martyrs under Islam was named one of Peter Frankopan's books of the year for The Spectator, and  Aeon published an essay of Christian's drawing on the book, entitled "Islam spread through the Christian world via the bedroom." This essay generated lots of debate on social media, and most recently he has published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about the destruction of priceless Islamic manuscripts in Yemen.

Lewis Brett Smiler's story "Ryan's Magic" was published in the Scarlet Leaf Review.  It is his third published story.

 

Recently published: Judith Moffett's memoir of her long friendship with the poet James Merrill. UNLIKELY FRIENDS James Merrill and Judith Moffett: A MEMOIR. He was her teacher in a 1967 creative writing class at the University of Wisconsin, and despite enormous personal difference of style, values, and taste, he became her mentor and supporter

 

 

 

 

 

 

Valerie Nieman is coming to a venue near you! Come out and hear Val read from her new books, The Leopard Lady (poems) and To the Bones (novel).

 

APRIL 27 - Sunrise Books, 7 pm, High Point, NC.

APRIL 28 - NCPS Series at McIntyre's Books, 3 pm, Pittsboro, NC.

MAY 5 - Whirligig Stage, 6 pm, Greenville, NC.

MAY 7  - The Nexus Poets, 7 pm, New Bern, NC.

MAY 16-17 - Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Bridgewater, VA.

MAY 18-19 - Greensboro Bound, Greensboro, NC.

MAY 21 - Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC.

JUNE 1 - City Books, Pittsburgh.

JUNE 11 - Ohio County Public Library, Wheeling, WV.

JUNE 13 - Fountain Bookstore with Cliff Garstang.

JUNE 15 - Taylor Books, Charleston, WV

JULY 6 - Netwest Group, Hayesville, NC.

JULY 7-13 - John C. Campbell Folk School.

JULY 15 - Inner Geek, Huntington, WV.

JULY 25 - Conversation w/Jessica Cory at Malaprop’s.

AUG. 8 - Sausalito, CA Why There Are Words

SEPT. 5-6— Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, Burnsville, NC.

 

 

 

Zenora Knight's The Curse of the Bailey women

The Curse of the Bailey Women is the tale of a family from a small town, Fort Mitchell, Virginia, who believe all the females born into their family bloodline are subject to a curse originating with an ancient ancestor, Cousin Beulah Ann Bailey....  See webpage here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dian Stirn Groh has created a coloring book and contributed two chapters to Hunting the Wind, about the golden age of Pan Am-- published 9-28-18.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IRENE WEINBERGER BOOKS:

 

SOME ANTHOLOGIES OF APPALACHIAN LITERATURE

 

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Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 203

July 20, 2019

Read this newsletter online in its permanent location     Back Issues  
  MSW Home     About Meredith Sue Willis     Contact

 

 

 

 

In This Issue:

New Books, Announcements, and Events

 

Book Reviews (by MSW unless otherwise noted)

Fearless: Women's Journeys to Self-Empowerment (Anthology)
reviewed by Victoria Endres

Void Moon by Michael Connelly

Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café by Fannie Flagg

The Secret Place by Tana French

Wings Apart by Burt Kimmelman

Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison by Lois Lenski

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

To the Bones by Valerie Nieman Reviewed by Ed Davis

Those Who Knew by Idra Novey

The Street by Ann Petry

The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzo

Rowing Home by Anna Egan Smucker

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson

Retracing My Steps by Jayne Moore Waldrop

During-the-Event by Roger Wall

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf--again!

 

More

George Lies on Carol and Ed Emshwiller

Short Reviews

Reader Responses

Books Received

Things to Read on the 'Web

Announcements

Anthologies of Appalachian Writing

Irene Weinberger Books

 

 

Summer Reading Rituals

Is your summer reading different from your reading the rest of the year? What do you read on vacation? Do you have special beach reading? Do you reread certain books?

Danny Williams writes:  “With summer here, I’m looking forward to a ritual I’ve practiced...since 1964. Some very hot day, I’ll take a pitcher of lemonade onto the porch and read a short novel in one sitting. It’s even more fun if I’m failing to perform important tasks while I do it. Two [books] I remember reading way back then were Mishima, The Sound of Waves, and The Little World of Don Camillo by some Italian whose name begins with G. All Quiet on the Western Front is another repeat. Every year I read a new find or two and an old favorite or two.”

 

Danny inspired me to think about my summer ritual, and mine is about where I read. On extremely hot days, I read at the dining room table under a ceiling fan, but mostly I do my reading (including reading for work) on a small screened area of our front porch. When we moved into this house two years ago, we had this built especially so we could be outside--but without mosquitoes!

 

Do you have a special summer reading place (maybe you go to the air conditioned public library?) or a type of summer book you read (Danny Williams's short novels)?

 

This issue of Books for Readers has a few books to consider this season, beginning with an excellent anthology on women's self-empowerment from the formidible Mountain State Press, reviewed by Victoria Endres. Then Ed Davis reviews Val Nieman's new novel. I have notes on three new books of poetry, and then there's Roger Wall's new post-apocalyptic novel.... and much more!

 

                                                                                    MSW

 

 

 

P.S.   Query: Is anyone familiar with the work of book feedback company The Spun Yarn? They sound reasonably priced, but are they any good? I'm always looking for editors & book coaches and book doctors to recommend to students and others.

 

 

Reviews, if not otherwise credited, are by MSW.

 

 

Fearless: Women's Journeys to Self-Empowerment (anthology) reviewed by Victoria Endres

In Fearless: Women’s Journeys to Self-Empowerment, Editor Cat Pleska has captured the spirit of the women of Appalachia and across the nation. Each poem, essay, and story adds a unique perspective, creating a well-rounded display of womanhood which culminates in Diana Hume George’s elegy to her former partner. The anthology evokes powerful emotion, sparking that drive within the reader to combat the adversity and self-doubt that holds them back. Pleska seems to say, “We have overcome, you can too.”

In every anthology, there is conversation, between the pieces themselves and between each piece and the reader. Pleska has chosen to layer this conversation by bringing in commenters for each piece. This conversation is had because of more than just proximity, these commenters share their own experience of reading these pieces. Fearless itself exists as a community of women, women lifting each other up, sharing stories, connecting.

Each piece in Fearless has its own rhythm and tone, allowing the reader to experience a variety of emotion. The reader experiences the mythic, the supernatural, art, motherhood, love, abuse, and above all other things we are given a sense of empowerment. No matter how dark a piece is, each writer ends with a meditation on overcoming, on seeing beyond the current struggle, and about embracing one’s own power. Fearless never revels in adversity or darkness and is at its core heavily rooted in the light.

 

 

 

 

To the Bones by Valerie Nieman Reviewed by Ed Davis

Valerie Nieman’s new novel almost makes me wish I were still an English professor so I could teach the book. A mash-up of genre and literary, To the Bones (WVU Press, 2019) has something for every taste in this rollicking ride of a read. My problem with reviewing it is not to reveal too much that readers need to discover for themselves.

However, there’s no way to get around saying that the plot focuses on a man mistaken by the locals of Redbird, West Virginia as a zombie. The plot in this lightning-paced page-turner takes flight instantly when we’re put in a black pit of human bones with Darrick MacBrehon. We climb and claw our way out with our co-protagonist, who has no idea how he got his gaping head wound, or why. He manages to make his way into town, stumble into the sweepstakes parlor and meet Lourana Taylor, who’s back in town to find her missing daughter. When Lourana decides, against her better judgment, to help this bedraggled man who, due to a birth defect, walks like a zombie, we suspect she’s something special.

We are not disappointed. Lourana has built an impenetrable wall around her emotions, necessary if she’s going to find her missing daughter. Which creates a conflict for with this zombie-orphan who, since his injury, has developed the ability to read the emotions of others, even use those emotions against them, whether he wants to or not. Observing the interplay between these two highly original characters provides much of the novel’s literary value for me. Readers can expect a good return on their emotional investment.

Over the next few days, events are set in motion that involve the vampirish Kavanaugh family, who feed on the lives of every Redbirder, resulting in horrific environmental degradation. Nieman, a former journalist in the Mountain State, knows a lot about economic exploitation, specifically the mining industry’s corner-cutting to create massive profits. And while the tale is steeped in enough terrifying genre tropes to satisfy zombie and vampire enthusiasts like my young former students, such tropes also reveal deep metaphorical truths. About the power of coal’s effect on the human spirit, for instance.

One of the things I loved best about the novel was the daily ordinariness transpiring between genre action set pieces (there’s quite a body count by the end, which would please my students no end). Just after Lourana and Darrick have digested the newspaper account of a gruesome killing, Lourana begins sorting through the “advertising circulars from Walmart, Dollar Store, CVS, and this week there was a Red Plum circular with good grocery coupons.” Zombie sightings everywhere, but hey, bargain hunting rocks!

Such touches of humor, however, neither dilute the tension nor the depth of character and theme. I was with Darrick and Lourana, both of whom have troubled pasts; I wanted them to figure out what an awful acid mine spill has to do with the Kavanaughs’ soon-to-be-announced development plan for Redbird. I wanted Lourana reunited with her missing daughter, wanted Darrick redeemed for the decent man that he is, wanted the “zombie” to triumph over the vampires. Above all, I wanted environmental justice for Redbird and my native state.

At the height of her writing powers, Nieman nimbly pulls all of this off. If she can please twenty-something college students yearning for a new take on their anti-heroes, plus simultaneously satisfy their professor’s penchant for literary fiction, that’s quite an accomplishment. To the Bones is an enjoyable, absorbing read by a mature writer that far exceeded my expectations. 

 

 

 

During-the-Event by Roger Wall

Roger Wall's new book, During-the-Event, winner of the Permafrost Prize, is a post-apocalyptic novel about survival and then rejoining the remnants of society. The narrator, a seventeen year old who is called D.E. or Pérez or Perry, was named During-the-Event by his adopted grandfather Otis (himself named for the elevator company). They survived the razing of their small North Dakota town (the "event") when D.E. was a newborn. The government, dealing with fires and loss of land due to rising heat and ocean levels, has tried concentrating people in work camps and a place called the Center. People outside these places are either ignored or slaughtered. Thus D.E. lives off the grid, until Otis's death.

The novel is in four parts, the first three named after the only people D.E. knows: Otis, who kept him alive, (albeit malnourished as an infant so that he has permanent bowed legs from rickets). Then there is the stranger, a big young worker who has run away from his labor camp looking for women to have sex with. He has muscles, but isn't a survivor. The third part, called Nola, is about a young woman who comes into D.E.'s world. She is from the privileged Center and is in electronic contact with people at home while she tests a power drink for its survival qualities. The most complex part of the plot involves her, and if she will stay with D.E. while being pursued by drones and "agents."

The final part, shorter than the others, is about D.E.'s foot and bicycle trek south looking for his family, or what might be his father's tribe, if his father is a Native American. He visits remnants of reservations and finally seems to be settling into an agricultural community run by a farmer and a cook. The novel ends with a community party and an opportunity for D.E. to dance with a girl he's met.

For post-apocalyptic fiction, it is surprisingly sweet–a world terribly damaged, but this seems so much more ordinary now, and there are a lot of people who are living outside the reach of the nasty, murderous, authoritarian government. Even the government seems to be softening, though–encouraging reproduction instead of stopping it, for example.

The best part of the story is D.E. himself and his naive but balanced and highly intelligent world view, and how he interacts with the stranger and Nola. The hypothesized collapse of civilization seems unfortunately plausible.

 

Rowing Home by Anna Egan Smucker

In this chapbook of poems made of what appear to be short lines in generally short lyric poems, Anna Egan Smucker tells whole life stories and manages to touch on current events with a subtlety that never loses its focus on the concrete. Poems like "Such a Time It Was" and "Summer Twilight Along the Ohio" have an elegaic tone that coexists magically with a tough-minded awareness of economic change and even worker safety. An iridescent beetle, she writes in "Summer Twilight Along the Ohio," "...shoulders its way/into the heart of Grandmother's perfect rose...."

There are other beautiful passages like the one in "Fall Island" that manage with short lines and monosyllables to create a whole scene:

The bad boys, the dark waves,
the wild geese, the rising moon
have stolen my boat away.

Several poems are explicitly about public events, such as the 1978 death of 51 construction workers when a cooling tower collapsed. Another poem is about the 2017 mass murder of country music fans in Las Vegas:

On this blue-sky October day,
how many others wonder
If their guns might have done
it better.

There is a wonderful group of Irish poems, including one called "Genealogy" about a shed where a man hid after being tortured by the Black and Tans during the Irish War of Independence.. It ends "The names...the stories.../No one rests in peace."

There isn't a single bad poem in this small, brilliant collection– each one seems to go in a new direction, linking the largest movements and struggles and catastrophes to "How the wail of a stranger's child" causes the narrator's breast milk to drip. This is in a powerful poem called "Hydrology" that has the narrator's daughter sharing a botanical wonder about desert places where water appears at night, which leads to the narrator's memory of nursing this very daughter.

The final few poems, as grounded in common objects and nature as all the others, break out in mystical directions. A class in manipulating clay ends with the narrator feeling what God would feel molding mountains, and the penultimate poem, "One World," is frankly and ecstatically about

....nothing separating
this world from the other.

 

 

 

Wings Apart by Burt Kimmelman

Wings Apart from the accomplished Burt Kimmelman (see my remarks on his last book of new poems) is his tenth collection of poetry. These are mostly short poems (with a couple of excellent exceptions), several in a syllabic form of three lines of three syllables like one called "Threesome" about the birth of his daughter, and another, inserted here in full, called "Marriage."

Making love
sorrows and
joys are one.

There are also four syllable/four line poems and six syllable/six line poems--many with the moment-of-being strategy of haiku. The moments here, however, equally include lovely natural settings and urban ones. His "Birthday Poem" takes place in his backyard in Maplewood, New Jersey:

I read Grace Paley's stories as I sit
below our backyard maple tree and think
of how I never scare people like she
could....

Urban settings include the train station in Prague, the Terezin ghetto, and Edith Wharton's home in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Whatever the place, though, what I love is the perfect stillness Kimmelman creates, perhaps especially the domestic poems where birds sing and sometimes his cats kill the birds. Probably my favorite poem of all in this book the final long one, called "Film Noir," which narrates much of a possibly recognizable old movie with plot scenes of homicide, police, and a femme fatale. It ends with the poet turning off his TV because he knows where the movie is going, and he ends his book by comparing poetry to the "simplicity" of murder and people.

He says that poetry "bestows a story we need/ in which no one's in trouble--like in a movie when/ the world's good and it makes sense, but then it all goes wrong."

 

 

 

 

Retracing My Steps by Jayne Moore Waldrop

Jayne Moore Waldrop's chapbook of poems, Retracing My Steps, is part of Finish Line Press's New Women's Voices Series. The first poem conjures up a younger self who finds the older narrator's hand

 

.......guides, nudges,
forces me to remember
her and who we used to be.

Waldrop, then, is both the recapturing and remembering of the concrete sense impressions of the individual's past, but also those of past generations--the white Europeans who crossed the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky, the expatriate Appalachians who didn't "strike oil/or gas....,/nor did they head to Beverly Hills,/ They loaded up and left home for/a multitude or reasons, survival/being high on the list...."

There are poems about separations between sisters ("The Pleiades"], and a particularly wonderful one called "The Slip" in which a woman and a mare have miscarriages.

I was also interested in how Waldrop makes a longer poem out of a series of haiku, but not writing about nature, but about the life style of people in a gated community: "The gates close at dusk,/reopen at dawn to let/the hired help back in...." And, of course, the wall around the gated community blocks the views.

Also not to be missed are poems about the narrator's mother, who was farm-to-table "before that was a thing." Waldrop eases in little contemporary phrases like that with great panache. That old version of herself, of course, wanted to be like the other girls, didn't want a mother who gardened and canned and made everything from scratch.

The final poem "The Row" is about a male farmer, one assumes the poet's grandfather or possibly one of the ancestors written about earlier. The poem is about the work of hoeing in extreme heat and how he "never shies/from the hardest, longest row."

It's a collection that speaks directly and beautifully of what we try to preserve in our present lives.

 

 

 

The Secret Place by Tana French

I've enjoyed to a greater or lesser degree all of Tana French's literary murder mysteries, but this one pulls together most of her best qualities in a powerfully careful structure.

It alternates sections in the first person consciousness of detective Stephen Moran (these are told in the past tense) with first person sections about a group of teenage girls. The Stephen Moran parts focus on his ambition to become a full time murder detective and and his relationship with the murder detective Conway (who stars in one of the other Dublin Detective novels). The sections about the girls are in the present tense, but interestingly cover much more time. One of the four girls is another murder detective's daughter Holly. The girls are involved in some way in the death of a school boy in the brother school to the girls' St. Kilda's.

The first Stephen Moran section (and all the Moran sections) takes place more than a year after the murder. Then the girls' sections take us back to the previous year and start of school. Then we go back to Moran and an extremely long day of the solving the crime, largely through interviews

The book ends by circling around to Holly (who was the point of view of a prologue too), who is taking new evidence to Moran, which is where we began.

The structure is taut, half a typical one of her first person Murder Squad novels, the other a sort of group consciousness among four girls who have essentially built their lives around a four-way friendship which is destroyed, not unusually, by sex/love/boy stuff--all part of an ordinariness the girls abhor.

There's no gore to speak of, at least not on stage. Very well done, intense and gripping.

 

 

 

 

 

The Street by Ann Petry

This novel made me very sad: poor beautiful Lutie Johnson tries so hard, and is so doomed. She wants to make a safe life for herself and her small son, but the world of Harlem around her is filled with rotten men and a small time madam called Mrs. Hedges who has her eye on Lutie.

Petry sees this Harlem world as an indictment of American racism, which it certainly is, but perhaps it is even more about the oppressive weight of all those men's eyes and assumptions that Lutie is a receptacle for their dreams and lusts, as if she weren't a person at all.

The heavy inevitability is like a Theodore Dreiser novel, stacking all the decks in a certain direction. You can see a dozen places where Lutie might have made a different decision, especially if she'd had a few more friends, or even if she'd gone to or stayed with her father and his girlfriend.

I had an almost physical reaction to her doom, but the best parts of the book may be a handful of chapters exploring other characters, including the nutsy Supe of the building she lives in who is obsessed with Lutie and gets her little boy in legal trouble and almost rapes Lute. The inside of his head is so frightened and crazy and paranoid that you feel for him too. And the Mrs. Hedges chapter is especially interesting, and also Min, the beaten down and unattractive house cleaner who lives with Supe and may be, oddly enough, the only person who ends up better off at the end of the novel.

This is an interesting novel, an American classic.

 

 

SHORTER REVIEWS

 

The Fortunate Pilgrim By Mario Puzo

Mario Puzo's second novel was critically praised, but it didn't make him any money. His next book was the wildly successful The Godfather. I like The Godfather for all the reasons everyone else does, but this one is more moving, more beautiful. The hero is based on Puzo's mother, called here Lucia Santa, who is also, said Puzo in an interview, the voice of Don Corleone himself.

This was published in 1964, set on 10th avenue, New York City, the old Hells' kitchen. The people are Italian immigrants, foul mouthed "peasant" characters, caught in various levels of poverty, some creeping nearer to crime, but the older people proud of their hard work, deeply enmeshed in the old male-female roles, holdovers from a different place, stable and patriarchal.

The women struggle to keep money coming in to support the children, and sexual passion is seen as a near-unavoidable failing that causes pain and destruction (financial disaster, childbirth for women, endless hours of physical labor for the men).

What is righteous and what is corrupt is different then from now: kids who rip off trucks and sell ice and goods to housewives are tolerated; everyone assumes payoffs and graft; the government is the enemy in America as in Italy. Cheating to get on welfare is only sensible, and on and on, with wonderful insights into a world of the thirties and forties. It has terrific characters who hate and love all at once, and change without wanting to.

I really like this book, in which Lucia Santa chooses her children over her (second) husband and in her late years manages to buy a house on Long Island. So richly the story of American immigration.

 

 

Those Who Knew by Idrea Novey

This has a touch of mostly magical realism, set in a rundown port city on an imaginary island where the Truth and Justice Party in power is proving to be as corrupt as the dictator it overthrew. A probably-murdered student's sweater and bra appear magically, or imagined, in the main character's possession and sets her off on an obsessive hunt for answers, most pointing at her former lover, who has a history of threatening and violence with women.

The lover's brother is a playwright who is writing a play about what his brother did. The play appears in bits and pieces between chapters.The other main character is a strong older woman who sells weed to students to support her bookstore.

A lot of the focus, though, is on the villain himself: an attractive leader of the Truth and Justice Party who has a habit of hurting the women he sleeps with, he is gradually suspected of crimes by several people. He is, however, never exposed: rather, he gets caught up in his own corruption and falls into alcoholism.

It's a realistic story that belies its own imaginary setting and splashes of magical realism.

 

 

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf--again!

This is maybe my fourth read of Mrs. Dalloway, and so much easier now. It seems strange to me that even though I've changed my reading habits--gobbling mysteries and crime procedurals and fantasy novels along with science fiction and Victorian three-deckers-- at the same time Woolf has become far more readable to me. I think perhaps I am more willing to let go of my pretensions to literary astuteness and slide into Woolf's world, which is, after all, powerful grounded in the senses.

I am in awe of how she slides from consciousness to consciousness in the omniscient POV.

I also read this differently because because our mortality has become more powerfully present as I age. Clarissa is subtly shown to be sick, Septimus kills himself.. His suicide is a catastrophe for his immigrant wife, but only distantly heard of by Clarissa and her party goers. Also, the brutal medical man who (mis)treated Septimus comes to Clarissa's party.

The novel is a dance, all about movement, the constancy of change, which is itself of course about mortality. It is also in its own way a love story. Peter Walsh clearly still carrying a torch for Clarissa, and that's where it ends.

So I'm ready to start reading it again, to loop through that world forever.

 

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin...also again

I really enjoyed this reread. Probably more than the first time or  the early segments of the HBO series. I don't think that the writing in the later books stands up as well, but this one is excellent. Sharp writing, excellent story telling. In spite of Martin's reputation for killing off his readers' favorite characters, only a couple die in the first volume: Ned Stark and Khal Drogo).

And I'd forgotten that the book ended spectacularly with the birth of the dragons.

Knowing the plot more or less made the reading more pleasurable for me– I was especially taken with the strange wise woman Daenerys hands over her hopes to, who turns out to cause destruction out of the desire for revenge. Lots of good stuff. If you haven't read it, even if you watched the HBO series, give it a taste.

 

 

Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café by Fannie Flagg

This popular book has some hilarious bits and touching moments that entertained me, but overall, I felt manipulated. It's a novel about a never-existed aspirational Good Ole South where most white people got along just fine with black people, and the black people love their white folks. I'm sure you could and still can find black people who love their white neighbors, but a book like Green Tomatoes implies this was the norm. Mainly, in spite of Flagg's best efforts, her book just doesn't get in black people's heads. The best she does is with a fancy man son of the black family, and how he gets in trouble with drinking and women and how he loves the city of Birmingham (his love of the city is one of the things I like).

As I said, there are plenty of good passages, but in spite of some roughness and violence (some people really do get killed) the good salt of the earth types (two of who just happen to be a lesbian couple who are also accepted as just regular folks with no apparent conflict) prevail, save one another from a possible Klan attack (but that's bad boys from Georgia, not Alabama). Anyhow, too much of it is wish fulfillment. I doubt I'd ever take the time to read another of hers.

 

 

 

Indian Captive: The story of Mary Jemison by Lois Lenski
A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison by James E. Seaver

 

This is probably children's writer/illustrator Lois Lenski's best known and maybe best book. Lenski was a small town Midwesterner, art school, then marriage. She made a name for herself as a children's book illustrator first (she did the illustrations for The Little Engine That Could). Later (in the 1950's and 60's) , she researched, wrote, and illustrated books about American children in the many regions of the nation. Some of these are pretty thin--I haven't been able to finish her Coal Camp Girl about an Appalachian child. But I really liked this fictional version of the real life memoir of the famous captive Mary Jemison. In fact, I went straight to the original memoir, heavily edited and explained from the world view of a minister named James E. Seaver.

Reading a couple of versions of the events gives me at least a hint of what might have been the reality. The story is that Jemison was captured as a young girl during the French and Indian War. The Indians who captured her (Shawnee, I believe) gave (or possible sold) her, as was traditional, to two sisters whose brother was killed in battle. The sisters could do as they pleased with her, and they chose not to torture her or kill her but to adopt her into their family, and from there on, it's husbands, children, assimilation, and apparent satisfaction with her life. She had the opportunity to return to the white people many times, but chose to stay with her family among the Seneca. This was not uncommon, although hardly inevitable, among the captives.

She recounts her story when she is a 90 year old property owner with many descendents. Seaver has serious biases--he is repeatedly surprised by the kindness of the Indians and amazed by how Jemison chose repeatedly to stay with them. After all, the Shawnees who initially captured her scalped and slaughtered her parents and at least three siblings (two older boys escaped) along with another couple of families.

Lenski's story for children leaves out the husbands--indeed, stops long before the main character discovers sex. Most of Lenski's book is working out why Mary/Molly would decide to stay. This does nicely for the plot–she keeps almost deciding to escape, but gradually realizes she loves the people she's with (her Seneca family). Lenski keeps her hoping that her birth family is alive, while in real life Mary knew early on that her family was dead, so was quicker to respond to affection and settle into her new life.

Lenski also presents the material culture and daily life of the Seneca and others extremely well. Her fictional version is probably not a lot more misleading than Seaver's version.

 

 

 

 

Void Moon by Michael Connelly

I like Connelly's Harry Bosch novels, but this one without Harry is good too, for a fast gobble. This one is very Elmore Leonard with its outlaw main character, The main character, Cassie, is a skilled cat burglar, who is essentially good at heart. The other main character, Karch, the psychopath, is fun to read, but the random killing he does begins to lie heavy in my stomach.

At first, everyone close to Cassie gets killed, then towards the end, the pendulum turns her way and we begin to have survivors. Of course, the threat to a child raises the ante to its highest level, and some of the held-back facts are manipulative, but it moves fast, and I had the feeling Connelly gave his best to this.

I was ceretainly rooting for Cassie and the child!

 

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson

I did that extremely rare thing for me-- I read a review in the New York Times and immediately ordered the book in ebook format.

The author is married to a Maori man, has kids with him, so has some personal connection to Polynesia people, but she says her approach is unapologetically Western. She organizes her book by following the Western apprehension of the Polynesians.

First there is Captain Cook and the amazing Tupaia, who navigated for Cook and made a kind of mysterious map that opens up wonderful questions about the world view and explorations of the Polynesians.

She also follows other Western explorers, details various Western theories about the origins of the Polynesian and how they spread over the Pacific, West to East. She also covers modern attempts to use Polynesian style craft to travel those routes, including Thor Heyerdahl and his almost certainly mistaken notion that the Polynesians came from South America, and the Hawaiian voyagers who had great success in recreating lost and nearly lost navigation techniques.

Using this framework, she gets in a tremendous amount of history and geography as well as cultural differences, and I just found it fascinating.

 

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George Lies on Ed and Carol Emshwiller:

"When I lived in DC in mid 70s, working at Roll Call, the newspaper covering Capitol Hill as ‘a community’ - I studied film and film production at GWU and the AFI Institute. I took an AFI 8 week seminar series led by Ed Emshwiller (who died in 1990). He used to train in from NYC . I refer to his work often when I discuss experimental films. And talk to anyone under age of 30 here.  A link: I’m pausing for a thot that Carol and Ed made an incredible wife and husband team!"

 

 

Books Worth Checking Out...

Coming soon: Susan Scott's Still Praying After All These Years, a collection of meditations by elders.   For a sample, look here. For a blog entry about the book, see Still Praying After All These Years.

Look for bilingual Spanish-English books of poetry by poet and translator Robin Myers  including Amalgama (Conflations) and Tener (Having).

Eric Greinke's new book of poems, Invisible Wings from Presa Press.

 

 

 

Phyllis Moore recommends these WV related books:

FRONTAL MATTER: GLUE GONE WILD, a memoir by Suzanne Samples

THE LAST APPALACHIAN WOLF by Daryl Michael

FEMININE RISING: VOICES OF POWER & INVISIBILITY, edited by Andrea Fekete and Lara Lillibridge

RETURN TO MATEWAN by R. G. Yoho

KEEPING HEART:A MEMOIR OF FAMILY STRUGGLE,RACE, AND MEDICINE by Otis Trotter

THE LIGHTNESS OF WATER & OTHER STORIES by Rhonda Browning White

 

 

THINGS TO READ ON THE WEB:

Susan Scott's blog entry about Still Praying After All These Years.

Lewis Brett Smiler's story about making magic at Scarlet Leaf Review. Lewis writes to say he's been getting good responses from real magicians:   Alan Kratish, Chief Wizard of the South Florida Magic School, wrote, "I enjoyed reading it and applaud its positive message."  Ryan Plunkett, Head Magician and Production Manager at the Chicago Magic Lounge, wrote, "Excellent read.  Thanks for sharing."  Kansas City magician Victor Le'Yon wrote, "A wonderful story!"

Suzanne Martinez's latest story at Streetlight Magazine.

A beautiful piece by Ingrid Hughes at her Psychology Today blog about her son's suicide. Also check out her book, Losing Aaron.

New Rachel King story on Pigeon Pages. She is also the managing editor for a quarterly contemplative arts magazine called Ruminate. Check it out.  Her website is Booksrachelking.com.

An interview with Robin Myers in the Los Angeles Times by Daniel Saldaña París

Persmimmon Tree's Fiftieth Issue! Congratulations!

Emily Temple, of Literary Hub, who has great lists. Here's her Epic Fantasies to fill the Game of Thrones hole.

A list of 15 important Appalachian novels (which I can't say I agree with, but it's interesting).

MSW's website reviewed and recommended at an online editing services company.They have a lot of reviews of interesting material and, of course, sell services!

An interview of MSW at the online magazine NFReads.com ("Interesting articles. Inspiring Stories.")

 

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND NEWS

 

 

Lewis Brett Smiler, author of "Ryan's Magic" in the Scarlet Leaf Review writes to say he's been getting good responses from read magicians:   Alan Kratish, Chief Wizard of the South Florida Magic School, wrote, "I enjoyed reading it and applaud its positive message."  Ryan Plunkett, Head Magician and Production Manager at the Chicago Magic Lounge, wrote, "Excellent read.  Thanks for sharing."  Kansas City magician Victor Le'Yon wrote, "A wonderful story!"

 

 

Valerie Nieman's latest book To the Bones is just published! (See our review above)   Learn more at her website, her Facebook page, orTwitter@valnieman, Instagram @valnieman, or...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barbara Crooker's new book The Book of Kells has won “Best Poetry Book 2018 Award” from the Poetry by the Sea contest.

 

 

Homegrown, the first book of Johnny Sundstrom's new trilogy Home of the Evergreen, is now available, ebook on Amazon or from the author siwash@peak.org

Land of the Evergreens aims to provide a cultural memoir of the 1980s, that transitional decade midway between the 1960s and the new 2000-millennium. Portrayed in these books are the Marijuana sub-culture, Cocaine for Arms exchanges with Central America, Horse Racing Scandals, and Old Growth Timber Battles. All of this and more, inescapably permeated by the deep emotional after-effects of one generation’s experience of the lost imperialist war in SE Asia. Highlighted by the challenges encountered in one man’s fugitive life underground, this was an era characterized by the confusions of facing a future where relationships unpredictably ebb and flow, and political changes and shifts become the norm. This first book focuses on the people and conflicts involved in the so-called Pot War of ’84, and its effects on rural western Oregon.

Johnny Sundstrom is a third-generation Westerner and rancher-conservationist who’s been living on his family’s land in Deadwood, Oregon for nearly five decades. During that time, he has seen the collapse of the historic local timber economy, the listing of regionally endangered fish and bird species, and a transformation of the  marijuana culture into a legal business model. He graduated from Williams College with a degree in English Literature, and has written extensively over the years with four historical novels on the settlement of the West, published by and available from Xlibris, from the Author <siwash@peak.org> (preferred),or Amazon.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edith Konecky 1922--2019

Edith Konecky, a member of my writing group and author of many wonderful novels and stories, died on March 28, 2019. Read more here. See some of her books here.

 

Recently published: Judith Moffett's memoir of her long friendship with the poet James Merrill. UNLIKELY FRIENDS James Merrill and Judith Moffett: A MEMOIR. He was her teacher in a 1967 creative writing class at the University of Wisconsin, and despite enormous personal difference of style, values, and taste, he became her mentor and supporter

 

 

 

 

 

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Coming soon from Hamilton Stone Editions:

 

 

 

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