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.

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.

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.

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore..

Infused with eco-logic, informed by feminism, and taking cues from Eve, Cain, Proserpine, Ulysses, Parsifal and selves present and past, these fifty poems illustrate myths of nature and the nature of inherited myth.

Available from Codhill or from your independent bookstore.

More information from https://marygilliland.com/

“Mary Gilliland’s magisterial new collection, The Devil’s Fools, opens in myth and magic, but its vast reach is deeply rooted in her reverence for earth and all earthly creations.…From first to last, I am spellbound by the largesse of vision and the beauty of this wondrous collection.”

Subverting received traditions, the lyrics of The Devil’s Fools speak to and for those wanting heaven: modern pilgrims, medieval masons; seafarer, axe murderer, alcoholic; daughter, spouse, sibling, mother; a woman on pause, a monarch of the underworld, Eve stepping out past Eden.

WINNER OF THE CODHILL PRESS PAULINE UCHMANOWICZ POETRY AWARD

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.

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.

Available from Amazon or your independent bookstore.

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 from Amazon or from your independent bookstore..

All the varieties of the human condition are here in Judith Beth Cohen’s collection of short stories – a Jewish bus driver in Texas, a Yoga guru, sixties rebels, struggling couples, and singles looking for love.

There’s a therapist who brings a live python to meetings with his disturbed charges and a single woman who joins a scheme for borrowing married men. A feuding couple fight a forest fire on an Indian reservation. Rebels and self-identified outsiders confront their demons in stories laced with humor and empathy.

The praise from one reviewer is typical:

“Almost every story features a woman who observes life with a beguiling mix of intelligence, skepticism, hope and humor. Perfect for these pandemic times.”

Available from Atmosphere Press, from Amazon, or from your independent bookstore.

Mother-Daughter Banquet untangles the knot of memory and finds a thread of love and reconciliation.

After losing her mother at the age of nine, Alice Bloch becomes a surrogate mother to her four younger siblings, while a formidable triumvirate of grandmother, stepmother, and aunt step into the maternal role to fill the void for Bloch herself, guiding her development as woman and writer. Diving deep into her memories of growing up as a Jewish lesbian in mid-twentieth century Ohio, Bloch brings us universal truths about the mother-daughter bond.

“Compelling, provocative, and above all else, completely honest, the four unique mothers who inhabit these pages will stay with the reader long after the last page has been turned.”

“I found myself laughing out loud on one page and teary-eyed on the next…. These stories are poignant, funny, and captivating.”  – Lillian Fademan, author of Naked in the Promised Land and My Mother’s Wars

Available from Minerva Rising Press, from Amazon, or from your independent bookstore.

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.
 

Available from robertaschultz.com, from Dos Madres Press, or from your independent bookstore.

Kerry Langan’s fellow writers can’t stop praising her pitch-perfect short stories:

“Once again, short story writer Kerry Langan knocks it out of the park. Her newest collection is a kaleidoscope of beautifully rendered stories illuminating, with tremendous verisimilitude, great insight, and lyrical and precise prose, the complex nature of the female heart and mind.”

“Kerry Langan’s collection offers a lovely new literary voice and a quiet, sharp, perceptive mind. These stories are intimate, surprising and graceful, a pleasure to read.”

“Kerry Langan’s My Name is Your Name, an impressive and readable collection, is a sort of primer on the ages of women. Her female protagonists take on issues and problems that are familiar to us, struggling with identity, finding autonomy, dealing with and fighting against expectations in a wonderfully detailed world, where desire and choice are fraught with consequence. This suspension between the ordinary and the arrival of the unexpected permeates the collection, highlighting the darkness behind the bright scrim of daily life.”

Available from Universal Table, from Amazon, or from your independent bookstore.

Imagine being an “other woman”, and then finding out that you’re not the only one. There have been many, all along.

For Jack, one is never enough.

Each chapter introduces someone affected by Jack’s trysts. The women are married, single, divorced. The ages vary as Jack grows older. Then the reach goes further. There is an adult son Jack never knew. There’s a bartender on the cusp of meeting the woman of his dreams, only to have Jack steal her away. There is a doctor who is shocked by Jack’s abandonment of her patient, an Other Woman with breast cancer. There are Jack’s first two wives, who run into each other thirty years after the first wife was replaced by the second wife, and there is the third wife, who is still married to Jack. Jack’s mother also speaks, at the beginning and the end.

Author Kathie Giorgio deftly weaves a novel that goes beyond the triangle of husband, wife, and lover. The question of who is cheating on whom becomes more difficult to answer. Each chapter reveals another secret. But every secret has two sides, and in some cases, even more than that.

Available from Amazon or your independent bookstore.

Contain, Cynthia Hogue’s new book of poems, began in the first few months of the pandemic lockdown as a daily meditation on artist Morgan O’Hara’s mandala-like visual sequence, “Nineteen Forms of Containment.” Each day Hogue focused on different social, cultural, or medical issues, retracing O’Hara’s process as a starting place for her own meditations on matter and form in a time of catastrophe. She often felt as if she were channeling both words and insights as she wrote, an inward-outward communion inspired by O’Hara’s series and the enormity of the tragedy unfolding.

In her New Pages review, poet Jami Macarty praises Hogue for the particular attention she pays to the “social justice-related realities” that the pandemic highlights, as “a way / of putting word to something / for which there are no words.”

Published by Tram Editions

Available from Tram Editions or from your independent bookstore.

If my mother hadn’t kept a baby book for me in which she recorded my birth weight, my bottle, my first words, my bedtime ritual, my toilet training — you get the idea — I would never have thought to write this parody of a baby book for middle-aged women and men.

As I turned its time-worn pages, I couldn’t help but notice that middle age, like babyhood, is an exciting developmental stage filled with memorable firsts and growth spurts — (pot bellies, chin hairs, and liver spots). And what better way to remember all the little details that make you special, such as your favorite formula (Pinot or Cosmo?) or your bedtime ritual (No liquids after 6 PM).

Throughout you’ll find updated nursery rhymes, and essays such as “Introducing solid foods;” “It’s prostate not prostrate;” and “Is it hot in here or is it me?”

The late Erma Bombeck had much to do with making this book a best-seller when she had this to say about My (Middle-Aged) Baby Book. “A great gift for middle-agers and those in denial.” — Erma Bombeck.

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

Available from https://www.sulimamalzin.net or from your independent bookstore.

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 from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

Ready to capture your dream of becoming a writer? Do you want to write poetry? Short stories? A novel? Your memoir?

Imagine a place where ALL writers are welcome, no matter their experience, no matter their genre. Imagine a community of encouragement, experience, and support.

Look no further than AllWriters’ Workplace & Workshop. AllWriters’ is an international creative writing studio, located in Waukesha, Wisconsin. We offer online and on-site courses and workshops in all genres and abilities of creative writing. We also offer coaching and editing services.

No matter where you are, no matter what you write, this is where you belong. Are you a writer? Then welcome home!

Welcome to AllWriters’ Workplace & Workshop!

More information from www.allwritersworkshop.com
262-446-0284
Contact director and founder Kathie Giorgio directly at kathie11@aol.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.

Available from Prolific Press or Amazon or your independent bookstore.

Inspired by the true story of the author’s mother’s escape from the Holocaust.

Leaving her Jewish family behind in Nazi–occupied Czechoslovakia, Lena’s journey takes her to an English village — where she faces prejudice and finds herself torn between two men.

An engrossing novel that “brings the forces of history to a very human level” (Booklist)

Winner of the IBPA Silver Medal in Historical Fiction. Now available in audiobook, narrated by the 4-time AudioFile Award Winner Jilly Bond

Available from Bookshop.org, from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

Audiobook available from Audible – or wherever you get your audiobooks.

More information from https://www.barbararidley.com/.

“Mother Tongue is not only dramatic and engrossing, it is also insightful and wise. Read it! Read it! You will never forget it!”

“Joyce Kornblatt’s voice is lyrical and powerful, and this lovely novel is about being lost and being found, in the deepest, most primal sense. A beautiful, beautiful book.”

“This author’s worthy return is full of grace . . .”

Mother Tongue begins with a shocking discovery.  In a powerful fiction that reads like a true story, the details of the crime and its aftermath unfold.

In mid-life, Australian fiction-writer Nella Pine learns that she was kidnapped as an infant from a hospital in the United States, taken to Australia, and raised there by the woman she knew as her mother, but who was actually her abductor.  “When I was three days old, a nurse named Ruth Miller stole me from the obstetrics ward in Mercy Hospital and raised me as her own.”

In four voices of those whose lives were changed forever by the abduction, the mystery of Nella’s kidnapping emerges. Why was she taken?  How was the secret kept for so long?  What became of the family she was stolen from? Mother Tongue invites the reader to participate with these memorable characters as they unfold the impact on them of a terrible crime.

Published by https://publerati.com

$17.95 wherever books are sold.

Available from Amazon or your independent bookstore.

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.

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard’s exuberantly lyrical collection is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates in Distantly an intimate series drawn loosely from urban experience. The poems are linked by their city settings, drawn from a woman’s observations, emotions, perceptions, and dreams as she wanders the streets of her world.

“A cosmopolitan of interiority,” as Eleanor Wilner describes her, “Brossard creates meta-cities where the political lies down with the poetic.” Cynthia Hogue’s co-translation, as Wilner adds, “doesn’t feel like translation, but like the discovery of a wholly original poet newly minted in English.”  

Distantly expresses a redolently postmodern sensibility, at once utopian and real.

Published by Omnidawn Press

Available from Omnidown Press or Amazon, or your independent bookstore.

Four siblings gather in Italy for their mother’s funeral. All fifty-something, all grief-stricken, they gather at their old holiday home in Tuscany, where their mother wants to be buried.

The four – and their partners – have come from far away and travel light, but they are bringing their present burdens and problems with them. The point of view shifts as each brother or sister picks up the story of their mother’s love, the sweetly remembered holidays in Tuscany, and what has happened to them since.

From the author of Death in Malta and The Cartographer of Venice comes this relatable story of four adult siblings grappling with things that change, and things that stay the same forever.

A Funeral in Fiesole is a family novel to gladden the heart of any reader.

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

“I don’t have words strong enough to convey the depth of feeling these stories aroused in me. Painful, poignant, wistful, evocative, hopeful, sensual, tragic . . . real. Simply stunning.”

Trees are silent witnesses to the passing of time, guardians of myth and memory, metaphors of life.

About the book:

Each of the thirteen stories in this collection has a tree of particular importance to its characters and their communities. These are tales of childhood and imagination, of migration and struggle, conflict and change. They are about specific places in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the U.S., and real and imagined sites of cultural encounter, growth and adaptation.

“After I finished reading Kathy Taylor’s “Trees and Other Witnesses” I felt like I was leaving behind a dear friend, one I was not yet ready to say goodbye to.”

“From the opening page, I was drawn into these stories by Taylor’s poetic and meditative voice.”

Available from Austin Macauley Publishers, from Amazon, or from your independent bookstore.

COLORADO AUTHORS LEAGUE FINALIST 2022

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.

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

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.

Available from New Village Press, or Amazon, or from your independent bookstore.

“In this extraordinary collection, Ann Fisher-Wirth looks levelly at mortality, grief, and memory, and reckons with what it is to be urgently alive, bringing her incisive nuance to subjects ranging from the loss of a beloved sister to Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary to our imperiled natural world to the comforts of marital love. In ‘Wooden Comb,’ Fisher-Wirth writes, ‘I cannot reconcile how the world is sweet, how the world is burning.’ Paradise Is Jagged is too wise a book to promise impossible reconciliation. Instead it offers a benediction of sorts: Walk with me through this difficult and tender place, it says. Willingly, gratefully, we do.”

Ann Fisher-Wirth is the recipient of the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Poetry and Literature, Mississippi Arts Commission

Paradise Is Jagged will be published soon.

Available from Terrapin Books, from Amazon, or your own independent bookstore.

The line-art illustrations are based on nearly 30 years of Lemberger’s brilliant photographs of dance performances and rehearsals in studios, on stages, and in other spaces.

Enjoy coloring a different dancer every month!

“MODERN WOMEN: 21st CENTURY COLORING BOOK IS A MAJOR MARVEL and a WONDER FILLED ACHIEVEMENT and an AWESOME WORK OF ART FOR NOW AND THE FUTURE!!! yes – i am yelling (and screaming). so well done and designed and so compelling and so cool…So powerful!!!”

Modern Women 21st Century Coloring Book Calendar 2023 – $14 (including free shipping to anywhere in U.S.)

MODERN WOMEN: 21ST CENTURY DANCE, A COLORING BOOK – $20 ($5 for shipping/handling in U.S.)

(For international shipping please request rates)

Available from Etsy.

Imagine calling yourself a writer. Now it’s time to make it real. Let Scribbly help you become the writer you’ve always wanted to be…without the pressure.

My name is Kim Duke and I’m a full-time writer, Amazon best-selling author and my work has been featured on NBC News, the Globe and Mail and other international media.

My mission is simple. To get more women writing with intention, fun and freedom!

My gentle writing program is mailed to your home every 30 days. Each Scribbly is loaded with quirky writing tips, prompts and examples. My team and I devote over 100 hours into each issue. Gorgeous illustrations, research, art, science and writing that reach out from the pages to inspire you. I can’t wait for you to see your Scribbly!

Scribbly is a gentle writing program that encourages your creativity and gets you writing in five minutes. If you want to explore creative nonfiction writing (without pressure) – you’ll love Scribbly! The best part? When you’re a Scribbly member, you get a chance to submit your writing for publication in Scribbly.

Hooray for Snail Mail!

More about the Scribbly Program can be found at www.kimdukewrites.com/Scribbly

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