We invite you to scroll through ArtsMart. It won’t take long – and you’ll be happily surprised at the good things you’ll find. A book that you realize is the very one you’ve been wanting to read – you just didn’t know it until you saw it here. The perfect "happy birthday" or "thank you" or “just because this made me think of you” gift. The writing course that will set you on a new career. Go ahead. Take a look. You’ll be glad you did.

Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1940s – the shy and introverted only child of a glamorous, eccentric divorcée – was a challenge that proved to be lifelong – and ironically the catalyst that propelled the author to go on the professional stage.

Available on Amazon.

An insightful look at the historical damages early colonizers of America caused and how their descendants may heal the harm done to the earth and Indigenous people.

Inherited Silence tells the story of beloved land in California’s Napa Valley—how the land fared during the onslaught of colonization and how it fares now in the drought, development, and wildfires that resulted from the colonial mind. Author Louise Dunlap’s ancestors were among the first Europeans to claim ownership of traditional lands of the Wappo people during a period of genocide. Her ancestors lived the dream of Manifest Destiny, but remained silent about the violent displacement of Indigenous people that made settlement possible.

When Dunlap’s generation inherited the Napa land, she was already wondering about its unspoken past. What kept her ancestors from seeing and telling the truth of their history? What had they brought west with them from the very earliest colonial experience in New England? Dunlap looks back into California’s and America’s history for the key to their silences and a way to heal the wounds of the land, its original people, and the harmful mind of the colonizer.

In the context of escalating wildfires and a national reckoning with racial justice, confronts her settler family’s stories with the truth of colonization, showing how the colonizer mind has led to environmental devastation, genocide, and systemic racism. Inherited Silence invites readers to consider their own ancestors’ role in colonization and begin reparations for the destructive actions of those who came before.

For more information or to order, visit https://www.newvillagepress.org.

A rare collection of diverse creators, The Lemon Tree is a kaleidoscopic work that contains some of the most creative women of our time. Nitza Agam, a Bay Area author, teacher, and poet, has compiled a work that reveals the truth behind what drives women writers and artists to express their creativity. Inspired by her late friend who hid much of her art in her attic, this work sheds light on women artists and writers, now for the first time, who convey what they have always known, some from an early age, their unwavering need to create using words or images or both. The essays reveal the struggles, the obstacles, the triumphs, and the joys of the creative process. Many of the authors and artists are Bay Area based, but also reside in Montana, Israel, and England.

Marlene Shikegawa has produced a short documentary about the project, and has generously agreed to share it with Persimmon Tree:

Available on Amazon.

To buy a copy of Traverse, visit https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/traverse-by-jane-augustine.

A disturbing encounter with a hermaphrodite at a county fair presages teenage Miami’s loss of innocence in 1970’s California. MIAMI IN VIRGO is a literary fiction coming-of-age novel narrated by precocious seventeen-year-old Miami.

She and her friends form a tight-knit circle practicing feminist Wiccan ritual, as her childhood fundamentalism casts a long shadow.

Conflicts with her friends over boys threaten their newfound feminist solidarity. An anticipated trip to a women’s demonstration devolves into a nightmarish questioning of her sexuality, further fracturing her friendships. An ill-fated romance at a Halloween party becomes thoroughly spooked when Miami winds up exiled in her new family after her mother’s remarriage.

Her peccadilloes take on a spiritual dimension and she goes through a soul-searing scrutiny which eventually leads to the resolution of her conflicts through the deepening of her character. The twists and turns of her fast-paced story make a compelling read.
 

Order the book, on Amazon.

Learn more about the book and its author: https://miamiinvirgo.com/

Learn more at laurarodley.com.

Laura Rodley’s remarkable poems transport you to the North Atlantic in the early 1700s. Novelistic in scope, Counter Point uses scene, dialogue, and action-driven narrative. And like any good novel, this book introduces an unforgettable character, Marie, an ordinary girl (“A laundress wears no jewelry on her / hands, only the roses of chapped skin”) who navigates the world with extraordinary fortitude. Artful language and sensual detail–whether evoking love’s first desires (“and here we splice open our shirts / like oysters after plucking / and just as lush”) or describing the malodors of a pirate ship (“even the smell of their feet / had a noise called squelching”)—bring to life a briny world, both intimate and writ large. It’s not often a poetry book is described as a page-turner, but Counter Point is that book: a heroine’s adventure lyrically told.

To order online, click here or also available on Amazon.

In her eighties, Sandra Butler does not identify as elderly. Or mature. She’s neither plucky nor a burden, and she’s not over any hills. She’s old and she’s ready to reclaim that word. Butler is not a senior—she’s a mother, a lesbian, a Jew, a feminist, and at times, “a rabble-rousing hectorer.” And now that her time is running out, Butler doesn’t mess around with things that don’t matter. She is supremely motivated, and she’s so much braver than ever before.

In this funny and intensely personal collection of essays, Butler chronicles her experience moving from aging to old, remembering and forgetting all the wrong things, feeling frustrated with technology, keeping up with the avalanche of cultural and political news, mothering two middle-aged daughters, surveying her old body, and ultimately, preparing for her death.

With its sharp humor and refreshing honesty, The Kitchen is Closed is a must-read for everyone who is 60 or older and for those who love them.

Buy now on Amazon or your independent bookseller.

A collection of poems from MoonPath Press

“Reading these poems is like viewing paintings in a gallery. The images are rich and detailed, the reader feels present in her settings. The individual poems are the observations of a seasoned poet, from perspectives that have been honed over a lifetime. The collection as a whole is a study in serenity.”
Stephen Parrish, author of The First 100 Words
(5 star Amazon Review)

A poem from Ordinary Splendor

Directions Back to Childhood

Turn left at the first sign of progress
and follow the old highway
along the Stillwater River.
When you hear the whistle of the train,
take a right and cross the covered bridge
that leads to the rodeo grounds
where the silver-maned bronc
caused so much havoc the summer you were ten
and the ghost of your grandfather’s Jeep
rests behind the bleached-out grandstand
choked with blackberries.
As you round the corner into town,
there’s a white picket fence
laced with lilacs. Walk through the gate.
You’ll see a blue and white Western Flyer
lying on its side in the middle of the sidewalk.
It will take you the rest of the way.

Judith Waller Carroll is an Oregon poet whose poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. This is her second full-length collection.

For order information click here.

For a signed book, contact the author at judithwcarroll@gmail.com

A gritty, matter-of-fact account of tragedy and how to make it a beginning and not an end.

Bold, brave, honest! A beautifully told mother-daughter love story.

Heartbreaking and hilarious.

This beautiful uplifting little book resonates with love, regret, grief, and much more, showing us that perfection is unnecessary: love still can win out in the end.

The Lady with the Crown: A Story of Resilience explores how unforeseen trauma can, in the blink of an eye, transform a normal happy family into a uniquely wounded one. It charts not only their resilience and courage but also Canrinus’s indomitable pursuit and reinvention of joy.

Available on Amazon.

The author is available for book club meetings on Zoom or, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in person. Contact her via facebook.com/theladywiththecrown.

The town of Timber nestled in the Oregon woods with its population of fifty is as much a character in Marian Mathews Clark’s novel These Doors as are those fifty citizens. Their stories that unfold chronologically from 1959 to 1983 reveal that a few emigrate but fewer want to.

In an era with no cell phones and an unreliable landline service, Timber’s Valley Store is e-mails, twitters, tweets, the hub where folks reminisce about blackout curtains and their neighbor who died at Pearl Harbor, haggle over spotted owls and clear cutting, mourn fellow loggers killed in the woods, voice curiosity about Chet who shows up from eastern Oregon to extract his son from white man’s land, and are suspicious of the hippies on the old Marshall place who log with mules. They disagree about whether or not the preacher who claims he saw God is crazy and if the ex-con who returns from prison with a new wife killed his old one. But they agree that the Portland transplant who pushes her petitions ‘for the good of Timber’ is a royal pain and that the poem over the entry of the Timber Store that says “The best people in the world pass through these doors,” is mostly true.

Published by Culicidae Press and available on Amazon.

 
With long experience mentoring poets working in a variety of styles, Joan is committed to helping you achieve excellence in your own inimitable voice. For her bio and poems, see www.joanlarkin.com

Options include:

––Online generative workshops (a few spots left)
Prompts inspired by historic and contemporary poems will lead to new work only you can write. Whether you’re new to poetry or well-published, this workshop will free and refresh your practice, igniting work that surprises you.

Fall 2022 Workshops on Zoom:

Five Mondays, 7:00-8:45 PM Eastern
October 10, 17, 24, 31; Nov. 7. $250

Five Wednesdays, 7:00-8:45 PM Eastern
October 12, 19, 26; Nov. 2, 9. $250

––Individual mentoring:
Starting with a free 15-minute consultation, a five-week intensive during which you’ll email up to three poems each week and receive Joan’s detailed response and prompts for generating new work. You can expect close attention to what’s effective as well as what needs strengthening. Mentoring concludes with a 30-minute online conversation. Poets at any level are welcome.$500

Alternative: 1-3 weeks of intensive mentoring: $110 per week (at intervals that work for you).
Should you decide to extend the commitment, fee will be credited towards the five-week process.

––Book-length manuscript consultation:
Joan’s comprehensive feedback includes detailed attention to individual poems, recommendations for sequence, and meticulous proofreading. Goal: a book-length manuscript ready to submit. $500 (chapbook $250).

––To apply for a workshop or service above:
Please email poemrise@gmail.com introducing yourself with a 1-3 page writing sample.
Once you’re accepted, a $50 deposit holds your place.

The As You Write It series is a great gift to our community: a page-turning read, a window into our local past, and a platform for brilliant storytellers, all in one. In turns reflective, touching, and funny, this anthology is a reminder of the worlds that can open up when we take the time to listen to the voices already among us.

With its seventh gift to our community, the As You Write It group once again reminds and encourages us: Everyone should write! And when talent is fostered, it blossoms. Lucky 7‘s eleven writers pull a deep spectrum of living color through the prism of the short memoir, leaving something new and different shining on every page: poetry and portals into our local history, childhood sense-memories returning, reveries and touching reflections. Place this little volume on your bedside table. You’ll be grateful.

To place an order, send a check
for $16 plus $3 shipping and handling to
Laura Rodley
P.O. Box 63
Shelburne Falls MA 01370

The Understudy is a charming, evocative, and authentic novel about the life of a Broadway actress in the 1970s, written by someone who has been there. Part theatrical love letter and part romance novel, The Understudy shows that while true love is never completely perfect, it can come pretty close if all parties involved are willing to work at it.

Available on Amazon.

Underscore is one poet’s attempt to explore the currents that swirl underneath the surface of everyday life. When do our voices breathe in unison, when do they diverge into counterpoint?

How do the events of our lives chorus into through-composed pieces without reprise or return to familiar themes?

When do we finally sing along with the unmistakable music of the spheres? In her first full-length collection, Roberta Schultz begins by looking “in instead of up” at the cadences we underline and define as our own.

You can buy Underscore from Dos Madres press at https:// www.dosmadres.com/shop/underscore-by-roberta-schultz/

Or from the author at robertaschultz.com