fiction
Snippets
Four-year-old Kelly recently lost her dad. She confronts Mom one day, wondering why her mom told her he's in Heaven, but her friends told her he's dead. Mom does her best to explain that Daddy's body is gone, but she believes his spirit is in Heaven.
Kelly wants to know if Daddy can eat hot dogs in Heaven, and if she can go to Heaven to eat hot dogs with him, because that was their favorite food.
Dr. Barry addresses a topic that will deeply resonate with families of young children who have lost parents, relatives, and other special people in their lives.
Sparks fly when Callie Winwood comes face-to-face with Will Tremaine, the man she fell in love with and thought she’d marry twenty-five years earlier. A chance encounter in a hospital emergency room reignites the feelings they have harbored for each other for more than two decades.
But their journey back to one another is anything but simple.
"(A Foolish Consistency)… expertly juxtaposes the sadness of loss with the joy of new beginnings …”
—Kirkus Book Reviews
Something is killing fetuses before they are born—a scourge affecting people around the globe, and scientists can’t find the culprit. At the same time, a strange sickness is causing organ failure among healthy people.
Veregro, the world’s primary provider of seeds and fertilizers, and one of the most effective generators of food throughout the world, is offering a million dollars to anyone who can discover the causes of these two mysterious killers. Except…Veregro’s own seeds and fertilizers are the cause.
nonfiction
Writing Through the Apocalypse, Pandemic Poetry and Prose, is a collection of sixty-three essays and poems by writers from all over the world who have been writing together on zoom every week since march 2020. Contributors include: KM Bellavita / Jayne Benjulian / Toni Bixby / Valerie Anne Burns / Mattie Coll / Amanda Sue Creasey / Amy Elizabeth Davis / Melissa Face / Nina Gaby / Gretchen
Gales / John Glanville / Juliana Lightle / Joan Mazza / Golnaz Montagné / Shauna Potocky / Tania Pryputniewicz / Lisa Rizzo / Barbara Rockman / Kathleen Roxby / Rhonda Seiter / Nancy A. Shobe / Patricia Smith / Laurna Strikwerda / Justine Sutton / Andrea van der Hoek / Claire Van Blaricum / Alenka Vrecek / Jamie Wallace / Julene Tripp Weaver / Kathryn Wood / Deborah Alston Wroblewski / and George Yatchisin.
Unmasked, edited by Marcia Meier and Kathleen Barry, Ph.D., of Santa Barbara, is a collection of 33 poems and 20 essays published by Weeping Willow Books.
It sheds light on a demographic often unmentioned when the talk turns to sexuality, featuring works by women who are published writers and also mothers, grandmothers, playwrights, professors, teachers, psychotherapists, copywriters, city council women, and a model for a foot fetish website.
“Sex for women after fifty is invisible for the same reason that contraception, abortion, and sex between two women or two men has been forbidden: sexuality is supposed to be only about procreation. This lie was invented by patriarchy, monotheism, racism and other hierarchies. Unmasked helps to restore a human right.”
—Gloria Steinem
Memoir
After discovering a trove of old family photos in her late mother’s garden shed, Merrill Williams embarks on a years-long genealogical search that leads back to her ancestors who arrived from England in the 1800s. Along the way, she learns their surprising stories, and her own.
In early 1966, a 28-year-old Air Force physician with a pilot's licence received orders to go to Vietnam. It was exactly what doctor Guy S. Clark, M.D., had hoped for: a choice assignment as flight surgeon to the elite pilots based at Cam Ranh Bay Air Force Base on the South China Sea.
Those orders began a year-long assignment that would find Clark flying more than 90 bombing missions over Vietnam and Laos in the Phantom F4-C, plunging deep into the Viet Cong-infested jungle with a gaggle of Marines from the Republic of Korea in search of the remains of two lost Phantom pilots, and tending to the medical needs of the hard-charging pilots he flew with.
"Ten-thousand feet below and off our left wing tip is a large, beautiful green valley, wedged between the coastal mountain range and the larger inland mountains. And then, directly, before my eyes, the beauty and grandeur of this valley are suddenly interrupted by a chain of silent explosions."
—Dr. Guy S. Clark, Sharkbait
In 1954, 29-year-old grad student Dick Jorgensen went to Japan as one of four “ambassador” teachers in a first-ever exchange program. He spent the next two years teaching at the University of Hiroshima, founded in the wake of the atomic bombing of the city in 1945. Living with Japanese families, he was forced to find new ways to reach students ravaged by World War II.
In this, the second of three memoirs, Dick Jorgensen takes readers along on his first around-the-world journey as he travels back to the United States from Japan in 1956.
Yūkō, which means “friendship between nations,” tells the story of Jorgensen’s life as he joins The Asia Foundation’s Japan desk in San Francisco, marries and starts a family.
"The solid beginning to this strong and enduring ‘friendship between nations’ began after World War II and developed during the first six years of The Asia Foundation’s program in Japan, from 1954-59. I feel privileged to have been a small part of this beginning."
—Dick Jorgensen, Yuko
poetry
A lovely poetic journey of discovering Ireland, truly a place out of time, inspired by an autumn trip to the historic isle. Travel with poet, journalist and editor Marcia Meier up the west coast of Ireland, finding muses in Waterford, Kinsale, the Ring of Kerry, the Dingle Peninsula, the tiny burg of Doolin, the Aran Islands, The Cliffs of Moher, The Burren, and beautiful windswept Connemara.
"Over Samhain, the harvest beckons / spirits to the thinning veil /
the sky ashen and wet / as darkness descends upon the graves…"
—Marcia Meier, Ireland, Place Out of Time
A 44-page gift book of poetry and art by journalist, developmental book editor and publisher Marcia Meier. Evoking both poignancy and optimism, Meier’s photos beautifully illustrate poems that delve into childhood fears and adult revelations that remind readers of the power of love, perseverance, and hope.