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When someone we love dies, a part of our own self dies too. I had a dream after my father died, that I was shot in the dark by a stranger. I lay on the ground on my stomach, not knowing what had happened. I didn’t know if I would live or die. We are physically hurt when someone we love dies, and don’t know how we can go on. 
 
   
It takes time and a thousand tears to accept the death of someone you love. Stay with this sadness. Your tears are holy water from the deep place of your loving. You will receive great comfort from people who have been in the place of sadness, where you are now.  They will be friends, family and even people you have not known before. In our sorrow, we are all connected.
     

I hope this book of few words and soft watercolors will be a way to offer sympathy and comfort to the ones who are traveling this journey through the heart of grief. 

Available at your favorite indie bookshop through Bookshop.org https://bit.ly/3i9Laqs

Amazon https://amzn.to/2S7OxDJ

Barnes & Noble https://bit.ly/34Hv7bC

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From Berkeley to Bolivia, from New York to New Mexico, our social-change movements have textured the 1950s through the present. The history makers presented in this “generational memoir” transformed the political/spiritual landscape of the U.S. and beyond, laying the foundation for contemporary thinking about equality and democracy.

Chellis Glendinning has written a memoir evoking the lives of women and men she has known. From Susan Griffin to Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg, Suzan Harjo to John Ross, they are some the most creative and courageous geniuses of a generation…. In the Company of Rebels is one of the most profoundly moving books I’ve read in years.

Psychologist/writer Chellis Glendinning has penned eight nonfiction books exploring psychological interfaces with social issues, as well as hundreds of essays in newspapers and magazines, a poetry book, and a bilingual opera. Off the Map and Chiva both won the National Federation of Press Women Book Award in nonfiction. She lives now in Bolivia where she wrote her first novel, Objetos, and is working on a second about three women in the Chaco War (1932-35). Chellis Glendinning’s most recent novel is TEA CUPS AND MACHINE GUNS.

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For more, visit raison3.com

The Full Moon Herald By Phyllis Klein is a book of poetry in newspaper format filled with real news stories, and personal news stories. It travels the ground of trauma, grief, empathy, and hope.

The Full Moon Herald has just received an honorable mention for poetry in the Eric Hoffer Poetry Book Award Competition for 2021. For a link to the announcement of the award and the judges’ comments, CLICK HERE.

From Minder-Binder Review of Books:
This exceptional first book of poems should be required reading for anyone who 1) appreciates poetry as a meaningful way to explore who we are in this beautiful and troubling world; 2) is willing to open themselves to the honesty and intimacy of our shared and connected lives; and/or 3) wishes to mine the deeper nature of the news without the noise and nonsense of talking heads. 


”Phyllis Klein’s remarkable poems make hidden wounds visible as she digs into the Breaking News. Entering this world, you breathe in the fresh air of honesty. You fume, you weep with her along the treacherous paths she travels, to finally understand we are ‘relatives in the fields of trees, beauty and devastation we call home.’ Such good news.”

“Phyllis Klein is a poet of great courage. She brings what Ezra Pound called poetry: ’the news that stays news.’ Her determination to see and name what we are afraid to face powers the headlines of this startling debut collection.”

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A National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist 2021

The stories in Julia MacDonnell’s first collection, The Topography of Hidden Stories create a shining tapestry of women’s lives in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. Her characters, among them women trapped in a pious patriarchy that has yet to loosen its control of women’s lives, grapple with doubt and disquiet in their search for love and connection. However difficult their situations, they confront experience with sharp eyes, ironic wit, and a sense of their own historical matrix.

Kirkus Reviews:
MacDonnell’s writing is frequently elegant, full of vivid metaphors…and descriptive language. The plots are both familiar and unpredictable, drawing readers in while challenging their preconceptions…. A strong collection of stories connected by deep Irish American roots.

Midwest Book Review, D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer:
The Topography of Hidden Stories holds many hidden gems…Dissimilar, evocative, and compelling, these snapshots freeze pivotal moments in time. They will captivate readers looking for literary examples of women trapped by circumstance and fate, their choices, their commitments to family, and their illusions and realities about the world and their place in it.

Readers seeking stories of growth and change and women’s evolving lives will find The Topography of Hidden Stories hard-hitting and thought-provokingly unexpected in its diversity and impact.

Indie Reader, Stephani Hren:
Julia MacDonnell …can cut to the quick of a character with a single sentence, or …stretch her exploration through an entire story…There’s an element of yearning to MacDonnell’s writing that makes her stories utterly entrancing and the characters, conflicts, and relationships that she’s crafted are deeply insightful.

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Stories in The Unforgotten, ranging from a novella to flash narratives of merely a paragraph, are populated by a variety of characters. Among them: Luisa, a beloved childhood servant in Peru, who disappears inexplicably. A child writes that her mom has a lover, a grownup word for boyfriend. Gertrude, whose lifelong collection of sophisticated words fades into dementia. Charles, a grandfather in a white nightgown and bobbing nightcap, chases a bull away from his wife’s beloved rose garden. A mother tells her child a story of a joyous snail with a will to live. Adrianna, now a grandmother, reminiscences about a college year in Paris with her best friend who later committed suicide. Henry, working in a research lab, befriends a rat he names Eloise.

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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.

Learn more at www.sallybuffington.com

When Katharine Wright, sister to the famous Wright Brothers, married for the first and only time at 52, her brother, Orville, refused to speak to her ever again. The Wright Sister is a historical novel made up of imagined letters from Katharine to Orville, as well as what she calls her Marriage Diary.

“The Wright Sister is a marvel—a perfect, very dear and brilliant novel whose characters are now stored in my heart like favorite, absent friends. Long live the remarkable Katharine Wright, her famous brothers, and author Patty Dann, who brought them back to life for this gobsmacked, grateful reader.”
 

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

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

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

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

Order the book, https://www.amazon.com/Miami-Virgo-Sally-Mansfield-Abbott/dp/1733377107.

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

Told in interconnecting stories, BALLROOM is a beautifully crafted debut novel about a group of strangers united by a desire to escape their complicated lives in a faded New York City dance hall. Time has eroded the glamour of the Ballroom, but at the end of the1990s, a small crowd of loyal patrons still makes its way past the floor-to-ceiling columns which frame the once grand hall each Sunday evening. Sweeping across the worn parquet floor under a peeling indigo ceiling, these men and women succumb to the magic of the music, looking for love and connection, eager to erase the drab reality of their complicated lives. As the rhythms of the Ballroom ebb and flow through these characters’ hearts, their fates come together in touching, unexpected ways.

“From start to finish, “Ballroom” is a perfectly choreographed dance, where the reader and the story meet, connect and then finally, part. It tells the tale of six independent yet interdependent characters who all share a deep love for ballroom dance. And while the language itself is not particularly theatrical, “Ballroom” reads much like a play, where these six lives unfold on a large stage, or in this case, the dance floor.”

“Simpson is a master at creating realistic characters who are flawed, a bit unappealing and yet sympathetic.”

To order, HarperCollinsPublishers

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