Are you looking for perfect gifts for all the special people on your holiday gift list? Well, here they are! Scroll through ArtsMart, and you’ll find a dozen or more super gift ideas - fascinating books on every subject, writing workshops and courses, even calendars - something for everyone on your list! And they all come with the wish that you have a joyous holiday season and a peaceful - and healthy - new year.

Links to Amazon are affiliate links, meaning that although the price remains exactly the same for you, Persimmon Tree receives a small commission on each purchase. While we do not in any way endorse Amazon (indeed, we support independent bookstores!), there is no denying that buying from Amazon does benefit Persimmon Tree at no extra effort or cost to you.

“[T]o read Pamela (Jody) Stewart’s This Momentary World is to witness through the heightened lens of poetry nearly half a century of living… Stewart’s early poems are in conversation with other writers, other books and works of art, other times outside of her own. Then, as the poet grows, she draws closer to her own life and the resulting poems become more urgent.”

Available on Amazon or from your local bookseller.

 
The interplay between the two poets immerses us in family relationships, encounters with the natural world, and most of all, a mature understanding of the contradictions in all of our lives.
– Joanne Durham, author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl and On Shifting Shoals

The earth-toned poems in Prayer Gardening by Constance Brewer and Kathleen Cassen Mickelson burble along the riverbank, lace themselves among the trees, tease us through seasons, give us glimpses of dreams, the yeasty smell of bread rising, the moon, angels, and even origami. And, oh, the birds—glorious, full-throated, “each voice as one small part of a choir,” (KCM) “light arrowing down/ to anoint… with purpose” (CB). Though there are two distinct voices here, one cannot help but deduce they are both channeling the same dazzling earth-centric deity.
– Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, author of Alone in the House of My Heart

Prayer Gardening sparkles with birds, stars, and snowflakes. In these pages we feel touch “sweep my soul/back into my body” and “hear the hunger beneath every song.” Constance Brewer and Kathleen Cassen Mickelson’s words call us to “whisper thanks for this breath,” reminding us to fully inhabit our lives—as the best poetry always does.  
– Laura Grace Weldon, 2019 Ohio Poet of the Year, author of Portals  

Available from Amazon and Kelsay Books.

For more information, visit constancebrewer.com or oneminnesotacrone.com.

A world at war. Romantic tension. A forlorn girl determined to win over a man she cannot have.

Georgia, 1941. Mae Lee Willis may be only eight years old, but she has her heart set on her older sister’s boyfriend. Frustrated by her sibling’s infidelity to the dashing paratrooper, she takes matters into her own hands. But the little girl never expected spilling the beans would have fatal consequences…

When the long-forbidden apple of Mae Lee’s eye returns years later damaged in mind and body from his battles in Burma, she can’t shake her naïve longing. But when a sudden tragedy commits her to her sister’s care, the heartsick teen is forced to face the brutal fragility of family bonds and selfless sacrifice.

…[D]ebut novelist Lovett snares us on the very first page of this story set in rural Georgia in the middle of the last century…. Exceptionally satisfying, Lovett is the real deal.” —Kirkus Reviews

Named one of the best 100 indie books of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews The audiobook received a Silver award in the 2023 IPPY Awards.

Available from Amazon or from your independent bookstore.

For more information, see www.annelovett.com

“Ronnie Hess’s Eggphrasis is a mix of astute and sympathetic observations about her backyard chickens and encounters with wild species, interwoven with her perspectives on life.  Her poetry is by turns amusing and poignant, while providing insight into the birds she writes about.” — Anna Pidgeon, Beers-Bascom Professor in Conservation, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Throughout this collection, birds are a delight, a cause for concern, a flock, unique individuals, worthy of attention in and of themselves and for what they sometimes suggest about us humans. These insightful poems present for our regard the narrow and the wide earth and all who find a place here to fly, to walk, to write, and to practice their art.” — Margaret Rozga, author of Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems, and 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate

About the Author

Ronnie Hess is a poet, essayist, editor, award-winning journalist, the author of six poetry collections, as well as two culinary travel guides (on France and Portugal, Ginkgo Press). Born and raised in New York City, she now lives in Madison, WI. https://ronniehess.com/

Word Poetry (2023) $18.25, 84 pages. Available through Amazon or your independent bookstore.

East End Cottage Ojai, Califonia Fine art giclée (25” x 19”) $299.00

Garden Portal, Casa del Herrero, Montecito, California Fine art giclée (25” x 19”) $299.00

Mexico Bungalow, Punta Mita Fine art giclée ( 20” x 16”) $299.00

The beauty of nature, how it renews and how it heals, is always the inspiration for my watercolors. I’m offering a few originals and giclée fine art prints painted “en plein air” wherever life takes me.

If an image speaks to you and you would like to purchase it please email me at susan@susanflorence.com for payment and shipping details. You’ll find more of my paintings and prints there, too.

Books by Susan Florence, also available at Amazon or your local bookseller:
— Babies Take Us On A Special Journey
— When You Lose Someone You Love: A Journey Through The Heart of Grief

 
Marsha Blitzer’s chapbook was inspired by her experiences in Russia immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was a time of deep despair for many, a time of great hope for most. The poems deal with the issues she faced raising a young son and working as a corporate lawyer in that highly turbulent legal environment. She describes street crime, setting up a Russian language pre-school, corporate lawlessness, friendships with Russians and expatriates, and more. The book’s title, Malaya Bronnaya, refers to the street in central Moscow where her apartment was located, across from historic Patriarchs’ Pond.

Available from Amazon and Finishing Line Press.

Ellen Bass, Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, writes, “At times spare and lyrical, at times rich with sensory detail, Entrekin invites readers into the intimacy of Walking Each Other Home. This generous collection honors devotion, lives well lived, and the legacy of children and grandchildren. This poet embraces both beauty and truth: ‘I am the blue flowers / the tiny white bones in the grass.’”

Alicia Ostriker, New York Poet Laureate emerita, says, “A man’s eyesight is gone and he is gradually dying after a long and successful life. His wife is caring for him as many wives do, but she is also making poems richly brimming with all they share — life, language, and years of love. Dense with the textures of existence, the fling of metaphor, the wisdom of ‘practicing being one with the night,’ Gail Entrekin’s poetry tells me I am not alone with my fears and stresses.”

Dorianne Laux, whose collection Only As the Day is Long was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, says, “Walking Each Other Home takes us through a marriage as it devolves into illness, operations, recovery, more loss.  And yet this couple walk together though the storm, lurching under one umbrella, looking up at the stars.  We watch them as they practice survival, practice becoming “one with the night.”  Poignant, moving and true.”

Available from longshippress.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, Bookshop.org, or your local bookstore.

What the Country Wrought explores and connects the meanings, nuances, and feel of “country.”

In this compelling collection you will discover poems of rural roots, legacies, and the mainstays of home, family, and personal identity. Poems that address societal issues and truths America as a whole has wrought. Poems that revel in the ideals and spirit of building a country: perseverance, independence, audacity, and sisterhood.

From motorcycling adventures to women’s suffrage, from the thunder of injustice to compassion and peace, Annis Cassells writes with an eye for description, an ear for musicality, and a heart for us all.

Annis Cassells is a poet, teacher, and coach. What the Country Wrought is her second full-length collection. She longingly recalls her adventures traversing the USA on Big Red, her trusty motorcycle. To compensate, she is often over-scheduled for writing and poetry workshops in far-away places over Zoom.

Available from Amazon and wherever books are sold.

In Georgette Unis’ Watercolors in the Desk Drawer, the world is rendered in intricate detail, lush as the pigments on an artist’s palette. Family, nature, politics, and art circumscribe the arc of a life where “time bends / the chronometer” and “leaves do not grow / in the winter soil of philosophies / but rather along the arteries / of unfortunates.” Whether tracking an ancestral immigrant childhood or the results of the most recent election, Unis is attuned to the shifting world, where memories pulled from the desk drawer of recollection reinvent and reinvigorate the landscape.

 

Available from Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, or from your independent bookstore.

Proceeds from sale of these lovely cards by Eleanor Rubin will go to benefit the Orchard Cove Scholarship Fund whose mission is to provide well deserving Orchard Cove employees with financial assistance toward furthering their education.

The artist Eleanor Rubin is a printmaker and watercolor artist whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Eleanor Rubin: Dreams of Repair, a book devoted to her artwork with a foreword by Howard Zinn, was published by Charta, 2011.

Packs of 5 cards with envelopes: $25 each. Handling and mailing for all orders is $5. Checks only please. Make checks payable to Orchard Cove Scholarship Fund. 

Send all orders to Orchard Cove Scholarship Fund, 1 Del Pond Drive, Canton, MA  02021 and please include the name and address where you want your order mailed. 

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.

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 and www.regentpress.net

 
A novel about writing, memory and belonging

The Birthing House follows a woman’s journey of healing and discovery through her writing. In 1980, after a recent miscarriage, Clare Muller arrives in the fairytale town of Marburg, Germany with her husband and six-year-old son. In 2000, Clare returns with her husband, seeking comfort after the sudden loss of her beloved father. The two timelines intertwine, shaping her life in unexpected ways as she witnesses and carries the painful stories of others through the dark forests of life’s real fairytales. Clare’s grief and loss meet growth and resilience in a community of women across time and cultures.

INTERNATIONAL FIREBIRD AWARD FOR MULTICULTURAL FICTION 2023

Available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org and your local independent bookstore.

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.

Toko Shinoda’s life (March 28, 1913 – March 1, 2021) is a story of determination and daring to be different. When Toko grew up in Japan a century ago, girls were expected to marry and take care of the home. Instead, Toko made art her life. She rebelled against the strict rules of the traditional Japanese calligraphy her father insisted she study. Using the traditional brush and black ink she learned to write with as a child, she created images from her heart.

An Amazon review: This may have been written for children but it is a fascinating introduction to an Oriental art form. The story of Toko is charmingly interwoven with calligraphy and art pieces, each accompanied by a spare and elegant explanation. A delightful and informative book.

Available from Amazon.

In the Christian States of America, 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. That’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 . . .

L Maristatter has published poetry in the web journal Defunct and fiction in The Saturday Evening Post online. She is on Facebook and Twitter (regularly), and Instagram and TikTok (when she’s feeling brave).

Support independent booksellers by finding Tiny Tin House on Bookshop.org or in your local bookstore. It’s also available on Amazon.

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.

 
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.

“Reading Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’s new poetry collection is like listening to a powerful concerto by Mozart or Beethoven. Concerto for an Empty Frame is presented in the form of a musical score, complete with Italian notation. Even her definitions are poems, such as these lines from her definition of “concerto:”
1. “Mus: A piece for one or more soloists and orchestra with three contrasting movements.
2. One thousand yellow finches lift off a late summer river all at once.”

The three movement of her concerto lead us through the breakup of her marriage, the loss of her son in a terrorist bombing, and finally a stepping away from grief, as “Blue startles the air open like an egg.” Concerto for an Empty Frame is a brilliant work by a gifted musician.”
— Maureen Eppstein. Author of Horizon Line

“This is a rare creation of song and scar, of vulnerability and both emotional and structural complexity. In Elizabeth Vrenios’ new collection Concerto in the Shape of an Empty Frame, the outer and inner, conceptual and human worlds mingle in accessible yet complex ways. Brimming with meditations on family, biology, mathematics, landscape, and personal identity, all woven through the language of classical music, these vibrant poems remain grounded in a universal familiarity that opens us up to something greater.”
— John Sibley Williams Author of Skyscrape

Available from Amazon, Kelsay Books, or your local bookstore.

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
Limited edition 2024 calendar $15

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

Available at etsy.com/shop/dancecoloringbook or julielemberger.com

 

Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery is about a woman who returns to her Midwestern childhood home following the deaths of her parents. A professional translator, the narrator “translates” her life, using the rooms, the objects, Ivy Lodge itself, discovering a new translation of her life. No longer does she view it through the eyes of her parents or siblings, and, as a result, she is at last able to uncover her long-hidden identity, to discover new truths about herself.

Ivy Lodge received a starred review on Kirkus.

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

For more information, go to http://lindamurphymarshall.com/.

 
“An artfully created masterpiece!”
 
Eleni Traganas is an award-winning renaissance artist in many fields: musician, composer, painter, writer and poet. In Shaded Pergola she brings her unique talents to haiku and short poetry. With luxurious original sketches and botanical illustrations inspired by antiquarian engravings, the poems of Shaded Pergola embody evanescent impressions meant to speak for themselves―and lead the reader into a transitory and spellbinding world where nature and the human soul find a common but rarefied affinity.

PRAISE FOR SHADED PERGOLA:

Available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, or your local bookstore.

For more on Eleni Traganas, please visit: https://www.elenitraganas.com

Helen Bar-Lev, whose vivid paintings of Ghanaian men and women illustrate this issue’s poetry page, is offering a special set of her paintings of the people of Ghana, either as originals (for $350) or as signed and numbered prints ($20). The paintings, which Bar-Lev refers to as pencil paintings, are exquisite miniatures, each approximately 11cm by 15cm (4.5″ x 6″).

Sixty percent of the proceeds from the sale of these paintings goes to support the Ghana branch of the Sheenway School. Sheenway School in Sasekope Village is the first registered private school in the Volta Region of Ghana. Its partnership with the original Sheenway School in Los Angeles, its enriched curriculum, extended education, and cultural aesthetics provide an unparalleled opportunity for Ghanaian children from pre-K through secondary.

To see the full range of Ghanaian paintings or prints available as part of this special offer, contact Helen Bar-Lev and let her know you are a Persimmon Tree reader.

 
This debut novel provides a wonderful sense of the New York City of the 1970’s. Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, squalid six floor walk-ups and posh co-ops, streets crowded with hustlers and cabbies, all come to life. The bars Michelle frequents have characters right out of central casting. The reader becomes submerged in the sights, sounds, and smells of NYC.

Beck-Clark does a great job of tackling weighty topics in a way that inspires introspection without detracting from the narrative flow. Given the exploration of trauma, it might not always be a comfortable read, but it is an important one. – Erin Britton, San Francisco Book Review


The novel’s plotlines are excellently weaved throughout, and the novel’s narrative moves ever forward, with several twists and turns maintaining the interest of the reader. The characters are fully developed as the reader gains a large measure of intimacy with them and identifies with their struggles and motivations. At the end of the day, Beck-Clark succeeds in spinning a true to life tale of Holocaust memory, trauma, and recovery, that is both sad and inspiring.
– David Keenan, Manhattan Book Review

Available at Amazon.com, B&N, Apple and most booksellers online and in bookstores.
For more information: www.denisebeck-clark.com

In these lush and candid poems, MAGGIE STETLER plumbs dreams, memories and buried feelings to reconstruct her chaotic childhood, her broken family and fractured self. A fugitive trail of cobalt blue…a room full of hummingbirds… startling images of beauty uplift and sustain her as she journeys toward love and wholeness. In the end, she is a white-haired, sensuous woman under a magnolia tree in full, unabashed bloom; awake to who she is and what remains, surrendering to the firmament, embracing joy.

“I was moved by so many of these poems, especially the powerful and vivid “Mother” poem and “Eight Ways of Looking at a Yellow Chrysanthemum,” a rich and inventive work. I am attached to Maggie’s dreamscapes, erotic candor, the clarity and confidence of her voice, the immediacy of her connection to memory and the natural world. Her first-book collection is long overdue and begs to be read.” — Colette Inez, Family Life and The Secret of M. Dulong: A Memoir

“This is a gorgeous, sensual collection of poems that are not afraid to delve into the deepest places while always reaching for the light. Longing and desire, suffering and self-doubt are balanced by an exuberant joy in the beauty and heft of the world. These poems feel solid on the tongue and in your hand. You will be “stunned” by these stars.” — Heather Davis, award-winning poet, author of The Lost Tribe of Us

Available from Amazon or your local independent bookseller.

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

“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.