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.

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

At age fourteen, Sophie Kamler crossed the Atlantic alone, from Poland to America. At sixteen she paid for her siblings and mother to follow. At eighteen, a penniless wife, then a mother of three, she defied New York gangsters. At fifty-six, a widow, she married again only to be widowed a second time. Matriarch to a sprawling but tightly-held family of descendants, hers is a story of ambition and of love given, withheld, slighted, sustained, and disappointed. This book is a moving tribute to a courageous woman, told here by her granddaughter, Barbara Kamler.  Riveting vignettes, photographs and poetic reflections combine to tell an affecting tale of love, pain and determination.  It is a story that will resonate with the experience of so many remarkable women, whose rich histories remain untold or defined by stereotype, minimising the complexity and vibrancy of their lives.

“Sophie Kamler’s story sweeps up the history of the twentieth century in one life. From pogroms to displacement, from freedom’s devouring ambitions to love that can endure years of suffering—this book of fragments, voices, memories and reflections offers readers gem after gem of wisdom. I found it unputdownable, almost holding my breath all the way through.”
—Kevin Brophy, Professor of Creative Writing, University of Melbourne; Founding Director, Five Islands Press, Australian literary magazine; recipient 2018 Michel Wright Prize for Poetry.

“So much of who we are is predicated on the decisions, hardships, and downright luck of our ancestors. Barbara Kamler has written a deeply moving tribute to her grandmother Sophie in a series of vignettes that engage with the complexity and limitations of memoir, leaning into these connections, parallels and palimpsets to create a composite portrait that feels expansive and true.”
—Magdalena Ball, poet, reviewer, Managing Director of Compulsive Reader, author of Bobish, a verse memoir of her great-grandmother.

Available from Amazon.

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.

It’s 2054 A.D., and the world needs a rest from men. Women have developed a novel solution, and the men can’t wait to leave. When my taxi driver tells me he has bullet wounds from the Russian police, speaks five languages, and is teaching at Harvard, I start taking notes. After the funeral, a widow loses all her married friends. Then karma sends flowers.

“Indra Kapur writes with clear insight and an acute sense of humor. The stories in A Year Without Men are varied, clever, and often delightfully surprising! Cue me rubbing my hands together with glee.” — Katherine Longshore, author of the Gilt series.

“The stories in A Year Without Men create a powerful sense of place with rich sensory and emotional detail. Characters are appealing in their humor and the compassion they inspire. I want to meet these people and be there with them! Some endings surprise us, and others give us a satisfying sense of the inevitable playing out. The stories have a depth of reality that makes them unforgettable.” — Ann Saxton Reh, author of the David Markam Mysteries

“Mickee Voodoo is a very entertaining parody of a “hardboiled” detective story in the mode of Chandler, Hammett, and, more recently, Robert B. Parker…witty banter ensues with the detective cracking wise in a colorful idiom both in dialogue and narrative…delights in wordplay…very clever, and is quite funny…Kapur is a talented and skillful fiction writer.” — John DeChancie, author of The Skyway Trilogy and The Castle Perilous series.

Available from Amazon or on order from your independent bookstore.

The author’s husband was a high-functioning alcoholic, a clinical term that belied drinking Scotch for breakfast. He kept his addiction a secret. Suspecting something was amiss, she became a detective: kissing for the sake of sniffing, discovering trash bags full of empties, flasks in his briefcase, and eventually over $60,000 in credit card debt.

Her pleas to get help were ignored, her support and encouragement spurned as she navigated that impossible line between supportive spouse and enabler. Each day brought fresh worries – will he get fired, get into a car crash, get killed?

Their lives were spiraling out of control, forcing her into a front row seat to rock bottom. Then, a devastating diagnosis.

Bottles in the Basement: Surviving an Alcoholic – A Memoir will resonate deeply with partners and loved ones who find themselves dragged down into a scary, out-of-control underworld–addiction, adultery, gambling, financial infidelity–and wondering, What happened to my life?

Paula Ganzi McGloin is an award-winning writer and contributor to The New York Times, including the Modern Love column, Newsday, AARP and other publications. She blogs about surviving an alcoholic on her website paulaganzimcgloin.com

Available from Amazon

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 and from Betti Franceschi, bettif80@gmail.com.

Betti Franceschi’s website is https://www.bettifranceschi.com/publications.htm

Women, the largest and yet most unrecognized population of the dance arts community, are spotlighted in renowned dance photographer Julie Lemberger’s Modern Women: 21st Century Dance, a coloring book, edited by Elizabeth Zimmer.

Lemberger, who has been photographing dance for almost two decades, transformed her photographs into illustrations almost ready to color and then added psychedelic, floral and abstract backgrounds for the figures “to dance in.”

The 92 page volume features today’s leading dance innovators and interpreters, and celebrates their diverse genres and perspectives.

Modern Women: 21st Century Dance is a perfect gift for children-of-all-ages including grandparents and grandchildren, especially those who love women, dance and art.

Two options available:
Coloring book for $20

Shipping & handling is $5 each for U.S. addresses. Please contact for International shipping costs.

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.

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”).

 
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

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.

Poems from Linda Hogan explore new and old ways of experiencing the vagaries of the body and existing in harmony with earth’s living beings. Throughout this clear-eyed collection, Hogan tenderly excavates how history instructs the present, and envisions a future alive with hope for a healthy and sustainable world that now wavers between loss and survival.

“Hogan remains awed and humble in this sweetly embracing, plangent book of grateful, sorrowful, tender poems wed to the scarred body and ravaged Earth.”
—BOOKLIST

“In an age as acrimonious as ours, Linda Hogan’s new poetry collection, A History of Kindness, sounds especially poignant.”
—THE WASHINGTON POST

“There is no one like Linda Hogan. I read her poetry to both calm and ignite my heart. A History of Kindness is a series of oracles rising from the page born out of a life of listening, feeling, responding.”
—TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS, author of Erosion

Available from Torrey House Press and Bookshop.org

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.

 
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.

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.

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

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.

 
 
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

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/.

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

In 1967, when teenaged Julia MacDonnell relinquished her son to closed adoption, she understood she’d never see him again and would always keep this secret.  Fast forward half a century when an email from him shows up in her queue.  Hidden Girls tells how her jubilation about this reconnection upended her life.  Julia is forced to grapple with her memories of love for her lost child, and of coercive manipulations by her family and Catholic Charities. MacDonnell was compelled to tell her story after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade because of her fear that women would again lose control of their reproductive rights.

“A visceral, moving account of adoption and the systems that prioritize profit and propriety over people.”
– Kirkus Reviews

“… an important beautifully-told accounting of a terrible history, and a timely warning that we not repeat its mistakes.”
– Kathryn Joyce, author of The Child Catchers

“… a beautiful, powerful, and truth-telling story…I was struck by how it is both every birth mother’s story and a story that is completely unique to the author.”
– Marylee MacDonald, birth mother, and author of Surrender

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and BookBaby.

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.

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

 
 
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.”

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.

The Birthing House is a novel about writing, memory and belonging. It takes place in the medieval town of Marburg, Germany, where layers of history and philosophy, stories of immigrants, midwives and births surround a woman who finds healing and discovery through her writing.

Kathy’s life-long love of language, music and storytelling come together in the newly released audiobook. Two talented narrators bring to life the diverse voices, languages and accents that season the text as Kathy’s original recordings create a musical interplay with key moments in the story.

“Kathy Taylor’s writing is a breath of fresh air in the literary world. Her ability to explore complex themes with nuance and sensitivity is unmatched. Her characters come alive on the page, their struggles and triumphs echoing in the hearts of readers.” — Bookish Connections

Available from Amazon, Spotify and many other major platforms.

guest poetry editor, Persimmon Tree, Winter 2022

Woolf’s pen runs dry, Tesla holes up, Lincoln emerges in yet another bardo, and the witnesses for peace include soldiers under duress, models transformed to artists, descendants of forced immigrants, survivors of hurricanes.

Ember Days begins with ritual and ends with prayer as the poems tunnel through Wednesday’s jammed boulevards, Friday’s worthless cash, Saturday’s prodigal feet.

“Gilliland is a poet of witness and spirituality, grappling with climate devastation while also interrogating world policies and politics.”
— Best American Poetry

“Gilliland waltzes smoothly between the cheeky and conversational and the lyrical.”
— LitHub

“I am spellbound by the largesse of vision and the beauty.”
— Cynthia Hogue

Order from: https://www.codhill.com/product/ember-days/

Find out more at https://marygilliland.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.

One part love story, one part mystical journey, and one part exploration of what is required of a leader who deeply cares about the well-being of her people.

When Julia travels to Ndalla’s World with a woman she barely knows, she risks much. But what she finds there is more than she imagined. There she discovers the power of true love, learns about the spirit realm that has always surrounded her, and comes to understand the very real sacrifices that a leader is willing to make for the people that she loves.

In Ndalla’s World, Beth Franz has given us the kind of characters we need to help us rediscover the very real possibilities that surround us in these very challenging times.

Available from Amazon and Bookshop.org.