Take a minute to scroll through the delightful offerings in ArtsMart, and you’ll find fascinating books on every subject, for every taste, and from every genre--poetry, memoirs, history and biography, children’s books, essays, mysteries, fiction both speculative and historical. You’ll also find writing workshops and retreats, note cards, prints and paintings, even grownup coloring books - something for each and every taste and hour and mood.



Persimmon Tree is an Amazon and Bookshop.org associate, which means our journal receives a small royalty every time you make a purchase by clicking through to Amazon or Bookshop.org. The price to you is no higher, but your purchase helps Persimmon Tree continue its vital work.

Spirit Captive is the impressive collection of poems, short stories, memories and artworks that Helen Bar-Lev presents to us as a declaration of her love for Jerusalem, a city harboring as much pain as pleasure. Through Helen’s eyes, we see contested Jerusalem through the seasons and the hours, a city of exquisite beauty. To appreciate the real spirit of this work we should start from the end: reading the poem Spirit Captive, we can feel the bond that exists between the poet and her chosen city. We can also sense the universality of Jerusalem – the painful, sometimes suffering, beauty that permeates it.

In A Love Poem to Jerusalem, Helen wonders if God created the sweet air of the city just to intoxicate her and if every stone or gate or flower may have been created as a source of inspiration for her paintings. This book is Helen’s masterpiece, where her poems, prose and paintings pay magnificent tribute to Jerusalem.

 
Available from BookBaby and Bookshop.org, shipping now.

When newly engaged Sally Buffington is introduced to Craigville, she meets an expansive Cape Cod cottage that is virtually a family member itself. She quickly finds herself competing for airtime among the talkative, assured band of brothers—and her new mother-in-law, the cottage’s lively and confounding matriarch.

Sally, a Cape Cod local, soon wonders how she’ll ever maintain her independence, let alone her sense of self when the day’s agenda and every detail is already set in stone. But she navigates her new life with quiet persistence and a boundless curiosity that guides her to explore life through the creative lens of her camera and her pen.

Sally writes with a whimsical candor that is both honest and humorous. Through poetic prose and heartfelt reflection, A Place Like This reveals the beauty of Cape Cod and shows us that sometimes the simplest of moments brings us the most lasting joy.

Sally Buffington is a writer and photographer, also a classically trained musician. From her home in southern California, she migrates back to native ground in Massachusetts, especially her spiritual homeland of Cape Cod. Writing lyrically and imaginatively, ever aware of sensory experience and memory, Buffington takes the reader into her thoughts wherever she finds herself.

Buffington can “see things other people don’t see” in everyday scenes and find them beautiful. But her prose is where that ability most shines through. This memoir paints a vivid and lasting memory of a home with as much personality as the family who lived there.

“Punctuated by sensory delights, the author’s prose can prove particularly mouthwatering” …. “An elegantly observant account that transports readers to a beloved place.”

To learn more, and order the book, go to Amazon, Bookshop.org, www.sallybuffington.com, or your local bookstore.

 
 
Jemma Avalon is an unconventional mage-in-training, longing to return to Everland Bay, her ancestral homeland, and find a way to join the renowned magical research institute there, like the women in her family before her.

Daughter of a gentle part elf-fae mother and a father with fiery dragon blood, an unusual combination even in the magical world, ten years after her mother’s sudden death, she is working at a major museum in DC, where magic is all but outlawed. Her father wants her to assimilate and live without magic, but Jemma is determined to fully embrace her heritage.

When an ordinary day at the museum takes an extraordinary turn, Jemma is rocketed to an Everland Bay Institute under violent siege, where dark-arts mages threaten everything important to her. She joins forces with her companions, working feverishly to save Everland Bay from crumbling under enemy attack. In so doing, she finds a path to her own strength and mastery, and her heart’s true home

A Heroine’s Journey tale for our times.

“A beautifully engaging fantasy teeming with dragons, fae, magic, and the importance of family and friendship. A joy to read from beginning to end.”
— Julie Boglisch, The Elifer Chronicles

Using the Amherst Writers & Artists method of timed prompts and strengths-based feedback, give yourself the space to mine your memories in one or more workshops:
 
Write in Your Own Backyard
What’s in your own backyard–your hometown, the town where you once lived or now live, or a place you’ve visited and know well–that you can bring into your writing? Draw on the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches of those settings to construct a world that transports both you and your readers. All genres welcome.
We’ll be using Linda Lappin’s The Soul of Place for inspiration and prompts.
$160 for four weeks, starting Tuesday, July 9, 7-9 pm ET via Zoom
 
Artist’s Palette, Writer’s Pen | Ekphrastic Writing
Unleash your creativity by gaining inspiration from visual art. We’ll use a variety of artwork from French impressionists, Flemish and Dutch masters, American painters, and sculptors from all over the globe to write in whatever genre calls to you. No experience necessary.
$160 for four weeks, starting Monday, July 8, 7-9 pm ET via Zoom
 
AWA-certified facilitator Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a former literary agent. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals, including Cimarron Review, Nimrod, Michigan Quarterly Review, Folio Literary Journal, and Consequence.
 

Andrea [Andi] Millenson Penner’s second collection of poetry, Rabbit Sun, Lotus Moon (Mercury HeartLink), invites the reader to experience the soulful nourishment of “this one precarious life between earth and sky.”

Poems arrive like handwritten letters—unexpected, delicious—from the territory of the poet’s heart. Much like the desert Southwest of the United States, these poems evoke a stark landscape of longing, the promise of rain after grief, and both the expanse and immediacy of human experience.

With cover art by New Mexico artist Meg Leonard, Rabbit Sun, Lotus Moon was named a finalist for the 2017 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award in poetry.

Andi is currently working on a chap book, a third book of poetry, and a memoir, with recent work published in literary magazines, blogs, and anthologies. You can follow her on In Our Own Ink.

Available from Amazon and Bookshop.org.

 
Sixty-Something and Flying Solo: A Retiree Sorts It Out in Iowa is an edgy, humorous memoir with serious ponderings. An Oregon transplant with no kids and no significant other, the author is someone about whom readers could say, “I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes, but if she can make it, I can, too.” Pieces such as ‘What Not to Say at a Funeral’ and ‘Dusting and Other Insanities’ provide a backdrop for monthly accounts of her fall into retirement’s abyss where she clings to her to-do lists while she alters her diet, her wardrobe and her vow to become more domestic. When she resurfaces a year later, she’s surprised at the landscape and what has saved her.

Marian Mathews Clark grew up among loggers in Mist, Oregon (pop 50), then caught the Union Pacific to Iowa to attend Graceland College. In the ensuing years, she capped perfume bottles on Coty’s assembly line in New York, was stranded on Loveland Pass during a blizzard, ironed costumes for Polynesian dancers at the Calgary Stampede, tried to shear a sheep in Australia, earned an MFA in Fiction from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and with co-writer Patricia Stevens was a finalist at O’jai’s Film Festival for their feature script Timber.

Bart Yates, author of The Distance Between Us, said of her memoir, “Clark is a sly writer; she lured me in with…broken garbage disposals and mysteriously disappearing walls; only later did I realize she was…writing about mortality, loss, joy, and love. Great stuff.”

2015 edition available from Amazon, Culicidae Press, and from your local independent bookseller.

 
On 9/11, Andrea Carter Brown was a resident of downtown Manhattan living just a block from the World Trade Center. September 12 chronicles her up close and all too personal experience of the attack, but, even more, the continuing horror and eventual healing of the months and years afterward.

September 12 won the 2022 IPPY Silver Medal in Poetry, the James Dickey Prize from Five Points, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, the Puddinghouse Press Chapbook Competition, The MacGuffin National Poet Hunt, and is cited in the Library of Congress Online Research Guide to the Poetry of 9/11.

“A more haunting memorial to 9/11 than this book will be hard to find. Reading September 12 is a wrenching but restorative experience you won’t soon forget”. 
— Martha Collins, poet, author of Casualty Reports and Blue Front

“… detail by detail, we watch the process of innocence captured by absolutely unpredicted trauma, and how the experience lives on and on, through shock and terror, through the kindness of strangers, through the heart of a beloved, through grief and elegy, through normality that will never again be normal.” 
— Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet Laureate

“This brave book documents great loss, but also hard-won psychic resilience in poems of astonishing beauty and wisdom. September 12 is necessary poetry.”
— Cynthia Hogue, Poetry Editor, Persimmon Tree

In a society where religion rules, one woman discovers the only rules are about survival.

Although she’s legally an adult, eighteen-year-old Meryn Flint must live at home until her stepfather, Ray, finds her a husband. Codified by the Sanctioned Church, it’s known as Family Duty, and it’s the law.

But when Ray kills her mother and Meryn must flee for her own safety, she quickly discovers there’s no safe place for a woman on the run. Unless she’s willing to marry her former boyfriend—a man who’s already demonstrated his capacity for violence—she’ll be forced to live on the street. And that’s a dangerous option for a woman alone.

As time runs out, Meryn is offered a third path: build herself a tiny house, a safe place to call home. Even though it’s a violation of her Family Duty as well as every moral law on the books, Meryn seizes the chance.

But even a tiny tin house might not be enough to save her . . .

An unapologetic Christian feminist, L Maristatter has published poetry in Defuncted journal and fiction in the Saturday Evening Post and Persimmon Tree journal. She loves cats, books, and chocolate, in that order. Usually.

In Understanding Moonseed, we meet the big city girl with a precocious interest in politics, have brushes with pivotal historic moments in the 60’s and 70’s, and continue her journey with her as she falls in love with a man who becomes famous in the music industry, moves with him to Silicon Valley, where she founds what would become one of the region’s largest independent PR/branding firms. She settles into roles as wife, mother and executive, working 60-hours a week, until cancer takes the man who had become husband, father, and soulmate. The family’s grief and devastation give way to trying to understand how life will continue without this column of the family. The arc of the story bends back to love.

Curtis’ sixth sense for what makes words ring– hollow, hallowed, or haunted–inside the walls of her personal architecture informs the themes of Understanding Moonseed. In this essay collection, “a love supreme” guides Curtis from Chicago’s Gold Coast to Silicon Valley branding executive, through reinvention as a memoirist and poet, to her second marriage with Michael, a union that interweaves the felt presences of their deceased spouses who haunt and steward them from grief’s unknowing to new births and epiphanies. In Understanding Moonseed, Curtis invites us with signature courage to grow rather than to retreat after loss in response to love’s call.
— Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium (Tupelo Press)

How does a spirit new to the world, baffled by the family domain and its customs, but above all curious, come to discover its essence?  What does any child carry into the present from ancestors whose histories have been assimilated and long forgotten? These are the questions poet Leslie Ullman explores in her sixth collection.

In the process, what at first appears to be a chronicle of a mid-century childhood becomes an interrogation of the very nature of the soul—its origins, its purpose, its evolution in a given lifetime. Sometimes humorous and gently satirical in their depictions of a middle-class America whose values once seemed unassailable, these poems reconstruct a personal history as they mull over the universal burdens of self-doubt, ambition, and inevitable relinquishments, and then taste the pleasures of traveling light.

Available from 3: A Taos Press and Amazon.

Night at the Musée d’Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities is a vibrant memoir of travel poems centering on Judy Wells’ appreciation of well-known European painters, architects, writers, and musicians associated with great European cities. Her poems explore artists in France, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Spain, from Van Gogh, Chagall, Matisse, and Balzac in Paris, to Velázquez and Goya in Madrid, and Gaudí in Barcelona.

Wells interweaves her own personal life into her poems, which illustrate her creative responses to her travels at different times—from young adult in France to older woman confronting aging in Barcelona. Her poetry encompasses various poetic styles—lyric, narrative, and surprisingly for a book on European travels, haiku.

Night at the Musée d’Orsay
 
If the curators knew
I, a moth, was in the Van Gogh room
they’d be shocked!
But what do they expect—
I love light and I’m particularly
attracted to a painting
of stars—globs of light
reflected in a river.
 
I’ve sat on top of these yellow blobs
and survived though I can feel
the heat of these stars
right through the paint.
Light bulbs are cold by comparison
though I’m not singed by Van Gogh.
I’m transformed and waves of ecstasy
wander through my wings.
 
I rest on Van Gogh’s stars all night.
In the morning I flit to a cottage
and settle on a deep blue iris.
The tourists think I’m part of the painting.
I laugh. I’m just a moth
with grand taste.

Available from Amazon, Bookshop.org, and www.regentpress.net

Janice Lynch Schuster is a writer, poet, and visual artist whose work is inspired and informed by her home near the wetlands of the Maryland portion of the Chesapeake Bay. Working with inks, she creates abstract images that reflect the marshes and creeks of her regions and explore the intersection and interplay of line and color. Sometimes she writes with pens on the images, which gives her the sensation of creating a story. A member of the Muddy Creek Artists Guild, her artwork has appeared in Persimmon Tree and Months to Years.

The pieces are 8”x 8”. If you are interested in learning more, please contact her via Instagram, Janice Lynch Schuster (@jls827) where you can also see more of her images.

Arriving in Philadelphia from Trieste, Italy in 1912, Giacinto, a young carver of church icons, becomes a carousel carver during the golden age of that craft in America. He works hard to build a life for himself and Anna, the fiancee he left behind. When she writes to say that she is marrying the gypsy violinist who played each day in the plaza of Trieste, he is left with only the magical animals he carves.

In 1939, with war looming, few new carousels are being built. Giacinto moves from Philadelphia to the New Jersey shore to maintain its many carousels. Another letter arrives from Anna: she is sending Rosa, her orphaned granddaughter, to him. Rosa’s gypsy heritage has put her in danger from the Nazi round ups, and her grandmother knows no other way to save her. Eight-year-old Rosa upends Giacinto’s solitary, predictable middle-aged existence. Discovery, adventure and danger are all met: youthful imagination brings carved stallions to life and love blossoms in unexpected places.

“Overall, The Carousel Carver is a beautiful little book about carving a niche for oneself in the world and finding love in unexpected places. Recommended.”
–American Historical Novel Society Review

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.
 

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

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

 
Carolyn Schlam invites artists and non-artists alike to engage their imaginations and explore a pathway to affirmative living and joyously creative art making. This is a book that can be read and reread and would make a wonderful gift for a contemplative person or for anyone who enjoys making or appreciating art.

Carolyn is the author of THE CREATIVE PATH: A VIEW FROM THE STUDIO, ON THE MAKING OF ART and THE JOY OF ART: HOW TO LOOK AT, APPRECIATE, AND TALK ABOUT ART, and the forthcoming sequel MORE JOY OF ART. She is a working painter and sculptor. Learn more about her at http://www.carolynschlam.com.

Set in the harsh landscape of rural north Mississippi during World War I, Gerry Wilson’s debut novel, That Pinson Girl, pits a white teenage mother against betrayal, hatred, and violence. Seventeen-year-old Leona Pinson gives birth to a son and refuses to name the child’s father. Luther Biggs, a biracial sharecropper with deep ties to the Pinson family, is Leona’s only ally against her brother, Raymond, who inhabits a world of nightriders and violence. As the secrets that haunt these characters come to light, Leona must rely on her own courage and cunning to save herself and her little son. In prose that has been called both lyrical and unflinching, this dark historical novel engages timeless issues of racism, sexism, and poverty.

“Devastating and beautifully written, Gerry Wilson’s That Pinson Girl is at once a heart-rending tragedy and a testament to the indomitable human spirit.” — Clifford Garstang, author of The Last Bird of Paradise and Oliver’s Travels

“In Gerry Wilson’s gripping debut novel, 1918 in North Mississippi becomes tangible again; here are the red hills, the suck of winter mud, the scrabble of subsistence living, and the intricately crossed lines of race and kin.” — Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Weeds, The Everlasting, and Free Men

“That Pinson Girl is a beautiful novel about the destructive power of dark secrets.” — Tiffany Tyson, author of The Past Is Never and Three Rivers

To learn more about Gerry, visit www.gerrygwilson.com.

Dancing Between the Raindrops: A Daughter’s Reflections on Love and Loss, is a powerful meditation on grief, a deeply personal mosaic of a daughter’s remembrances of beautiful, challenging and heartbreaking moments of life with her family. It speaks to anyone who has lost a loved one and is trying to navigate the world without them while coming to terms with complicated emotions.

Lisa Braxton’s parents died within two years of each other—her mother from ovarian cancer, her father from prostate cancer. While caring for her mother she was stunned to find out that she, herself, had a life-threatening illness—breast cancer.

In this intimate, lyrical memoir-in-essays, Lisa Braxton takes us to the core of her loss and extends a lifeline of comfort to anyone who needs to be reminded that in their grief they are not alone.

Dancing Between the Raindrops is a heartfelt homage to Braxton’s parents in the wake of their passing. She touches the soul of every adult child’s mourning in ways poignant, nostalgic, aching, and funny with a clever patchwork of writing styles. A must read!

Available from Amazon and Bookshop.org.

For more information see https://lisabraxton.com/.

Through her search for newfound purpose in her seventies, author Karen Roberts discovered that voices of encouragement were difficult to find among the popular paradigms of aging: decline, withdrawal, and disengagement, among them.

This workbook presents a remarkable opportunity to unlock a fulfilling and purposeful later life stage.

What’s Included:

• Thought-provoking discussions on aging, gender, and culture
• Interviews with eight inspiring women who overcame challenges and pursued their passions later in life
• Engaging questions to help you reflect and grow on your journey.
• Unique experiences and wisdom that women bring to the later years

Filled with inspirational and educational opportunities, The Blossoming of Women promotes a different vision of elder years and retirement that translates not to retiring from life but entering another phase of efficiency and meaningful thoughts, actions, and choices. Beautiful nature images throughout support the gentle feel and uplifting spirit of these stories. — D. Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

Karen Marie Roberts received an MS degree in human development after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1990. Her interests moved from alternative healing to gerontology and stages of aging. In graduate school, this became a concentration in creative longevity and phenomenology. She attended Wellesley College, UC Berkeley, and Fielding Graduate School.

August, 1980. When Anthropologist Layne Darius comes to Arabia to study a nomadic tribe in the Rub-Al-Khali desert, she also has a personal mission—to find out why her mother vanished here eight years ago.

Falling in love with diplomat David Markam complicates her search, but her sympathy with a group fighting for social reform makes her the target of someone desperate enough to kill.

“Ethnographer Layne Darius challenges… the repressive Saudi government and the country’s unforgiving cultural restrictions… to discover deeply troubling truths about the disappearance of her mother. A sinuous, compelling novel.”
— Anne Da Vigo, award-winning author of Bakersfield Boys Club

“With great sensitivity and nuance, Reh . . . deftly weaves political turmoil with emotional tumult.”
— Kirkus Reviews

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

Other books in the David Markam Mystery Series include Meditating Murder and the forthcoming A Killing in Kasauli. Read more about them at www.annsaxtonreh.com

 
 
Our lives are filled with moments so fleeting that it can be easy to miss the great impact they may have on us. That is, unless we learn to listen when life speaks, even if only in a whisper.

Author Linda F. Piotrowski is a master of listening and learning from all life has to offer. She is a retired board certified chaplain with a master’s degree in theological studies as well as advanced study in palliative care and being with the dying. She ministered as a chaplain for over 40 years. In her retirement she serves as a Stephen Minister.

Always an avid reader she loves reflecting on the rich gifts of ordinary life. She lives in Green Valley, Arizona with her Maine Coon cat, O’Malley. This is her first book. Through reflections,  beautiful photographs, questions for reflection, and suggestions for journaling Linda unpacks many of life’s lessons, as learned through events from childhood through the adult years, and shows you how to do the same.

You will start with learning to honor your origins, teasing out the minute day-to-day moments as well as major events that have shaped you.From there you will explore what makes you all you are today—your little rituals, what feeds your soul, what makes you ache, and who or what guides you. Finally, you will explore what will move you forward and ready you for what lies ahead in your life. Learn to embrace what serves you, and release the rest.

As Piotrowski says, this book will guide you to, “Find your way to the ‘holy and hidden’ heart of your life.”

Betti Franceschi is a painter and sculptor with a decades-long interest in dancers. In 1983, she went to Paris to revel in her daughter Antonia dancing there with New York City Ballet. At the season gala, the audience was as thrilling as the performance on stage. However, the Parisian women in their couture paled in comparison to the retired ballet étoiles in attendance. Exactly thirty years later, at three in the morning, Franceschi was jolted awake in her bed by the realization that she had to photograph those étoiles. It turned out that the project was realized with mostly American stars, and not in Paris, but in Franceschi’s New York studio. The Ageless Dancers photographs are about great dancers’ expressive inner line and the technique that survives diminished athleticism—the artist’s joy triumphant over time.

Available from brilliant: editions

For more, visit https://www.bettifranceschi.com/

 
 
Crooked Hearts Press publishes forgotten, overlooked, and thus disappeared women writers over the age of 55, alongside veteran writers we recognize for their excellence.

In Barbara Allen’s Joy Falls, the most recent Crooked Hearts Press publication, a traumatized family has an elusive desire for normalcy that is found in lyrical moments and humorous problem-solving. The novel is filled with characters who have the stamina for the chaotic present even as their personal histories invade. Joy Falls helps us, not in a self-help way, but in the way fiction helps through storytelling, interesting characters, and laughter. It is about the profoundness of children, the importance of humor, and what happens when we show up for our own lives.

“Barbara Allen’s gorgeous debut novel, Joy Falls, is a true knockout. Allen has created a vibrating—more than vibrant!—world in this comic-tragedy of family madness and love. That she can be so laugh-out-loud funny and heart-breaking and wise all at once never ceases to amaze me. As soon as I finished the book, I had to read it again. I so look forward to more work from her in the future!” — Elizabeth Evans, As Good As Dead

Go to the Crooked Hearts Press website to purchase Joy Falls and other Crooked Hearts books.

Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems extends tactile mysteries to existential questions of invisible miracles, connection, and faith in the face of silence: “By praying you, I create you,” Fulton informs an elusive God. Reveling in the stunning possibilities of language, she seeks joy to counteract trauma and grief, empathizes with the silent pathos of animals, and finds solace in art, friendship, and the mysterious power of gifts. Without denying suffering, this enthralling volume extends a fervent prayer for gratitude and healing.

Fulton borrows tropes and theories from science, linguistics, visual art, [and] mathematics…It is this kind of sonic and imaginative range—which puts into conversation the music of what is voiced with what is silent, invisible—that makes it almost impossible to talk about the powerful hold of these poems…Perhaps more than any poet writing today, Fulton takes to heart John Keats’s belief that writing poetry is a ‘vale of soul-making.’…‘You have to listen,’ she admonishes, ‘louder than you sing.’ Is there a more attentive listener than Alice Fulton? A more haunted and haunting singer?
— Lisa Russ Spaar, On the Seawall
 

Alice Fulton is the featured poet in the spring 2024 issue of Persimmon Tree.

Lying Down with Dogs is a memoir told in interrelated essays about the years Caradine spent starting and running Other Mothers Animal Rescue. As in any worthwhile endeavor, life has a way of intervening, and she includes some of those non-animal adventures in her tale, as it is all a part of the Other Mothers saga. From rescuing kittens under a house to finding a farm sanctuary that would take in a pig, from birthing puppies to cats in the freezer, she tells the inside – often crazy – story of what is involved in managing such an enterprise.

But Lying Down with Dogs is first and foremost a story of the animals and the impact they have had on the author’s life through its many ups and downs. Sometimes, they’ve provided love, sometimes diversion and, always, they have prepared her for what comes next. Ultimately, her love of animals is the story of her own redemption.

This book is a sample of some of our work: fiction, and non-fiction, stories and poems, written and shared in our longtime Eastside Seattle area writing group that meets on Tuesday mornings. You will find stories of bugs and children and fish and whales and people who walk in and out of paintings: fantastic characters and ordinary people trying to find their way and remembering their families and family history.

Our main purpose in publishing this anthology is to honor our writing instructor/guru Doris Northstrom celebrating her 90th year of life and 35th year of leading/encouraging writers to become better at their craft. It’s also an opportunity to showcase our talents and to encourage older people to write. The average age of our group members is 75+. If we can do it, others surely can.

We are a diverse group, and that enhances our ability to learn from and support one other. Our shared stories of birth, marriage, health and grief, stir our souls and encourage us to write. We began as classmates; we have become a close-knit family, brought together because we write.

“Not sure who these people are other than great writers. Really enjoyable read.”
— Amazon reviewer

Available from Amazon

 
It took me forty years to write my story. Hundreds of drafts in desk drawers, computers and even in my dreams. The beginning I knew, but the end was lost with my first husband. And I just couldn’t make it up.

After a book deal was offered, I drove my editor crazy with changes. I told her the albatross wasn’t letting go till I got the story right. She threatened to come and tear off the bird’s legs if I touched the copy one more time.

And when it was all done, the book on display in the window of a downtown Helsinki bookstore, my former stepson called for the first time ever.

We need to talk, Niko said, and I learned how wrong I’d been about the things that really mattered.

This is the final, final version of my story.
Unless, of course, Mariam decides to get in touch.

More on www.tualaine.com

“Indra Kapur’s writing is illuminating, entertaining, and perceptive, gracing each topic with beauty and wit that leaves you both completely satisfied and wanting more.” Katherine Longshore, author of the Gilt series

“Indra Kapur’s courage in embracing and committing her life to another culture is clear. Her stories delight, break our hearts, and show us an India most of us have never seen before.” Ann Saxton Reh, author of the David Markam mysteries.

“These stories deftly capture the nuances and contradictions of their well-drawn characters, many from India, in a range of intriguing and dramatic situations.” Jack Adler, author of The Tides of Faith and other novels.

Available on Amazon and from you independent book store.

 
 
Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean is the most remote inhabited island in the world.

Henry, Lizzy, and Starchy are among the many children of Tristan da Cunha who lose their fathers to the sea in 1885. Their friendship endures over eighty years on an island that is both an egalitarian utopia and an unrelenting challenge to its people.

Based on the history of the island – documented by missionaries, whalers, explorers, shipwrecked travelers, and the islanders themselves – Leaving Tristan da Cunha follows the trio’s fortunes as ships come and go, providing their only connection to the “h’outside warld.”

When the 1961 eruption of Tristan’s volcano forces the evacuation of the islanders to England, they are determined to return as soon as the ashes cool. But the Colonial Office stands in the way.

This is the story of the love the people of Tristan have for their “hi-land” and of their determination to live out their lives there – on the narrow green apron of the volcano – in spite of being relentlessly urged by authorities to abandon Tristan to its rightful inhabitants: “the wild birds of the ocean.”

Margaret is a retired community planner. Her story Two Goddesses and a Child: An imagined incident on ancient Crete appeared in the Fall 2023 of Persimmon Tree.

Available from Amazon.

Persimmon Tree readers will recognize and love young Joey’s mother, Ellie, as she navigates through poverty and around a philandering, alcoholic husband to help her boy achieve his dream of becoming a classical musician. She scrimps and saves to take her nine-year-old boy to the San Francisco Symphony to hear Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, though she had never before set foot in a concert hall.

Readers will follow Joey through his childhood with all its real-life pain and watch him use his creativity to “get even” for his dad’s cruelty. Though his relationship with his mother is not without trials, she models for him loyalty, persistence, and hard work, and allows no excuses when times are hard.

In high school, Joey is torn between his love for a curly-haired beauty and pursuing his musical dream. When another girl courts him and offers to help him pay his way through college and music lessons, Joey marries her, thus forming a tormented love triangle.

You will follow Joey as he becomes a successful musician. But, having achieved his musical goals, will Joey ever be able to set right his personal life?

Available on Amazon

Check out Nanci’s website for samples of her writing and art. Nancileewoody.com

And click here to hear the music in Tears and Trombones.

Helen Bar-Lev has traveled extensively – especially in Africa and throughout the Middle East – and has come away with exquisite “pencil paintings” (as she calls them) from each journey. The painting here is of a town in Israel to which she has recently been evacuated, and, like all of her paintings, is a miniature, measuring approximately 11cm by 15cm (4.5” x 6”).