Women, the largest and yet the 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. Using her more than two decades of dance images, Lemberger transformed them into illustrations almost ready to color and then added psychedelic, floral, and abstract backgrounds for the figures “to dance in.”

Featured are today’s leading dance innovators and interpreters, celebrating their diverse genres and perspectives. More than 60 women participated in the 92-page volume, including Wendy Whelan, Annie-B Parson, Merian Soto, Eiko Otake, Francesca Harper, Jinju Song-Begin, Pam Tanowitz, Andrea Miller, and many more. Additionally, read about these women’s accomplishments with their quotes, biographies, and a glossary of 21^st-century dance terms.

Dance Magazine’s Lisa Traiger wrote:

“Get out the crayons, markers or colored pencils. Modern Women: 21st-Century Dance, feels like the antidote to a COVID-19 winter. Created by Brooklyn-based dance photographer Julie Lemberger, the book pays tribute to this generation of powerful and creative women dancers.”

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

For $20 + $5 each s/h (within U.S./please contact for International shipping rates), it is available at:
etsy.com/shop/dancecoloringbook or julielemberger.com

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.

Available on Amazon.

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.

To order online, click here or also available on Amazon.

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

Buy now at Amazon.com

Reclaiming the Sacred Source: The Ancient Power and Wisdom of Women’s Sexuality

Arguing for the return of celebrating the life-force with orgasm, Reclaiming the Sacred Source explores the sexual imbalance that disturbs the lives of millions. Some have been abused. Some believe it their right to take sexual gratification. Most have forgotten the purpose of sexuality: to celebrate life. Five thousand years ago the invading and over-powering Indo-Europeans disrupted sexuality as a sacrament in the celebration of the ancient Goddess. Modern religions perpetuate the false story of sexuality as evil. This book provides insight into this historical occurrence and offers suggestions for healing that can restore memory and practice of high-level orgasm as a celebration of life and all that is sacred in the highest vibratory peak of our pleasure.

Available on-line everywhere www.lynncreighton.com

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has resulted in so much pain, suffering, and sadness around the world, has nonetheless proven to be an extraordinarily rich source of material for writers. This collection of works by and about elders contains something for readers of all ages and of almost every conceivable literary taste. A majority of the book’s contributors are women. Here you will find poems (including a performance poem), short stories, plays, memoirs, and essays. You will find works written in French as well as in English, and you will find works written by Americans as well as by Canadians. And you will experience the full gamut of moods, from despondency to defiance, and from stoic acceptance to sly cynicism. As you read, you will almost certainly shed a few tears. But you will also laugh out loud more than once, and experience moments of sheer awe at the insight and inspiration provided by our more than 50 authors. Here is a COVID collection unlike any other, a book to keep on your shelves and treasure for years after the pandemic is finally over.

Buy now at Amazon.com

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

In this lighthearted novel, 62-year-old BJ is enjoying a successful career, a nice house, and a pleasant life… until her younger sister, Iris, moves in with her.

At 55. Iris is the recent widow of a philanderer – attractive (thanks partly to skillful plastic surgery), sweet, helpful — and so comfortable that BJ fears she’ll never move out.

So BJ starts an Over 50’s Singles Night to help find her a new husband. But when only a few elderly ladies and one gay man show up, BJ has to regroup. She introduces Iris to a retired neighbor. They dislike each other at once — though the neighbor likes BJ quite a bit.

Then Iris reveals a long-held secret that keeps the sisters avoiding each other for weeks. Will they ever make up? Will sisterly love prevail? Romantic love? Will Over 50’s Singles Night be a failure — or more powerful than anyone thought?

Ellyn Bache is the award-winning author of nine novels, including Safe Passage, which was made into a movie starring Susan Sarandon.

To Order, Click Here

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 www.sallybuffington.com

While supplies last, get our physical CD, Christmas Belles, at raison3.com/christmas-belles. Many tracks are also available for download.

For more, visit raison3.com

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/

To order, CLICK HERE.

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.”
 

To order, CLICK HERE.

To order, CLICK HERE.

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.

To order, CLICK HERE.

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