A salad-eating dog, the haunted trunk, a 'possum who drinks coffee-The Blue Box and Memories that Live in the Bones by Sharon Mabry is a collection of stories about Mabry's growing up years in the mountains of East Tennessee, some of the adventures in her 56-year marriage, and her thoughts on retirement after teaching for 52 years at Austin Peay State University. Mabry writes with wit and candor about her mother's declining health and the changes to her family home. Throughout her life, Mabry finds the humor that lives within each moment. The Blue Box and Memories that Live in the Bones is a collection that glimpses into the inner joy that maintains Mabry's dimpled cheeks and smiling eyes. It's a contagious outlook that will inspire readers to find amusement in their own reflections.
The Nudge Writing Prompts work for the lone writer and in class settings, writing groups, and between pairs of friends. In The Nudge Writing Prompts, Shana Thornton gives you the writing elbow--prompts for all types of writers, from fiction novelists to memoirists, poets, and those who want to journal for self-reflection. You'll discover writing prompts with questions for further character development, thematic prompts, vocabulary prompts, historically-based nudges, and self-reflection prompts for you as a writer. You'll find tools for revision and editing and suggestions for getting the most out of your characters. Grab a blank notebook, a manuscript already in progress, or open a new note in your phone--The Nudge Writing Prompts will generate endless ideas for you as a writer.
Ripe for the Pickin' by Shana Thornton takes readers on a road trip with Robin, her music, and old secrets. The Family Medicine Wheel series weaves Southern family tall tales, plant lore, & songwriting.
THE BEGINNING'S END by Nikki Martin reveals compelling new characters whose lives change the fate of everyone even while the book reconnects readers with their favorite characters from her Awake While Dreaming series.
BreatheYourOMBalance: Yoga and Relationships explores our connections in writings created both before and after the everyday reality of the coronavirus pandemic. For volume three, Sarah Michelle is joined by over 20 contributors.
New Orleans author Grace King''s childhood turns from Civil War era refinement to navigating the bayous with her family on a flatboat and then emerging to a different life in New Orleans after the war. In the present day, Meredith Mandin becomes fascinated by the life of Grace King after her husband returns from the war in Afghanistan, and they begin a new direction for their family. In her debut novel, Finding Grace and Grit (Thorncraft 2021), Khristeena Lute shows how Meredith and Grace risk poverty and social suicide as they carve daringly different futures than the ones society had prescribed. Meredith Mandin is a first-generation college student and a new doctoral candidate. Just as she begins her doctoral program, her mother runs off with a man she just met, and her father is arrested. With a wry sense of humor at the dark and comedic turns of her life, Meredith struggles to parent her daughters and her mother, navigate the treacherous waters of competitive graduate students, and find a job to prevent sliding back into her family''s generational poverty-all while finishing her dissertation on Grace King, a pre-Modernist New Orleans writer.Meanwhile, in her own time, nine-year-old Grace King survives the Civil War and grows into a strong, southern writer-until her own family''s darkness threatens to destroy her sense of self and identity. Meredith and Grace struggle to define themselves one hundred years apart. Even though they live in different centuries, Finding Grace and Grit shows the darkness southern women often face as well as their resolve to overcome it.
A MOMENTARY DARKNESS is the first novel in the series, AWAKE WHILE DREAMING, by Nikki Martin. A MOMENTARY DARKNESS explores into the realm of fantasy by experimenting with the possibility of alternate worlds. Martin writes a fluid world of memory and experience for her characters, adding their natural confusion to altered states of reality.
Seasons of Balance: On Creativity & Mindfulness explores the creative life...through changing relationships, fitness practices, meditations, aging, gratitude, and more. As one season helps us to restore our creative practices, so does another season arouse our artistic endeavors and still another that stimulates us to action. We need all of the seasons to meet the goals we have set for ourselves. We hope you will use this book to inspire you with affirmations, prompt meditations, and/or as a creativity journal. "'Seasons of Balance' is an exquisite work of writing that encourages you to tap into your own creative crockpot and weave some beautiful webs of truth. Teague and Thornton each have unique, yet informal voices that make them feel real, approachable, and most importantly, relatable. You'll be scrambling for your pen as their thought-provoking stories and poetry carry you up and down the roller coaster of human emotions. Both artists have an obvious talent for prose, a well entwined style, and the uncanny ability to discuss seemingly mundane bits of everyday life, while revealing the true depth and magic under the surface. Seasons of Balance is an excellent resource for anyone looking to further explore the root of their creative being. The perfect ode to strength and femininity, with a solid splash of vulnerability thrown in for flavor."--STEPH GONGORA, author of The Beginner's Guide to Handstand
BreatheYourOMBalance: Yoga and Healing delves into the poignant journey of yoga as it heals, restores, and revitalizes life after life. This second volume about yoga embraces the human touch of yoga and its spiritual passages, physical inner presence, and timeless message of wellness. Kelsy Timas, Founder and CEO of Guiding Wellness Institute, Inc., a certified yoga school and holistic center of wellbeing, introduces the voices that breathe life into this book. These contributors speak about connections that we all hope to achieve and wounds that we all hope to heal. "Yoga is often said to be a path of transformation, a way to change your life for the better; what exactly does that mean? By reading these poems and stories in BreatheYourOMBalance: Yoga and Healing, you will learn how fear, doubts, and limitations can be peeled away as quickly as one breath or even just one yoga pose, and when practiced consistently, change you and your community. Pick this book up, read these stories, hold them close, and feel the love move from within the pages to your heart."--Lisa Lofthouse, lifelong yogi, teacher, and author of Journey to a Life of Bliss
When Robin Ballard takes a writing course in college, she goes searching for answers about her homeless father and wanders into the secret lives of her relatives as they gradually reveal their personal histories. Set in Nashville and the surrounding rural towns, Poke Sallet Queen and the Family Medicine Wheel offers a look into the superstitions and changes of a middle Tennessee family from the 1920s to the 21st century. Based on novel events, homework assignments, old magic recipes, drunken revelries, senile remembrances, midnight songs, some tall tales, some folk tales, and the lost journals, Robin Ballard tells a true Tennessee family history.Reading Shana Thornton's highly original novel will make you want to get your own family stories to the page. You'll meet larger-than-life characters like Hoot and Zona, Aunt Cora and Jane, Miss Emy, and Nenny, the matriarch, who rolls her own cigarettes and knows all the secrets of the family medicine wheel. You may even find yourself signing up for a writing class like the one that sets the narrator, young Robin Ballard, to interviewing her aunts and grandmother, tracking down her homeless father, and digging out the family secrets, lost journals, and recipes that make POKE SALLET QUEEN & THE FAMILY MEDICINE WHEEL a most surprising and satisfying fictional family history. (At least, I think it's fiction!) -MARY HELEN STEFANIAK author of The Turk and My Mother and The Cailiffs of Baghdad, GeorgiaWhen I'm given a book to review, I like to open it up at random and see if what's on the happenstance page resonates at all. This time I found the heroine Robin Ballard singing Mother Maybelle Carter's Wildwood Flower at a beauty contest she does not expect to win. She is someone I recognize, who trips over a cord as she's leaving the stage, whose family's knowledge comes from the dirt not from parchment scrolls and crests that open doors. This character is humble and honest, and the book refreshingly natural and just different enough. I like it. -RHETA GRIMSLEY JOHNSON, author of Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second ComingShana Thornton has a fresh, unique voice and talent. POKE SALLET QUEEN & THE FAMILY MEDICINE WHEEL is a lyrical tale of love in the lush Tennessee hills, of generations gone by, and of people appreciated for simple things as much as the passing on of their history. There is mystery, sorrow, laughter and knowledge in these unforgettable characters. Shana writes a magical story that stays with you long after the final page. As with one of the characters, She knows real magic. -VIRGINIA BROWN, author of Dark River Road and the Dixie Diva mystery seriesVibrant in detail! Meet and fall in love with the characters of POKE SALLET QUEEN & THE FAMILY MEDICINE WHEEL and along the way, learn the secrets of great story-telling. -BUD WILLIS, author of Marble Mountain: A Vietnam Memoir
';Sister' is a sacred word. Cattail Beach is joy. Until one day at its shore, both are lost in a single moment.Family is life, and Amy has a gentle, happy one. Devoted parents, a loving marriage, two little girls, a fulfilling career and a cherished relationship with her sister. Amy and Heather are more than sistersbest friends, inseparable confidants, co-workers and, finally, mothers.Cattail, the adored beach near their coastal New England home, is Amy's place of refuge and the backdrop for their happiest summer memories. But when a mistake there ends tragically, almost destroying everything that Amy holds as sacred, she doesn't know how she'll continue, nor mend the rift with her sister that results. Talking Underwater explores the balance between the elation of family summers at the ocean and the ways we navigate unbearable heartache and find news ways of being.Praise for Talking Underwater:Writing in confident, musical prose, Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo weaves a story of youth and what it means to come of age in a world whose perfection cannot last. With their beloved childhood beach as a backdrop, two sisters learn to overcome longing and loss and, ultimately, to find redemption.--NAOMI BENARON, author of RUNNING THE RIFT, winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction Talking Underwater unfolds with the slow, sinuous rhythms of summer. We taste salt on skin, we smell the ozone of fast moving storms. Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo is a master at tracing the currents that run beneath the surface of the closest relationships and how sudden riptides can swallow them whole. By turns tender and tragic, this is the most generous and genuine story of sisterly love Ive read in ages. -- SHERI HOLMAN, author of THE DRESS LODGER and WITCHES ON THE ROAD TONIGHT ';Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo's Talking Underwater is a searing, heartfelt story of two sisters and the tragedy that tests their lifelong bond. Told with evocative prose, this powerful novel will have you rooting for Amy and Heather to find their way back to each other. Book clubs will love this.' KRISTYN KUSEK LEWIS, author of SAVE ME and HOW LUCKY YOU ARE Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. Talking Underwater is a literary gift, filled with characters you want to spend time with. As a fellow New England author, I especially appreciate her scene settingswhich are rich and vivid. Deep family connections and intrigue frame a plot that makes for a definite page-turner. I highly recommend Talking Underwater for anyone looking to devour the next great read.STEVEN MANCHSTER, #1 bestselling author of THE ROCKIN CHAIR and TWELVE MONTHS ';Talking Underwater is Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo's searing tale of the testing of two sisters' strong bond. The narrative felt so real that it made me cautiously ask if she had been through such a harrowing experience in real life. She vividly captures the raw emotions.'--BEVERLY FISHER, author of GRACE AMONG THE LEAVINGSWith a delicate, but sure, touch, Ms. DeLorenzo creates characters so real you feel you've met them before. The cadence of her prose will stay with you, long after you finish the book.--MARY KRUGER, author of KNIT FAST, DIE YOUNG
"Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo's exquisite debut novel, The Mosquito Hours, tells the powerful story of three courageous women, struggling with the rippling effects of guarded secrets, misguided lies, and heartbreaking mistakes. Revelations add layers of meaning, deepening our understanding--and theirs, of themselves, each other, their relationships-as the novel builds toward its wise, hauntingly beautiful conclusion. Vivid language and brilliant insight drew me into the riveting world of The Mosquito Hours, but it was the strong, loving women-Vivian, Tania, and Guin-at the center of this luminous, profoundly moving novel that truly captivated me. The Mosquito Hours is a breathtaking work of art-and, at heart, an unforgettable love story."-TERRI GIULIANO LONG, author of In Leah's Wake, and Until I Come Home***"In prose as undulating as the ocean by which the story is set, The Mosquito Hours chronicles the Crawford family, a multi-generational family of widowed and unwed women, momentarily at the ebb tide of their lives. Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo takes us into the world of ordinary women living with pluck and dignity despite unplanned pregnancies, underemployment and the untimely deaths of loved ones. It is a quiet pleasure to watch the tide return."-DEBORAH LEE LUSKIN, author of the award-winning novel, Into the Wilderness***"The Mosquito Hours quickly draws the reader into a turning-point summer in a stone house built on sand, where three generations of women grapple with uncertainty and change, faith and secrets. Especially, secrets. Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo writes with a sharp eye for detail, a strong sense of place, and moments of quirky humor and unexpected grace."-ELLEN MEEROPOL, author of House Arrest***"The Mosquito Hours is a windswept elegy that unearths the hidden complexity of everyday life, adumbrating the traces of the past that haunt a receding present.With crisp prose, wit, and keen insight, Corliss DeLorenzo has created a poignant exploration of family, love, and the changing landscape of feminine identity."- MCCORMICK TEMPLEMAN, author of The Little Woods, and The Glass Casket
MULTIPLE EXPOSURE shares an intimate, ghostly portrait of the impact of war, and generations of military service, on a family. The "e;war on terror"e; has captured the lives of the U.S. military and their families for over 10 years, and Ellen Masters' husband has been repeatedly deployed. In this novel, Ellen shares her desires to connect with her husband and family, and to discover her own strength by training for a marathon. Ellen describes the woodlands where she loves to run and the cave that fascinates her throughout life. The landscape is both inviting and haunting, intoxicating Ellen to stay in that place while her husband is assigned to an Army post in another state, and Ellen longs for their daughter to connect with him beyond photographs and Skype calls. Ellen shares the beauty of a Southern setting with the complexities of living in constant transition due to the consideration of life and the possibility of death on a daily basis. Ellen creates a way to channel her frustration and anger into running-an activity that both challenges and heals her.
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