Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC, Eastern Oregon publisher of speculative fiction, science fiction, poetry and other genres. Owned and operated by David and Sue Memmott, La Grande, Oregon

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As of 11/13/17, Wordcraft of Oregon is no longer accepting any international orders. Due to the exorbitant overseas postal rates, all shipping costs reflected on this site are for U.S. orders only. Any international orders will be refused. June 1, 2016 STORY COLLECTION BY NATE LIEDERBACH BLESSINGS GALORE, stories Nate Liederbach ISBN: 978-1-877655-91-3, LCN: 2016931968 First Trade Paperback, 6.0 X 9.0, 166 pgs., $15/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover design by Kristin Summers, www.redbatdesign.com Cover art by Lindsey Stern Author Photo by Michelle Kyoto Crowson "The writing in these startling stories by Nate Liederbach is vivid and innovative and perfect for the wild and unexpected events. The scope ranges from the apocalyptically large to the intimately small, and all of it is interesting and moving. Chances are taken, and they pay off. Yes, there is a high jumping economist and witches and outlaws and a tongue to be shaved, but also a candy bar from the past and roadkill, and you get to take your daughter to heaven for a little vacation. I love finding rare writers who are telling the stories only they can tell. Settle in and be ready to be surprised by Blessings Galore. -- Ray Vukcevich, author of Boarding Instructions and Meet Me in the Moonroom "Nate Liederbach deftly combines slipstream literaray fiction and visionary dialogue to pioneer a futuristic territory saturated with intoxicating language. Eloquent, yet tight, Blessings Galore is a heady mixture of stunning story and thoughtful philosophy." --Stephanie Freele, author of Surrounded by Water and Feeding Strays "Blessings Galore bears the hallmarks of an experimental classic--it is at once lurid, zestfully grotesque, and utterly wondroous. Nate Liederbach punches not up or down in this wild collection, but straight at the reader's chest, where all the blood and muscle converges--in other words, these stories are not even remotely for the faint of heart." --Matthew Derby, author of The Silent History and Super Flat Times ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nate Liederbach is the author of Doing a Bit of Bleeding, Negative Spaces and Beasts You'll Never See (winner of the 2014 Noemi Press Fiction Award). Among other honors, his writing has received the Academy of American Poets' Larry Levis Prize , the Atlantic Monthly College Nonfiction Prize, a Best New Poets inclusion, and the Utah Original Writing Competition's Short Fictin Award. Helives in Olympia, Washington. December 1, 2015 BOOK TWO OF SEA-LEVEL NERVE, PROSE POEMS BY JAMES GRABILL SEA-LEVEL NERVE (BOOK TWO) Prose Poems by James Grabill ISBN: 978-1-877655-90-63, LCN: 2015950952 First Trade Paperback, 6 X 9, 104 pgs., $15/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover Art by Miriam Nelson Cover Design by Kristin Summers, www.redbatdesign.com Author photo by Bill Siverly "I know of no other poet who has addressed climate change as powerfully and persistently as James Grabill. In Sea-Level Nerve: Book One, the urgency of our greatest challenge is perhaps more audible. In Book Two, Grabill shatters every conceivable divide we have become so comfortable with." --Derek Sheffied, author of Through the Second Skin BOOK ONE BELOW BUY BOOK ONE AND TWO FOR 33% DISCOUNT $20 plus $3.50 shipping, US ONLY August 1, 2015 DEBUT NOVEL BY TERRA BRIGANDO ROOMS FOR GHOSTS, a novel Terra Brigando ISBN: 978-1-877655-93-7, LCN: 2015938562 First Trade Paperback, 5.5 X 8.5, 104 pgs., $12/3.50 s/h (US ONLY) Cover design by Kristin Summers, www.redbatdesign.com Author Photo by Brent Scharschmidt Terra Brigando's first novel, Rooms for Ghosts, chronicles the disintegration of a wealthy family while vacationing on an island one summer. The narrator, a young teenager, splits her time between caring for a drug-addicted mother and navigating her own desire for understanding. With no one to look after her, she finds herself enmeshed in her mother's lavish parties and becomes the object of affection of an older man. After discovering her father in an affair, she becomes obsessed with her father's mistress. What follows is a sweet, but unseemly, relationship between the two females and a devastating tragedy that changes the family forever. Written in dark, lyrical prose, Rooms for Ghosts takes us on a journey that is rife with longing and confusion as the narrator searches for the love that seems to elude her. "Author Terra Brigando plunges us into an experience where loneliness can result in going to the edge and wondering if there is a way back. The innocence of adolescence is demolished and the world turns in a very short time. Executed with graceful and memorable language, a textured and languid narrative, and compelling insight into the gnarly confusion of adolescence, Brigando layers the story delicately and deeply, plunging the reader into the truths and dares of this young girl's search for love." --Elmaz Abinader, author of This House, My Bones "Rooms for Ghosts is a riveting story about a fourteen-year-old girl undergoing unexpected rites of passage during a summer vacation that introduces her to drugs, alcohol, sex, and the inchoate longing that every teenager feels when she is not quite grownup, but no longer a child either. Brigando sets a blistering pace that never lets up. Her story is filled with glittering images and an envious sense of timing that belies the fact that this is her first novel. Ghosts is a dazzling coming of age narrative dense with stunning descriptions that are sometimes tender and loving, but sometimes shockingly brutal as well. Edgy, in your face, the author never holds back, never flinches, even though some timorous readers might wish she had." --Duff Brenna, AWP Novel Award winner for The Book of Mamie ABOUT THE AUTHOR Terra Brigando lives in Oakland, California. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in English and Creative Writing at Mills College in 2012. This is her first novel. June 1, 2015 #4 IN THE WORDCRAFT SERIES OF FABULIST NOVELLAS "DeBiase's exquisitely crafted debut novella straddles a line between magical realism and metaphorical truth in a story that explores ties among three generations of women, the persistence of innocence even in the most desperate of childhoods, and the transformative power of stories and dreams...DeBiase's storytelling, both in the overall narrative and in the actual tales her characters tell, deftly excavates the beauty in brokenness and the strange sweetness in sorrow." --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (June 2015) MAMA & THE HUNGRY HOLE Johanna DeBiase Wordcraft Series of Fabulist Novellas #4 ISBN: 978-1-877655-85-2, LCN: 2015933291 First Trade Paperback, 5 X 8, 154 pgs., $12/3.50 s/h, (US ONLY) Cover design by Kristin Summers, www.redbatdesign.com Author Photo by Judith DeBiase In a narrative interwoven with fairytales, the lines that divide memories from dreams blur in Mama & the Hungry Hole. Julia is 4-years-old and her Mama has stolen her away to the mountains of northern New Mexico where everything is unfamiliar and everyone is unknown. Lonely and often forced to take care of herself during Mama's many "quiet times," Julia befriends a tree. Tree has been around longer than anyone and witnessed the village change from thriving ranching town to hippie commune to bedroom community. When Julia's Nana comes to visit and a traveling Circus moves in next door it seems like everything will change for the better, but Tree is the first to notice the eerie sensation of nothingness deep beneath its roots. "Loss, family-forged shackles and bonds, and the power of storytelling, are at the splintered heart of this engaging debut novella. DeBiase poignantly renders the mystery, magic and terror inherent in nature and childhood., and does so with vigorous simplicity. In what amounts to a deftly executed balancing act: charm holds hands with tender sorrow; reality dissolves inside of dreams; and peeled layers reveal deeper mysteries. Or to spin it another way: an existential fairy tale for insomniacs." --John Biscello, author of Broken Land and Freezer Tag "Johanna DeBiase's Mama & the Hungry Hole excavates the innocence and despair of the liminal child. As activist as it is feminist, DeBiase follows the abrupt agony when the body is confronted with death. Here, mourning yields potent escapism and Mama & the Hungry Hole is a magical curse that we dare not stop reading." --Lily Hoang, author of Unfinished and The Evolutionary Revolution ABOUT THE AUTHOR Johanna DeBiase writes from New Mexico where she is spellbound by the energy vortex of Taos Mountain. Originally from New York, she earned her BA in Literature and Creative Writing from Bard Collage and her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her short fiction has been published online and in print including Portland Review, theNewerYork, Monkeybicycle, Convergence, Prick of the Spindle and San Antonio Current. She has also received scholarships to attend San Miguel Writer's Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and Rensing Center. The rest of the time, she is a certified yoga instructor , vintage clothing boutique owner and mother of one. Review by Linda Michel-Cassidy for Prick of the Spindle March 1, 2015 #3 IN THE WORDCRAFT SERIES OF FABULIST NOVELLAS A DOUBLE MONSTER FEATURE (TWO NOVELLAS) BUY ALL THREE GRANDBOIS DOUBLE MONSTER FEATURES FOR SPECIAL DISCOUNT BELOW (SIX NOVELLAS). 2015 FINALIST FOR INDIEFAB BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD IN BOTH LITERARY FICTION AND FANTASY "These stories show how fantastical tropes can be perfect touchstones for exploring universal human experiences." -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY THE GIRL ON THE SWING & AT NIGHT IN CRUMBLING VOICES Peter Grandbois Wordcraft Series of Fabulist Novellas #3 ISBN: 978-1-877655-86-9, LCN: 2014955736 First Trade Paperback, 5 X 8, 144 pgs., $12/3.50 s/h (US ONLY) Cover design by Kristin Summers, www.redbatdesign.com Author photo by Gary Isaacs THE GIRL ON THE SWING & AT NIGHT IN CRUMBLING VOICES, the third and final installment in award winning novelist Peter Grandbois' series of monster double features, marks a departure from the previous books in that these stories are not told through the point of view of a movie monster icon. Inspired by lesser know 50's monster fare, the monsters in these novellas become more difficult to discern and therfore, even more disturbing. "Eerie stories harkening back to the grand old talkes of The Twilight Zone will thrill as they entertain...the writing is so good that it goes beyond genre." --ForeWord Reviews "It's insightful storytelling at its best...easily Grandbois' darkest yet--and the author is only growing more confident and capable, wielding sci-fi tropes like blades to cut to the heart of our doubts and fears. --Glenn Dallas, San Francisco Book Review "Grandbois makes a case for a newer, better understanding of monsters. He brings them from the far, unexplored edges of the map and sets them directly in front of you in order to show that the monster's most frightening quality is his own fear...Grandbois shows us that the truth is indeed out there, but it's even farther, darker, and more complicated than we might have first imagined." --Alexander Lumans, Los Angeles Review of Books ABOUT THE AUTHOR Peter Grandbois' first novel, The Gravedigger, is currently in pre-production as a major motion picture. It was also chosen by Barnes and Noble for the "Discover Great New Writers" program and named one of the best books of 2006 by Booklist. His second novel, Nahoonkara was ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award winner in literary fiction for 2011. He is also the author of an innovative memoir entitled The Arsenic Lobster and a collection of surreal short fictions, Domestic Disturbances, currently a finalist for ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Awards. His plays have been produced in St. Louis, Columbus, and on 42nd St. in New York. He is a professor of creative writing at Dennison University in Ohio. SPECIAL OFFER: BUY ALL THREE BOOKS IN GRANDBOIS' MONSTER SERIES, SIX NOVELLAS, FOR $25 PLUS SHIPPING. October 1, 2014 #2 IN THE WORDCRAFT SERIES OF FABULIST NOVELLAS A DOUBLE MONSTER FEATURE (TWO NOVELLAS) HONORABLE MENTION FOR INDIE-FAB AWARD FOR BEST FANTASY OF THE YEAR BY AN INDEPENDENT OR UNIVERSITY PRESS (2014) Read More "Extraordinary characters in ordinary situations prompt wry philosophical speculations about everyday life and longings in this pair of novellas laced with tropes from sci-fi B movies...Although Grandbois (Domestic Disturbances) endows his characters with some otherworldly attributes, he renders them believably human through their self-doubts and amusing foibles. His clever, sympathetic depiction of the men inside the monsters will appeal to a wide range of readers." -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY THE GLOB WHO GIRDLED GRANVILLE & THE SECRET LIVES OF ACTORS Peter Grandbois Wordcraft Series of Fabulist Novellas #2 ISBN: 978-1-877655-84-5, LCN: 2014942463 First Trade Paperback, 5 X 8, 122 pgs., $12/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover design by Kristin Summers, www.redbatdesign.com Author photo by Gary Isaacs In THE GLOB WHO GIRDLED GRANVILLE & THE SECRET LIVES OF ACTORS, we encounter perhaps the two biggest icons of '50s B Horror, The Blob and The Thing from Another World . This time around, we meet our monsters decades after the films that made them famous as they attempt to adjust to "normal life." Whether you've seen the movies or not, Grandbois' madcap prose breathes life into these monsters, and, in doing so, makes us better able to face the monster in ourselves. "If you ever doubted that monsters (and movie stars) have rich inner lives, doubt no more. Let Peter Grandbois be your guide to the wounded heart (or some extra-terrestrial equivalent) of every alien being on a rampage. Full of wit, verve, and imagination." --Karen Joy Fowler "The monsters Peter Grandbois gives us here aren't just painfully wonderfully human, they're each of us, they're all of us. After reading this, you'll see that you've had scales all along." -- Stephen Graham Jones, author of Ledfeather and Flushboy Lit Reactor Review "A must read..." --Chris Rosales Read here. HTML Giant Review "Grandbois . . . breath(es) a new, complex literary life into both narratives, so that the thrill is one of uncanny insight and surprising tenderness. . .a haunting critique of domesticity and divorce—not the conventional manifestations of these states, but their ungraspable and inevitably reductive power. . . exposing the underlying importance of the freakish clinquant that is our need for our own pop history. . ." -- Nate Liederebach Read here. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Peter Grandbois' first novel, The Gravedigger, is currently in pre-production as a major motion picture. It was also chosen by Barnes and Noble for the "Discover Great New Writers" program and named one of the best books of 2006 by Booklist. His second novel, Nahoonkara was ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award winner in literary fiction for 2011. He is also the author of an innovative memoir entitled The Arsenic Lobster and a collection of surreal short fictions, Domestic Disturbances, currently a finalist for ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Awards. His plays have been produced in St. Louis, Columbus, and on 42nd St. in New York. He is a professor of creative writing at Dennison University in Ohio. September 1, 2014 NEW PROSE POEMS BY OREGON BOOK AWARD WINNER SEA-LEVEL NERVE (BOOK ONE) Prose Poems by James Grabill ISBN: 978-1-877655-88-3, LCN: 2014943775 First Trade Paperback, 6 X 9, 104 pgs., $15/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover Art by Miriam Nelson Cover Design by Kristin Summers, www.redbatdesign.com Author photo by Bill Siverly "In this era with seven quickly becoming eight billion of us hoping to survive on Earth, as scientific research and development, community resilience, and social justice progress, so do they retool awareness and rewrite working paradigms--on this terrain, the prose poems in Sea-Level Nerve speak symphonically and resonate ecologically as they explore what we collectively find through ecological perspectives with an eye toward the emerging future." -- James Grabill, July 21, 2014 "James Grabill has always been at the forefront of ecologically concerned poets, finding the information we need, and speaking as a steward for the natural world. In 'Living with the Stern Review' he says 'Even a gnat's dust plants a seed and takes back life.' And then he warns us: 'What our ancestors believed was endless has come circling back around us.'" -- Allan Cooper, editor of Germination and author of Gabriel's Wing "In Sea-Level Nerve James Grabill takes the mico and macro observations of science--in other words, every being and phenomenon in the universe--and pulls them together into a great vision. His unique lyricism is one of the brilliant lights of contemporary American poetry." --Lawrence Smith, editor of Caliban and author of Annie's Soup Kitchen About the Author JAMES GRABILL has published seven books of poems, two books of essays and two poetry chapbooks. Poem Rising Out of the Earth and Standing Up in Someone (Lynx House, 1994) won the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Three other volumes have been finalists for OBA: Through the Green Fire (Holy Cow! Press, 1995) in creative nonfiction, Listening to the Leaves Form (Lynx House, 1997), and An Indigo Scent after the Rain (Lynx House, 2003) in poetry. Now semi-retired, Grabill channels his energy into writing projects and public presentations. He continues to teach "Pathways to Sustainability" at Clackamas Community College. He lives in Portland, Oregon. August 1, 2014 #1 IN THE WORDCRAFT SERIES OF FABULIST NOVELLAS A DOUBLE MONSTER FEATURE (TWO NOVELLAS) WAIT YOUR TURN & THE STABILITY OF LARGE SYSTEMS Peter Grandbois Wordcraft Series of Fabulist Novellas, #1 ISBN: 978-1-877655-82-1, LCN: 2014935679 First Trade Paperback, 5 X 8, 120 pgs., $12/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover design by Kristin Summers, www.redbatdesign.com Author photo by Gary Isaacs In Wait Your Turn and The Stability of Large Systems, the first in a series of monster double features, award-winning novelist Peter Grandbois pulls back the curtain, revealing previously undiscovered behind the scenes footage of two of the most feared '50's movie icons: The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Fly. Playful and painful, these novellas put the microscope to domestic life revealing the human in the monster and the monstrous in the human. "Grandbois has a flair for telling stories in refreshingly unique ways...His writing is clear and concise with colorful phrasing and impeccable grammar. His dialogue flows naturally and never seems forced." --Jass Elliot, Foreword Reviews, Fall 2014 "In this double feature, Grandbois peels back the scrim of the B-movie to reveal the wounded figures lurking behind, figures that cast shadows that seem from one angle monstrous but from another all too human. At once playful and painful--you'll never look at B horror in the same way again." --Brian Evenson, author of Windeye and Immobility About the Author PETER GRANDBOIS is the author of the novel, The Gravedigger, selected by Barnes and Noble for its "Discover Great New Writers" program, The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, chosen as one of the top five memoirs of 2009 by the Sacramento News and Review, Nahoonkara, winner of the gold medal in literary fiction in ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Awards for 2011, and a collection of surreal flash fictions, Domestic Distrubrances. His essays, plays, and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and been shortlisted for both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. He is an associate editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. October 1, 2012 KEEPING THE SWARM: NEW AND SELECTED ESSAYS George Venn ISBN: 978-1-877655-76-0, LCN: First Trade Paperback, 6 X 9, 224 pgs., $15.95/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover Art: "Finding the Queen," Kodua Galieti Cover & Book Design: redbat design, www.redbatdesign.com Author Photo: Marie Balaban "The collection is personal and universal, grounded in the small towns of the Inland Northwest that Venn knows so well..." --Jeff Baker, The Oregonian "In his latest collection of essays, Keeping the Swarm, Venn again reflects his strong ties to and affection for the Pacific Northwest...Intensely personal and intimate, these essays reflect a thoughtful nostalgia and gentle sensibility...Venn offers many memorable moments." --Kirsten Rabe, ForeWord Reviews, Winter 2012 "This welcome essay collection by the sharpest-eyed Northwest writer conjures the region he knows so intimately. His careful portraits of mining towns, wheat harvest, bee keeping, snowland wonders ring clean and true... This venerable voice blesses every reader with another brave and rewarding book." --Craig Lesley, author of Burning Fence "Keeping the Swarm is an intimate, powerful portrait of community. Dipping his pen into a mix of blood and honey, George Venn braves the scabrous terrain of memory. Venn's prose is powerful, his narrative vulnerable. The Poet's abiding respect for creatures and for environment, for song and for languages...shines brightly here. This book will make you thirst for the clear water of the mountains, and hunger for the amber-nectar of home." --Karen Spears Zacharias, author of A Silence of Mockingbirds "George Venn is a gentle radical: In lyrical prose he enchants us with the closely observed words and acts of ordinary people--from the Northwest's small towns to classrooms in post-Cultural Revolution Hunan--always connecting this fabric of local life to the global issues of social justice and human interdependence. 'Who says literature makes nothing happen?' Venn asks. His memorable essays inspire us to go beyond humanities to humanitarian work." --Jennifer Eastman Atteberry, author of Up in the Rocky Mountains "In Keeping the Swarm, George Venn both asks and answers the question, "After all, what are writers for?' ...In clear-eyed, honest, and eloquent fashion, Venn examines the places and people of his childhood and adulthood, proving that the pedestrian and the profound exist...[and] coalesce to form our most sacred guidebook for us to examine our own piece of the world, to recognize the beauty, grace, and peril..." --Robert Stubblefield, University of Montana "In his latest collection of essays, Keeping the Swarm, Venn again reflects his strong ties to and affection for the Pacific Northwest...intensely personal and intimate, these essays reflect a thoughtful nostalgia and gentle sensibility...touches of powerful writing [and] many memorable moments." --Kirsten Rabe, Foreword Reviews, Winter 2013 "From the gorgeous cover photo by California beekeeper-photographer Kodua Galieti to the very personal family photos and gentle boyhood remembrances, Venn paints a picture of beekeeping and family forever intertwined." --Fran Bach, Washington State Beekeepers Assoc. Newsletter, Nov. 2012 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Poet, essayist, literary historian, editor, linguist, and educator, George Venn is a distinguished figure in western literature. In 1988, his third book, Marking the Magic Circle, was awarded a silver medal from Oregon Institute of Literary Arts. From 1989-1994, he designed and directed the OREGON LITERATURE SERIES for which he received the Stewart Holbrook Award for "outstanding contributions to Oregon's literary life." In 1999, West of Paradise was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. In 2005, the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission honored Marking the Magic Circle as "one of the 100 best Oregon books in two centuries." His C.E.S. Wood monograph Soldier to Advocate (2007) and his Word War II Fred Hill collection Darkroom Soldier have recently earned high praise. For more see his website at: www.georgevenn.com August 1, 2012 MAD CURSIVE Poems by Joshua McKinney ISBN: 978-1-877655-77-7, LCN: 2012940178 First Trade Paperback, 6 X 9, 80 pgs., $14/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover art: "Miyamoto Musashi wielding two bokken," a print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi Calligraphy: Magdelena & Maciej Kopciuch Cover Design: Kristin Summers, redbat design Author Photo: Anita Scharf Interior design: David Memmott "The poems in Mad Cursive move gracefully between beauty and destruction, the essential real locale of poetry in our times. A mad swordsman inside a poet-seer, McKinney dares to locate what resembles, in my reading, spirit laid bare. In this truly elegant book, the remnant of our language negotiates a shadow world--that space between life and death--which is life on this earth. 'Inside sword we find word,' indeed. A truly courageous book. --Claudia Keelan, author of Missing Her "Joshua McKinney tells of two masters: one who liked to write while walking in 'a place unblurred by interruption' and one who ' preferred uneven ground.' When I think of McKinney's work, I see him as the second master--clearing a new path, or, as Pound said of Whitman, the one who broke 'the new wood.' In McKinney's post-bucolic interstitial landscape, flowers stand as ostiaries, the heat index reduces the Earth's archives to ash, and the spirit trembles like a leaf. 'What I thought beautiful was what died astray.' Though he leads us through foreboding realms of the imagination, McKinney's gentle-edged Taoist generosity is exceedingly redemptive, assuring, pointing us skyward and crying, 'look.' Here is a poet who has earned the title of 'master.' -- D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys "In an era of distress and shrillness, it takes courage and, more than courage, Grace, to speak out boldly , unguardedly, for Balance. In the literal body of these new poems, Joshua McKinney articulates the mortal grandeur and (this is more poignant than I can rightly say) the tragedy of Balance. McKinney simply will not relinquish either past or present, love or bereavement, intellect or animal anguish, merely to accommodate the shrill urgings of our moment. Mad Cursive is therefore, and shall remain, a heroic collection." --Donald Revell, author of The Bitter Withy "Mad Cursive is an excellent use of poetry as a vehicle for real thought: a good read." --San Francisco Book Review, Sept. 2012 Read full review. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joshua McKinney is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Saunter, co-winner of the University of Georgia Press Poetry Series Open Competition in 2001, and The Novice Mourner, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize in 2005. He is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: Saunter (Primitive Publications, 1998) and Permutations of the Gallery (Pavement Saw Press, 1996), winner of the Pavement Saw Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared widely in such journals as American Letters & Commentary, Boulevard, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. Other awards include a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry. He teaches poetry writing and literature at California State University, Sacramento. He is a member of Senkakukan of Sacramento where he studies Mugai Ryu, Toyama Ryu, and the curriculum of the Zen Nihon Battado Renmei. June 15, 2012 SUDDEN DEATH OVER TIME Stories by John Rember ISBN: 978-1-877655-79-1, LCN: 2012938178 First Trade Paperback, 6 X 9, 146 pgs., $14/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Front cover art: "Find Your Rainbow," Diane Labombarge, courtesy Dreamstime.com Back cover art: "Seamless Crows," Indigocrow, courtesy iStockphoto.com Title page collage: David Memmott, images courtesy iStockphoto.com Cover design: Kristin Summers, www. redbatdesign.com Interior design: David Memmott Sudden Death Over Time does what only good satire can--tear down the artificial and the irrelevant to get to what is human. The stories are funny, insightful, disturbing, sad, and always entertaining. They emerge from the uncertainty of our time, amid failing infrastructures, moral ambiguity, corruption, and tenured disinterest of an academic system that perhaps like our political system needs to slough its skin and renew itself every ten years as Thomas Jefferson once suggested. Rember's talent in bringing interesting characters to life and letting them stumble on their humanity in places at the same time common and extreme give these stories an energy that sparks on every page until they conflagrate into a controlled burn. "John Rember tears your heart out and replaces it with his own. No one I know of comes close to his mastery of the short story. Read him and weep." --TIM SANDLIN, author of the GroVont Quartet "I couldn't get enough of the stories in Sudden Death Over Time. John Rember's wit is as sharp as the edge of a well-hone ski and his prose is as smooth and perfect as a Dean's finest scotch. Reading these stories made me feel as though I'd come upon Richard Russo and Thomas McGuane swapping smart and wicked tales in front of a hot pub fire with cold drinks in hand. The book is that skillful, and that funny." --ALYSON HAGY, author of Ghosts of Wyoming "Rember's deft touches, the concrete language and careful craftsmanship he displays discloses a powerful writer at the summit of his game, a wordsmith who knows how to spin a yarn in such a winning way that those who read his stories are carried along with ineffable ease, perhaps seldom aware of the simple beauty of the style, the prose, its concision: never a word out of place, never a phrase without its distinctive, unfaltering Rember rhythm. Sudden Death Over Time is consummate literature--a dazzling achievement." --DUFF BRENNA, from his Introduction About the Author JOHN REMBER was born in Sun Valley, Idaho. He is the author of the story collections, Coyote in the Mountains and Cheerleaders from Gomorrah, the memoir Traplines, and the why-to-write book, MFA in a Box. For many years he was a professor of literature and writing at the College of Idaho and in the Pacific University MFA Program. He lives with his wife Julie in the Sawtooth Valley of Idaho. June 1, 2012 Finalist for Next Generation Indie Book Award in General Non-Fiction Finalist for San Diego Book Award "Brenna's experience is all there, in thorough, felt detail--in the embedded dialogue, in the scenes truer than memory or invention, in the visionary understanding of grotesque and sympathetic characters, and in the complete, self-standing episodes woven into the chronological flow. Anyone following the landmark achievements of literary memoir must learn from and celebrate this remarkable book." DeWitt Henry, American Book Review, Nov./Dec. 2012, Vol. 34, #1 MURDERING THE MOM: A MEMOIR Duff Brenna ISBN: 978-1-877655-74-6, LCN: 2012930960 First Trade Paperback, 6 X 9, 218 pg., $15/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover and Family Photos from Pappas family album Cover design: Kristin Summers, redbat design Author Photo: David Memmott Special thanks to Robert Mast for assistance with family album "You're killing me, Duffy. You're killing me," the mom always said. Murdering the Mom is a story that elevates the obscene to the sublime. Duff Brenna takes all the materials of hardship and abuse during an unhappy childhood and sculpts it into art, into something transcendent. This is a heart-rending memoir that exceeds the expectations one normally has of a memoir, that is, it reads like a captivating novel. "There are some memoirs that seem so artful in the dissection of the joys and horrors of a life that they resonate long after that last page. Duff Brenna provides just such a story...[he] provides a compelling attempt to untangle the emotional threads of his childhood. By viewing his past with such a sense of honesty and compassion, he delivers a memoir that's a truly striking accomplishment." -- Elizabeth Millard for ForeWord Magazine On-Line Reviews READ FOREWORD MAGAZINE ON-LINE REVIEW OF MURDERING THE MOM SAN DIEGO LIVING'S INTERVIEW WITH DUFF BRENNA. "Duff Brenna is one of the most talented, brave and daring writers of contemporary American letters...With great skill, insight, wisdom, introspection, and above all a sense of humanity and forgiveness, a brilliant writer transcends the tragic and turns this powerful, raw, heartfelt story into the finest art." --JAMES BROWN, author of This River and The Los Angeles Dairies "This book portrays a broken childhood and a struggling life in the most raw and honest manner imaginable. He makes this book a personal gift to every reader." --Rachel J. Richards, The Portland Book Review "[Duff Brenna] is exploring--unsparingly, unflinchingly, but above all fairly, with balance and breathtaking honesty--the humanity of a group of people born into and continually creating a kind of hell in which they thrash around without a clue as to how to get out." --THOMAS E. KENNEDY, author of In the Company of Angels, and Fallling Sideways Read review in San Diego's East County Magazine "With plenty of humor and poignancy, Murdering the Mom, is an excellent pick for memoir collections, very highly recommended." --Midwest Book Review "Duff Brenna childhood and coming of age are as harrowing as Maxim Gorki's, but where Gorki's calls for a Soviet revolution to free underlcasses from the cycle of brutality, Brenna's celebrates our common humanity, complexity, and resilience, revolution within. His accounts of being brutalized and loved by his stepfatherare both horrific and comic. This is a memoir remarkable for its ironic acceptance of outrages..." --DeWitte Henry "Murdering the Mom is wonderful! I just finished it a minute ago. A delicious read...those last scenes are terribly moving." --Steve Kowit, author of The Gods of Rapture and Lurid Confessions About the Author DUFF BRENNA is the author of six novels, including The Book of Mamie, which won the AWP Award for Best Novel; The Holy Book of the Beard, named "an underground classic" by The New York Times; Too Cool, a New York Times Noteworthy Book; The Altar of the Body, given the Editors Prize Favorite Book of the Year Award, South Florido Sun-Sentinel, and also received a San Diego Writers Association Award for Best Novel in 2002. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award, Milwaukee Magazine's Best Short Story of the Year Award, and a Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention. His work has been translated into six languages. His collection of short stories, Minnesota Memoirs, was published by Serving House Books in February, 2012. Duff Brenna's website, www.duffbrenna.com March 1, 2012 2012 Bronze in Poetry from Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award. 2013 Finalist for the Spur Award for Best Western Poem from Western Writers of America, for "Night Singer, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico THE SKY IS A BIRD OF SORROW Poems by Steve Dieffenbacher ISBN: 978-1-877655-75-3, LCN: 2012932497 First Trade Paperback,6 X 9, 110 pgs., $15/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover and interior artwork copyright 2005-2011, Don Gray www.dongraystudio.com "Loom of the Land," cover painting Cover design: Kristin Summers, www.redbatdesign.com Author photo: Deidre Dieffenbacher The Sky Is a Bird of Sorrow is an apt title for Steve Dieffenbacher's new book of poems. Like the sky, the scope of the poetry is wide, primarily a sweeping vision of spaces and eras specific to the West -- Oregon, New Mexico, deserts, mountains, ocean shores, the land and its people. The tone of voice, maintained almost consistently throughout the book, is filled with the sort of longing that beauty and wonder always occasion. Loss and searching, treated honestly and straighforwardly through human events and earthly, are Dieffenbacher's major themes. "On the rim of the canyon/I have come to find you." --Pattiann Rogers, author of Wayfare and Generations These gentle, well-considered poems travel American landscapes of the domestic, historic and prehistoric. In virtually every line, Steve Dieffenbacher celebrates the complications of human occupation and succession, always asserting the possibilities of a life well-lived: "if it be not now, yet it will come, our last and deepest love." --David Axelrod, author of What Next, Old Knife? and Departing by a Broken Gate From this poet whose German surname evokes a "deep stream" comes a collection both lit and shadowed from within by a Rilkean lyricism. Dieffenbacher gives us poems that can hear a "...continent's breath/heaving out of distance/from plains of frost." His is a gift capable of conveying the language of a wounded tree, its "...aching/broken top" its "...bell/of wooden bones." Brimming with stunning tropes, alive with liquid music, his poems carry "...the mute undertow of another earth." On these pages, a fortunate reader finds language that reaches "to the root of the world." --Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate When the geese call in late autumn, this book says, they call for you. Crossing borders, climbing the rim, holding a vigil at dawn, these poems forge elegy in each hour of each day, like birds graced with dark wings. In poems like these, even sorrow can fly. --Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft Interview with Steve Dieffenbacher About the Author Steve Dieffenbacher has lived in Oregon's Rogue Valley since 1989. His poem "Emptiness" won the 2010 Poetry Prize sponsored by Cloudbank magazine of Corvallis, Oregon, and he has published in numerous regional journals. His poems also are included in Deer Drink the Moon (2007), an anthology of Oregon poetry published by Ooligan Press at Portland State University; in the chapbooks Universe of the Unsaid (2009), Voices of the Siskiyous (2006), and At the Boundary (2001); in the anthology Intricate Homeland: Collected Writings from the Klamath Siskiyou (2000); and in A Path Through Stone, a 1995 cycle of poems that includes the work by Bruce Barton, Jonah Bornstein and John Reid. He is an editor at the Mail Tribune in Medford, where he writes a monthly column focusing on nature and hiking for the newspaper's Sunday travel section. He has won various awards for writing, photography, and page design in his more than 35 years as a journalist. October 1, 2011 Picked as one of the ten best fiction titles of 2011 by Jane Ciabattari forThe Boston Globe OUR DAILY BREAD A Novel by Lauren B. Davis ISBN: 978-1-877655-72-2, LCN: 2011928120 First trade paperback, 6X9, 258 pages, $15/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover design: Kristin Summers, redbat design Cover art: iStockPhoto.com Photo of Boy Scout Whistle: Ron Davis Author photo: Helen Tansey "Backwoods Noir" at its best. For generations the Erskine clan has lived in poverty and isolation on North Mountain, shunned by the God-fearing people of nearby Gideon. Now, Albert Erskine comes down off the mountain hoping to change the future for his brothers and sisters and sets in motion a chain of events that will change everything. Inspired by the true story. From best-selling novelist Lauren B. Davis comes the deeply compassionate story of what happens when we view our neighbors as "The Other," as well as the transcendent power of unlikely friendships. OUR DAILY BREAD HAS BEEN PICKED UP BY HARPER COLLINS-CANADA. WORDCRAFT OF OREGON WILL CONTINUE TO REPRESENT THE NOVEL IN THE UNITED STATES. Our Daily Bread is a compelling narrative set in a closely observed, sometimes dark, but ultimately life-enhancing landscape. Lauren B. Davis' vivid prose and empathetically developed characters will remain in the reader's mind long after the final chapter has been read." --Jane Urquhart, prize winning author of Away and The Stone Carvers "I'll never forget this book, the stunning power of the descriptions, the attention to detail, the riveting plot, the fully-realized characters--this is storytelling at its very best." --Duff Brenna, author of The Book of Mamie, The Holy Book of the Beard "Wow! From the first chapter of Our Daily Bread, "up here where the view was like heaven and the living was like hell," I was hooked--by the characters, by the flow, by the clean , rhythmic prose. This is a novel that will make you want to do something about poverty, hunger, ignorance and the people who are subjected to such conditions. An outstanding, absorbing, page-turning novel." --Thomas E. Kennedy, author of The Copenhagen Quartet "Rendered with gorgeous prose, this compact, fast-moving novel features an astonishing range of tones, from hope to heartbreak, from black humor to white-knuckle terror. It will stay with you long after the covers are closed." --Dexter Palmer, author of The Dream of Perpetual Motion ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lauren B. Davis is the author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed novels, The Radiant City, a finalist for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize; and The Stubborn Season, chosen for the Robert Adams Lecture Series; as well as two collections of short stories, An Unrehearsed Desire and Rat Medicine & Other Unlikely Curatives. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards and she is the recipient of two Mid-Career Writer Sustaining grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts. Lauren reviews books for The Globe & Mail and The Literary Review of Canada, leads monthly Sharpening the Quill writing workshops in Princeton, New Jersey. TO ARRANGE AND INTERVIEW, CONTACT BLANCHE BRANN, LITERARY ADVOCATE, 609-620-0450, Bibrann@yahoo.com FOR INFORMATION ON READINGS AND EVENTS, PLEASE VISIT LAUREN'S WEBSITE AT www.laurenbdavis.com READ FIRST CHAPTER Lauren B. Davis is the featured author for the October 2011 issue of SERVING HOUSE JOURNAL. Read the first chapter of OUR DAILY BREAD. INTERVIEWS MyBookAddictionReviews interview, 9/29/11 REVIEW EXCERPTS "...a powerful, harrowing, and deeply unsettling work. It's the sort of novel that keeps you reading even as your skin crawls and your blood pressure mounts...Our Daily Bread proceeds like a noose tightening...a stark, beautiful, sad and frankly terrifying novel. Our Daily Bread is finely crafted, with careful attention to characterization, style and pacing. It succeeds on every level..." --Robert J. Wiersema, Quill & Quire, Sept. 2011 “a novel full of remarkable moments. . . a level of detail that puts us in the beating hearts of imperiled souls. No fact-filled journalistic account, no matter how lurid, could do the same. . . simple, brave, powerful scenes, skillfully written with an anger no less effective for being tempered – scenes that sit with the soul long after the book is closed.” – Alan Cumyn, The Globe & Mail, Oct. 15, 2011 LINKS TO REVIEWS Musehouse event: Book Bound Column, montgomerynews.com http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/sin_and_sustenance_20120105/ http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-our-daily-bread-a/ http://followtheclue.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/our-daily-bread-lauren-b-davis/ http://dadofdivas-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/07/book-review-our-daily-bread.html http://www.simplystacie.net/2011/07/book-review-our-daily-bread/ http://www.supermomreviews.com/2011/07/our-daily-bread-novel-by-lauren-b-davis.html March 1, 2011 A CHINAMAN'S CHANCE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS: 1960-2010 Alex Kuo ISBN: 978-1-877655-71-5 First trade paperback, 6 X9, 146 pages, $15/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover design: Kristin Summers, redbat design Author photo: Zoe Filipkowska "Alex was my first writing teacher, and 25 years later is still my teacher. His vision is sure and uncompromising. I love this book." --Sherman Alexie "I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him." --Carolyn Kizer "Line after line, I am surprised and moved by the way his language connects the rhythms of our collective memory, imagination and chance." --Ping-Kwan Leung "Alex Kuo's A Chinaman's Chance startles its reader out of complacency. Here is writing that doesn't coddle and that keeps one engrossed, questioning, thoroughly awake. Kuo's poem-stories deftly resist attempts at a too narrow classification of style--beyond it being his own--simultaneously suggesting while artfully sidestepping any overassumption of autobiography by blending what reads like personal history with inarguable emotional truths." --Laurel Leigh, The Bloomsbury Review (Vol. 31, #1) "Alex Kuo has given us...a book we can be with for many years...[a] book that feeds my mind and touches my spiritual life." Irene Koronas ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in Boston, Alex Kuo spent most of World War II in China, followed by eight years in Hong Kong before returning to the United States. He has lived and worked most of his adult life in Idaho and Washington beginning in 1956 when he signed on a forest fire crew for U.S.F.S. Since 1963 he has taught writing and cultural studies at several colleges and universties on both sides of the Pacific. His first published poems appeared in 1961 in Castalia, Descant and American Weave. Recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, he has also been awarded the Lingnan American Studies and Senior Fulbright lectureships, a Rockefeller Bellagio residency, and several research grants. He has been appointed distinguished writer-in-residence at Fudan University , Knox College and Mercy Corps. In 2002 Lipstick and Other Stories received the American Book Award, and in 2010 he received the Alumni Achievement Award from Knox College. October, 2010 WORDCRAFT OF OREGON CHAPBOOK SERIES, #1 OUT OF PRINT BLUE MOON: Poems from Chinese Lines Poems, Vincent Wixon ISBN: 978-1-877655-70-8 saddle-stitched, 6.25 X 8.25, 36 pages, $8, plus $3.50 s/h Book design: David Memmott Author photo: Patty Wixon 29 poems developed from lines from Chinese poems selected from THE COLLECTED SONGS OF COLD MOUNTAIN and POEMSOF THE MASTERS: China's Classic Anthology of T'ang and Sung Dynasty Verse, published by Copper Canyon Press. Sample Poem: BlueMoonpoem ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vincent Wixon is the author of two other books of poetry--THE SQUARE GROVE (Traprock Books, 2006) and SEED (May Day Press, 1993). He has co-produced documentary films on Lawson Inada and William Stafford, and co-edited two books on writing by William Stafford for the University of Michigan Press. He and his wife Patty live in Ashland, Oregon, and are long-time poetry editors for Jefferson Monthly, the public radio program guide for Southern Oregon and Northern California. September 2010 FIRST FULL POETRY COLLECTION BY AUTHOR OF "ABOVE THE CLEARWATER," FINALIST FOR THE 2004 OREGON BOOK AWARD IN CREATIVE NONFICTION AT THIS DISTANCE Poems, Bette Husted ISBN: 978-1-877655-69-2, LCN: 2010925248 first trade paperback, 6 X 9, 104 pages, $14/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover art & inside b/w croppings: "Above 8," Don Gray Cover design: Kristin Summer, redbat design Author photo: Dean Husted "Bette Lynch Husted, so richly rooted in the wild Oregon land she inhabits, writes with deep care and conscience. Her poems shun nothing--exploring difficult legacies and the mysterious encroachments of 'what people do' with calm humility and curiousity. She asks the questions. 'Anything a Box Will Hold' can't be missed. When she speaks of the 'winter wren singing his small whole-bodies celebration amid bright moss," that's her voice too, in the giant landscape--comforting and clear." --Naomi Shihab Nye "Space. Spaciousness. Amidst such vistas, these poems are placed. Visit. Stay." --Lawson Fusao Inada "This is a poet who will take you on roads you don't know to places where you haven't been, the lonesome places, Wallowa, Ahsahka, Imnaha, and on into the gray-crowned night. She travels the far West, the farthest West, farther than the pioneers. She goes the distance." --Ursula K. Le Guin "Bette Husted's poems in this collection explore the rural landscape, its peoples and why and how they live there...This is what important poetry is supposted to be, a caring look into a place one grew up and lives in." --Alex Kuo ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bette Lynch Husted lives and writes in Pendleton. Her works include a chapbook After Fire (Puddinghouse 2002) and a collection of memoir essays, Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land (Oregon State University Press 2004), which was a finalist for the 2005 Oregon Book Award and the 2005 WILLA Award in creative nonfiction. Her collection of essays, Lessons from the Borderlands, is forthcoming from Plain View Press. Her essays, stories and poems have appeared in Runes, Fourth Genre, Prairie Schooner, Natural Bridge and other journals. She was a Fishtrap Fellow and received a 2007 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Award. September 2010 IMPULSE & WARP: The Selected 20th Century Poems Dan Raphael ISBN: 978-1-877655-68-5, LCN: 2010925247 first trade paperback, 7.5 X 9.25, 162 pages, $15/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover art: "Inviting the Aliens," David Memmott B/W ink plates: Brad Winter Cover design: Kristin Summer, redbat design Author photo: Melba Dlugonski "Dan Raphael is one of the finest prophetic poets composing in English. He focuses on his subjects so intently they dissolve and he rearranges the molecules into recombinant linguistic poetry for now and the future." --Charles Potts, author of The Portable Potts and Valga Krusa "Musical, intelligent and perpetually mutable...Impulse & Warp is a gift of high art made of the raw materials...Essential sound from one of our finest singers." Jake Berry, author of Branbu Drezi and Cyclones in High Northern Latitudes "Dan Raphael is from the great tradition--he doesn't want to think about or judge his work. He wants to keep making more: the unstoppable soul importance of the poet, the 'knowing your friends by the shape of their breaths.' Impulse & Warp is a wild wonderful ride, a kaleidoscope of words, sensations and ideas." --Sharon Doubiago, author of My Fathers Love and Love on the Streets "Dan Raphael's poetry lights up the dark abyss with sparks generated by blows from Vulcan's hammer. Watch out innocent civilians, friendly fire is headed your way." --Casey Bush, Senior Editor of Bear Deluxe Magazine ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dan Raphael's poems have appeared in around 300 publications including Caliban, Central Park, Heaven Bone, Lost and Found Times, Nebula Awards 31, Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry, Tinfish, Otoliths, Portland Review, Unlikely Stories, Short Fuse, Raven Chronicles and x-stream. Among his books of the 21st Century are Showing Light a Good Time (Wordcraft of Oregon/Jazz Police, 2001), Among My Eyes (x-stream, 2002) and Breath Test (nine muses books, 2007). An energetic and intense performer, Dan has given over 200 readings, including places like Bumershoot, Portland Poetry Festival, Powell's Books, Cornell University, Red Sky Poetry Theatre, Reed College, Artquake, Southern Oregon University, Moe's Books, Portland Jazz Festival, and the Astrochimp Impact Crater. He edited NRG Magazine for 18 years, then published 26 Books (26 chapbooks of 26 pages by 26 authors). Starting at college, he had organized readings and poetry events for over 30 years, including one monthly series that lasted 13 years, and Poetland, where 80 poets read in 8 venues over an 8 hour span. Despite degrees from Cornell, Bowling Green State and Western Washington, Dan has stayed out of teaching, working first for the post office and later for the Oregon DMV. He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife Melba and son Orion. June 2010 NEW NOVEL BY AUTHOR OF MADISON HOUSE, WINNER OF THE 2005 LANGUM PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION CLARA AND MERRITT A Literary Historical Novel by Peter Donahue ISBN: 978-1-877655-66-1, LCN: 2010922060 first trade paperback, 6 X 9, 288 pgs, $15/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover art: "Business District," by Yvonne Twining Humber, courtesy of Martin-Zambito Fine Art, Seattle, WA Cover design: Kristin Summer, redbat design Author photo: Jay W. Shoot Clara and Merritt unfolds amidst the violent strife between longshoremen and Teamsters in Seattle in the 1930s and '40s. When Clara Hamilton, the daughter of a longshoreman, and Merritt Discoll, a member of the Teamsters, fall in love, their relationship is immediately threatened by the fierce antagonism between the rival unions. Encompassing the West Coast labor movement, World War II, the rise of McCarthyism, the Northwest School of Art, and much more, this profound and multi-layered novel explores how people reckon with the larger forces of world events in their everyday lives--and extends author Peter Donahue's remarkable investigation of Northwest history. "Clara and Merritt is rich with details that give life to a little-known chapter of our past. Donahue draws us into a panoramic, dramatic sage--events that affected the entire Pacific Northwest and generations to come." --Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses "Peter Donahue has crafted an impressive, fully imagined, satisfying drama, and Clara Hamilton ranks among the most endearing and inspiring heroines in Northwest literature." --Jim Lynch, author of The Highest Tide and Border Songs "Decades before Seattle became known for Microsoft and Starbucks, the city was a muscular place where working men labored hard...Peter Donahue's Clara and Merritt captures that brawnier city from the 1930s and 1940s when the Teamsters and more radical International Longshoremen Association battled for labor supremacy...Like the best historical fiction, Donahur's well-paced novel...provides a strong sense of place and well-drawn characters to convey its time." --Hank Stern, Willamette Week "...vivid characters, persuasive storytelling, rich noirish detail, and a deep sense of time and place." --Eric Scigliano, Seattle Metropolitan Magazine ABOUT THE AUTHOR Peter Donahue is the author of the novel, Madison House, winner of the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction, and the short story collection The Corneilius Arms. He is co-editor, along with John Trombold, of the anthologies Reading Seattle: The City in Prose and Reading Portland: The City in Prose. He writes the Retrospective Reviews column on Northwest literature for Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History, and teaches creative writing and journalism at Birmingham-Sourthern College in Alabama. More at Peter Donahue's website March 2010 THE FIRE DIARIES Poems by Matt Schumacher ISBN: 978-1-877655-67-8, LCN: 2010921257 first trade paperback, 6 X 9, 100 pgs, $14/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover art: "Eagle Nebula," Kevin Loren Cornelius Kevin's website Cover design: Kristin Summer, redbat design Author photo: Kaley Frank New poetry collection by author of Spilling The Moon "In Matt Schumacher's The Fire Diaries, '[t]he wheels attempt to grip the violet highway' as a car passes through a forest fire. Schumacher's poems pivot on a central theme: a poet in utter control of his medium, writing about uncontrolled burning. Schumacher shape-shifts fearlessly, speaking sometimes through the voices of witnesses, and sometimes through the fire itself, as poem after poem spontaneously combusts. This is a terrific book: funny, scary, and visceral." --Angela Sorby, author of Bird Skin Coat "To read a Matt Schumacher poem is to enter a world of riotous word riffs and fire-related incantations. Meditative, hauntingly chaotic, and beautiful, these poems will singe your memory. This ample collection glows with great personal and historical revelatory spark." --Virgial Saurez, author of 90 Miles: New and Selected Poems "In The Fire Diaries, Matt Schumacher draws on accounts ranging from the great Chicago fire to the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc's self immolation and ignites them with the 'mind's embroidery' to take his readers on an unexpected and transformative journey...Through the intermediary of his rich lyrics, Schumacher...calls his readers to see beyond the ordinary..." --Kirberly Blaeser, author of Apprenticed to Justice and Absentee Indians ABOUT THE AUTHOR Educated at the University of Maine and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Matt Schumacher is a vagabond transplant who considers himself an Oregonian. His first collection of poetry, Spilling the Moon, made its debut with Wordcraft of Oregon in March 2008, and his poems have recently appeared in ZYZZYVA, Green Mountains Review, Sub-Lit, basalt, and Portland Reivew. A short version of this collection, Fire Diary, was chosen by Matthea Harvey as the winner of the Well Lit Press chapbook contest in spring 2008. He lives with his wife, Kaley, and is pursuing a doctorate in English/Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. JANUARY 2010 DEPARTING BY A BROKEN GATE Poems by David Axelrod ISBN: 978-1-877655-65-4, LCN: 2009938236 first trade paperback, 6 X 9, 92 pages, $14/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Front & back Cover images: courtesy of MorgueFile.com Cover design: Kristin Summers, www.redbat.com New collection of poems by the author of The Cartographer's Melancholy, winner of the 2004 Spokane Prize for Poetry and finalist for the 2006 Oregon Book Award in poetry Praise for previous work: "[Axelrod's poems are] a moving journey into a landscape where we are all pilgrims making our way down dark roads in search of some transcendent moment that may never occur, yet the will to keep traveling impels us ever forward until we reach a kind of solace and release." --Ai, author ofDread "Thought provoking...often lyrically tender." --Barbara McMichael, reviewere for The Olympian "David Axelrod's fine, elegaic and lyrical poems express a sense of loss the contemporary mind must endure, unaccommodated, on the edge of betrayed nature and nothing." --Paul Nelson, author ofSea Level ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Axelrod is the author of four previous collections of poems, including Wordcraft of Oregon titles, The Kingdom at Hand and Chronicles of a Withering State. His collection of cultural and environmental essays about the interior Northwest, Troubled Intimacies, appeared in 2004. His poems and essays have been published in New Letters, Boulevard, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, River Styx, Verse Daily, among others. He also edits basalt : a journal of fine & liteerary arts. AUGUST 2009 THE PROCESSION OF MEMORIES: Selected Poems 1929-1945 Harry Martinson, the Swedish Nobel Prize Winner A New Bilingual Edition Translated by Lars Nordström ISBN: 978-1-877655-64-7, LCN: 2009927703 first trade paperback, 6 X 9, 124 pages, $14/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover Painting, Eldareporträtt [Portait of a Stoker] by Harry Martinson Sketch of Harry Martinson by Swedish artist, Arne Cassell Sketch of clipper ship by Harry Martinson Photo of Lars Nordström: Cynthia Nordström Cover Design: redbat design, Kristin Summer Interior Design: David Memmott Fatherless and abandoned by his mother at age six, Nobel Laureate, Harry Martinson, grew up mostly in rural foster homes in the south of Sweden in the early years of the 20th century. He left school at thirteen and became a sailor and vagabond—a global nomad—at sixteen. After permanently leaving the sea in 1927, he began to transform the story of his life into art. He painted, wrote poetry, autobiography, fiction, drama and essays. Using imagery and language that was fresh and striking, readers found his books moving and appealing, and he quickly wrote himself into the hearts of Scandinavian readers. Today, Martinson is still a widely read author in Sweden and new translations of his work continuous to find readers around the world. In this bilingual edition, translator Lars Nordström introduces the reader to Martinson’s early work as a poet. None of the 60 poems included here have ever been translated into English previously. ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR Lars Nordström was born in 1954 in Stockholm, Sweden, where he lived until 1974. He was educated at the University of Stockholm and Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where he received a BA in English in 1981. He then moved to Uppsala University, Sweden, where he received his Ph.D. in American literature in 1989. He is the recipient of several Fulbright grants, a Scandinavian Foundation grant for academic research in the USA, several Swedish Institute grants and awards, a Dagmar and Nils William Olsson Fellowship, as well as a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellowship. In 1988 he settled with his wife and two sons on a small vineyard in Beavercreek, Oregon. For many years Lars Nordström worked as a technical translator in the high tech industry, but now divides his time between growing wine grapes and writing and translating literature, as well as giving talks on various Swedish-American subjects. Lars Nordström has published prose, poetry, translations, oral histories, interviews, articles, and scholarly materials in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Canada, Japan and the United States in magazines such as Studia Neophilologica, Alchemy, Horisont, The Great River Review, the new renaissance, Translation, The Greenfield Review, The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly, Calapooya Literary Review, Hubbub, ICE-FLOE, Northwest Review, Oregon Literary Review, PRISM International, International Poetry Review, The Chariton Review, WRIT and many more. For an up-to-date list of Lars Nordström’s writings, please visit www.larsnordstrom.com JULY 2009 WINNER OF THE 2010 ERIC HOFFER AWARD SILVER MEDALIST FOR FOREWORD MAGAZINE'S BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD IN THE CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL FICTION. WINNER OF THE DELTA AWARD FROM FRIENDS OF MORRIS LIBRARY (SOUTHERN ILLINOIS-CARBONDALE) A DEMOCRACY OF GHOSTS a novel by John Griswold ISBN: 978-1-877655-63-0, LCN: 2009920772 first trade paperback, 6 X 9, 192 pages, $13.95/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover Art: October 1916 cover of The Masses Cover Design: redbat design, Kristin Summers Author Photo: Josh Birnbaum A Democracy of Ghosts is the love story of four couples, set against the backdrop of the Herrin Massacre of 1922. This clash of miners and strikebreakers in Bloody Williamson County, in Southern Illinois, resulted in the deaths of 21 men -- 19 of them the "scabs" tortured and murdered by average men, women, and even children in what was once the most radical community in America. John Griswold has drawn from contemporary eyewitnesses and news accounts, an ethnography of the area, histories, and his own grandfather's letters to create the lives of four fictional couples whose ambitions, self-doubts, and social and sexual jealousies contribute to this great American violence that still echoes down through time. "At times disturbing and tragically violent, always insightful, poignant and uncompromising, Griswold's riveting narrative is filled with complex men and women bursting with life. Fast-paced and powerful, Ghosts is an original ride told by a masterful writer." --Duff Brenna, author of The Law of Falling Bodies "With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified intonations of our young nation's sweat and tears evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair." -- Bob Shacochis A Democracy of Ghosts has been selected as the winner of the Delta Award from Friends of Morris Library (University of Southern Illinois - Carbondale) in recognition of an individual or organization that has written/ published about southern Illinois with distinction. John Griswold joins such luminaries as John Gardner, Paul Simon and Robert Coover as winners of this award. “A brilliant and lyrical historical novel, Democracy of Ghosts conjures the affairs behind one of the most violent labor disputes in American history—the brutal killing of 21 scabs and coal miners at a strip mine in southern Illinois in 1921. In some ways a horrifying cautionary tale for today’s mining conflicts in the coalfields. Democracy of Ghosts explores the entangled love affairs between couples caught up in the great coal mining strike that ultimately shattered a region, and turned one of the most radical communities into a social pariah. Griswold’s narrative is riveting. This original novel deserves as large an audience as possible—pass the word.” --Jeff Biggs, The Huffington Post (11/29/09) ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Griswold lives with his wife and sons in Urbana, Illinois, where he teaches at the Univesity of Illinois. HIs writing has appeared in Ninth Letter, Brevity and Natural Bridge, which nominated him for the Pushcart Prize, and in the anthhologies The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3 (W.W. Norton) and Mountain Man Dance Moves (McSweeny's Books). His single-story chapbook, The Stork, is available from Featherproof Books. He's currently at work on a nonfiction book about Herrin, Illinois, which will be published in 2010 by The History Press. John has also written extensively under the pen name Oronte Churm. As Churm, he is a contributing writer for Inside Higher Ed and as a columnist for McSweeney's. Read more at: www.JohnGriswold.net Interview with NPR affiliate ForeWord Magazine author interview Interview with The Southern Illinoisan Interview with John Griswold at Practising Writing MARCH 2009 "Where the Yellow Brick Road" from GIVING IT AWAY was selected as a finalist for Western Writers of America 2010 Spur Award for Western poem category. GIVING IT AWAY, poems by David Memmott ISBN: 978-1-877655-62-3, LCN: 2008943602 first trade paperback, 6 X 9, 176 pages, $14/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover art: David Memmott Inside art: David Memmott Author photo: Sue Hoyt Cover design: Kristin Summers, www.redbatdesign.com "Rich in personae--Dreamer, Warrior, Traveler, Gardener, Lover, Son, Witness, Poet--David Memmott's Giving It Away is mature, sophisticated, visionary work. These diverse poems range far and near, inside and out of time and place. They intimately explore what we all want to know: How does the dream of life shape our every waking moment? What happens in a day under these wheeling infinite stars? Are harmony and wisdom possible? Readers everywhere may savor the fruits of Memmott's amazing range of replies and his passionate quest for the universal round--our common dance." --George Venn, author of Marking the Magic Circle and West of Paradise "David Memmott's sense of place extends from his piece of ground in northeastern Oregon to the space-time continuum of the universe itself. By turns prophetic, polemical, sensual, and humorous, these poems speak in stalwart witness to the outer and inner landscapes that he calls home." --John Daniel, author of The Far Corner "Giving It Away is infused with the generous and expansive spirit its title evokes. The center of the book is a powerful narrative poem, 'Where the Yellow Brick Road Turns West.' From that center he unfolds the harsh but saving rituals of survival in the rual west: paying homage to his mother who escaped an abusive husband and took him to a new life, celebrating stacked firewood and the song of wintering over birds, responding to the works of other writers, confronting a 'flatline stretch of lonesome highway,' and suffering the bite of winter which nevertheless brings with it 'snow slumping away/under the steady Chinook of our most welcome touch...' A fine and fresh contribution to the literature of the northwest." --Barbara Drake, author of Bees in Wet Weather and Writing Poetry "David Memmott's fifth book of poetry is an engaging celebration of life in Eastern Oregon--and the many strong poems resonate with a lyric vitality." --Peter Sears, author of The Brink Memmott's author site on www.redroom.com Read Memmott's long poem, "Where the Yellow Brick Road Turns West," published as an e-chapbook on Poets and Writers/Web del Sol, edited by Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy Read Memmott's long poem, "Disciples of Paradox," a tribute to Stephen W. Hawking, in Strange Horizons archive. Nominated for a 2009 Rhysling Award in the long poem category. ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Memmott’s work has appeared in mainstream as well as genre magazines and anthologies. HIs previous books of poetry include House on Fire, a limited edition of 100 copies published by Jazz Police Books; The Larger Earth: Descending Notes of a Grounded Astronaut, published by Permeable Press; Within the Walls of Jericho, 26 Books; and Watermarked, published by Traprock Books. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies including Deer Drink the Moon: Poems of Oregon, Salt: An Anthology of Oregon Coastal Poetry, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, NebulaAwards 27, Alchemy of Stars: An Anthology of Rhysling Award Winners, High Desert Journal, Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, Strange Horizons, The Jefferson Monthly. He co-edited, Angel Body and Other Magic for the Soul, with Chris Reed of BBR Publications, selected as a finalist for the British Fantasy Award for best antholgy of 2003. He is also the author of a story collection, Shadow Baones, and a postcyberpunk novel, Primetime, which Paul DiFillipo, in his review for Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, called "philosophic sf at its best." DECEMBER 2008 WINNER OF 2009 WILLA AWARD IN POETRY FINALIST FOR ERIC HOFFER AWARD BETWEEN DESERT SEASONS, poems by Ellen Waterston ISBN: 978-1-877655-60-9 , LCN: 2008934447 first trade paperback, 6 X 9, 106 pages, $14/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover art: Ingrid Lustig Author photo: Carol Sternkopf Cover design: Kristin Summers, redbat design "The music of Ellen Waterston's language in Between Desert Seasons is touching and vibrant, fiery raw and refined, reined in and set free. The endings of so many of these poems are startling and perfect, compelling re-readings just to experience again the turn of logic and imagination that created them. I'm grateful for the open voice of this book that has allowed me to enter places, meet people, and experience ebvents I might otherwise have missed." --Pattiann Rogers, author of Wayfare "The poems in this collection search for a way beyond loneliness of self first by naming that loneliness and then by threading connections to the multi-layered world beyond the self...In Between Desert Seasons Waterston has found a way to "plant words strong enough" to do the work of describing what it means to be human." --Wendy Mnookin, author of The Moon Makes Its Own Plea "The men and women in these poems travel diverse landscapes from Oregon to Baja in search of love, solace, and the meaning of a touch. Ellen Waterston creates vivid, singular moments that shine beyond the words on the page." --Kent Nelson, author of The Touching That Lasts "The truth is: Ellen Waterston's poems arrive. They situate themselves naturally, to proceed in compelling, telling ways. Each poem leaves something behind." -- Lawson Fusao Inada, Oregon Poet Laureate and author of Legends from Camp "Ellen Waterston's new poems come from years of living in a desert of high revelation...[Her] poems create an oasis for all of us--a clear, remote, and vital spring, a woman's life beyond any macho western settler's museum or mirage." --George Venn, General Editor of the Oregon Literature Series and author of West of Paradise ABOUT THE AUTHOR As a New Englander who married and moved to the ranching West, Waterston grounds her writing in both of those cultural and geographic landscapes. Her award-winning essays, short stories and poems have been widely published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her memoir, Then There Was No Mountain, Rowman and Littlefield publisher, was selected by the Oregonian as one of the top ten books in 2003, and nationally was a Foreword and WILLA finalist earning her an appearance on Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer. Her collection of poetry, I Am Madagascar, was awarded the WILLA Prize in Poetry in 2005. She is the winner of the 2007 Obsidian Prize in Poetry, the 2008 Oregon Quarterly Essay Award and the author of two childrfen's books, Barney's Joy and Tea at Miss Jean's, Roberts Rinehart publisher. Waterston is the recipient of numerous writing residency followships and honors, including the 2005 Fishtrap Writer-In-Residence, a 2003 Special Literary Fellowship for Women Writers given by Oregon's Literary Arts, and a 2007 honorary PhD in Humane Letters from Oregon State University/Cascade Campus for her work as an author and in support of the literary arts. She is the founder of the Writing Ranch www.writingranch.com , which supports writers through seminars and retreats, and is director of The Nature of Words www.thenatureofwords.org, an annual literary event held in Bend, Oregon the first weekend of November. Where the Crooked River Rises, a collection of personal and nature essays on the High Desert is slatedfor publication in 2009. She is working on a novel. Waterston received her Bachelor's degree from Harvard University and Master's degree from the University of Madagascar. OCTOBER 2008 FINALIST FOR 2009 WASHINGTON STATE BOOK AWARD IN FICTION WHITE JADE & OTHER STORIES, seven short stories and a novella by Alex Kuo ISBN: 978-1-877655-61-6, LCN: 2008928198 first trade paperback, 6 X 9, 186 pgs., $13.95/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover design: Kristin Summers, redbat design Author photo: Zoe Filipkowska "Alex Kuo's writing refuses to be pinned down, traveling from playful wit and searing sarcasm in eastern Oregon, to sorrowful tragedy in Shanghai. While the stories are dizzyingly smart and mischievous, the novella illuminates the depth of Kuo's talent for humanizing historical circumstances with fiercely vivid characters. 'White Jade' deconstructs and re-imagines the purpose and power of the literary autobiography." -- Aimee Phan, author of We Should Never Meet "I first fell in love with American literature through the poems and stories of Alex Kuo. This gorgeous and intelligent book confirms that love. I'll be reading Alex until the end of days." -- Sherman Alexie, author of Flight and Indian Killer “For Kuo… language is always political. As an Asian-American writer, Kuo has spent a career writing and living in China and the American West. The tension in his fiction is the anger, humor, irony and confusion you feel when you come from two worlds, neither of which really accepts you…and Kuo tells it with the steady gaze of a poet and with great empathy.” – Richard Wallace for The Seattle Times "Writer Alex Kuo challenges the perimeters of Asian American identity in his collection of short stories, 'White Jade and Other Stories.' In this latest publication, Kuo’s characters offer a fresh perspective on the aftermath of transplanting one’s ancestral roots, from a recent Washington State University (WSU) graduate, ill-proficient in wielding chopsticks and unable to speak any Chinese dialect, to a promising student from 1920s Shanghai who flees to California amidst political unrest in her homeland. Given the wide divergence of each character’s historical and cultural reference points, the common thread of their Chinese heritage provides a focal theme, albeit with unexpected variations." Nancy Young Kwon, International Examiner Volume 35, No. 22 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alex Kuo has been an administrator and a teacher of writing, literature, ethnic and cultural studies at several American universities. He has also taught writing, translation and American literature in Chinese universities. He has three National Endowment for the Arts awards, and grants from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the United Nations, Artist Trust, and the Idaho, Pennsylvania and Washington state arts organizations. He has been awarded a Senior Fulbright, a Lingnan, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency. He has also held the positions of Writer-in-Residence for Mercy Corps and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Knox College. In 2008 he was invited to be the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Shanghai's Fudan University. More than three hundred-and-fifty poems , short stories, photographs and essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers. HIs most recent books are This Fierce Geography (poems/1999), Lipstick and Other Stories (2001) which received the 2002 American Book Award, and The Panda Diaries (novel/2006). www.alexkuo.org AUGUST 2008 2009 GOLD MEDAL WINNER OF IPPY AWARD FOR HISTORICAL FICTION HONORABLE MENTION FOR ERIC HOFFER AWARD IN GENERAL FICTION FINALIST FOR FOREWORD MAGAZINE'S BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD IN FICTION SMALL PRESS REVIEW PICK, Sept./Oct. 2008 KATHERINE'S WISH, a literary historical novel based on the lives of Katherine Mansfield, Ida Constance Baker, and John Middlebury Murry by Linda Lappin ISBN: 978-1-877655-58-6, LCN: 2008925492 First trade paperback, 6 X 9, 228 pgs., $15/3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover photo by Linda Lappin Cover design by Kristin Summers, redbat design " Lappin has built on textual evidence from journals, letters, and diary entries in order to adhere to “an overall sense of truth” which she renders as her own mosaic. Her writing style, with its rhythm, flow, and sensual detail, richly evokes the significant social scene of a vanished era. " Joyce J. Townsend, Rain Taxi "It's not an easy or siimple thing to write fiction which that keeps faith with the life it is based on, so the reader will say 'There is nothing here that falsifies', as well as 'This has the imaginative flair of story telling, the freedom of its form.' Linda Lappin has immersed herself in Mansfield's life, and emerged from it with a story to to narrate on her own terms, a fiction charged with the enthusiasm of a good researcher, and carried through with a novelist's verve." --Vince O'Sullivan, co-editor of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield “Lappin weaves a tale that is triumphant, genuine and tender in its unfolding. With vivid details and imagery born of careful research, she brings Mansfield to life, her voice so clear and authentic we are convinced that she is more than Lappin's character. She is Mansfield: sexually reckless, socially excitable, temperamentally damaged, spiteful and cruel, appealing and vulnerable. She is Mansfield—a tragic and unconventional heroine.” -- R.A. Rycraft, Perigee: Publication for the Arts, Issue 23, January – April, 2009 "A dramatic retelling of a story about an artist oppressed by the odds, [Katherine's Wish] gives narrative to the chaotic last years of [Katherine Mansfield's] life. Lappin draws from letters and other historical documents to bring the last years of Mansfield's life into bring, making Katherine's Wish an intriguing and highly recommended piece of writing." --The Midwest Book Review "Katherine's Wish is a beautifully observed novel [that] reveals a core truth: that Mansfield's was not so much a creative life cut short as one that flourished so long against all odds." -- Alexandra Johnson, author of The Hidden Writer "Katherine's Wish, fifteen years in the making, is a dazzling bit of fictional sorcery, conjuring to life the bright and talented swirl of modern society in the 1920s... This novel is a must read, whether you have historical interests per se or only enjoy a story so compelling and moving that there's no putting it down. I certainly couldn't!" -- David Lynn, Editor, the Kenyon Review "The author of two critically successful historical novels, Prisoner of Palmary and The Etruscan, Linda Lappin turns her gifted hand to fictional biography in Katherine's Wish... Like the 'new biography' of Lytton Strachery and analogous fiction by Virginia Wolff, Lappin's fictional life of Mansfield recreates the ineffable, 'rainbow-like' essence of a human being from the inside perspective of three people: Mansfield herself, her traveling friend Ida Baker, and [her husband, John Middleton] Murry." -- Wayne K. Chapman, Editor, The South Caroline Review LINDA LAPPIN READING FROM KATHERINE'S WISH (MP3s): Track 1 Bandol Track 2 Hampstead Track 3 Hampstead: In the Writer's Studio Track 4 A Public of Two in Hampstead Track 5 Paris ABOUT THE AUTHOR Linda Lappin is the author of The Etruscan (Wynkin de Worde, Galway, 2004) hailed by critics as a new classic in American writing about Italy . Semi-Finalist for the 2000 Three Oaks First Novel Prize awarded by Story-Line Press, in Oregon, The Etruscan was selected as a Book of the Week by Book View Ireland and praised by the Literary Review as "compelling, haunting, intriguing," and by Prairie Schooner as "gorgeously detailed, wickedly fun." She is also the author of Prisoner of Palmary, an experimental historical novel set in 18th century Italy, short-listed for the Mid-List First Novel Award in 1999. Her essays, poetry, reviews and fiction have appeared in a wide avriety of US publications, from the Kenyon Review to the Kansas City Star. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The last chapter of Katherine's Wish was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer short fiction award in 2007 and was published in Best New Writing 2007. She teaches Creative Writing for the U.S.A.C. Study Abroad program in Viterbo. She also directs the Writing Center of Centro Pokkoli www.pokkoli.org Her forthcoming books include Signatures in Stone, a mystery novel set in Bomarzo, Italy, and Spirits of Place, a creative writing textbook. Linda Lappin's websites are www.lindalappin.net and www.theetruscan.com JULY 2008 2009 FINALIST FOR OREGON BOOK AWARD IN FICTION (KEN KESEY AWARD) 2009 NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARD GOLD MEDALIST FOR SHORT STORY - FICTION, AND FINALIST IN SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY LISTED AS ONE OF THE TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR IN SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY BY BOOKLIST. CRAZY LOVE, stories by Leslie What ISBN: 978-1-877655-59-3, LCN: 2008921844 First trade paperback, 5.5 X 8.5, 200 pgs. $13.95, $3.50 s/h, US ONLY Cover art: "Wallpaper," Jessica Plattner Cover design: Kristin Summers, redbat design "'Queen of Gonzo' What (Olympic Games) drags love out of its gooey, schmaltzy rut and takes it for a joyride in this exuberant collection of 17 stories... No matter how brief or long, no matter how bizarre, each tales in this collection grabs readers and demands they rethink how they see all the myriad forms of love." -- Publishers Weekly Starred Review "An ace at the new weirdness defined by the anthology, Feeling Very Strange (2006), What uses it to be creepy, polemical, and funny, all at once or in various blendings. These 17 stories progress from grim to laugh-out-loud ludicrous without ever derogating their common subject, love, though they do depict it as fairly insane." --The Booklist Starred Review (July 2008) "Leslie What's wild and risk-taking fantasy tales have been largely overlooked, but her latest short story collection offers a great opportunity for wideer attention. 'Babies' is a blistering allegory of motherhood that fuses together bug exterminators, marital problems and obsessive solicitude in 13 pitch-perfect pages. The story's heroine carries the 'extra weight' and protective quality of human pregnancy, while mothering cockroaches that 'always came to her side whenver the bugman sprayed the landlord's kitchen.' 'Paper Mates' is a clever story in which paperwork quite literally reproduces like rabbits. What's stories, like Ray Bradbury's and Richard Matheson's, rely on high concepts to carry the narratives forward, but her prose works best when it is concise. Nearly every tale offers an unexpected surprise, but never feels too gimmicky. This is a universe in which one should never underestimate a woman in a ratty gorilla suit, even if her ability to 'speak' with gorillas may very well be her only means of communication." -- Edward Champion, Washington Post Book World (October 12 - 18, 2008) "This quirky short story collection has been almost completely overlooked by readers who look at the fantasy genre with the same frightened isolationism readily observed in George W. Bush’s move to a neighborhood terrified of non-Caucasian residents. That’s a great shame, because there are invaluable lessons here on how to take a wild idea and make it concise and enthralling. The collection contains unsettling allegories and gleefully imaginative premises. There isn’t a single story in here that doesn’t take some kind of narrative gamble. And while the dice-rolling doesn’t always pay off, it certainly remains hot in your hands." --TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2008, written by Edward Champion, Washington Post reviewer, from his blog, Reluctant Habits, http://www.edrants.com:80/top-ten-books-of-2008/ "What demonstrates a gift for delving into heart-wrenching matters with a lightness of touch...Pain, joy, self-deception, guilt: these are the places 'crazy love' takes us. What know them well." --L. Timmel Duchamp, American Book Review/Line on Line "Ironic and uncompromising, Leslie What's collection is also unfailingly humorous and boldly creative, frequently outlandishly so. What has written an enlightening examination of the most crazy-making endeavor in which our species obsessively engages. It drives us crazy-Crazy Love." --R.A. Rycraft, Pif Magazine "If unbearable guilt makes you wish to suffer vicariously, and professionally, for others; if you suddenly find yourself the father of thousands and thousands of children; if your ambition is to occupy the Chair of Hermit Studies at the University of Oregon, or to be a ghost in a hot-air balloon, or if you have considered wearing a gorilla mask while having an abortion -- Crazy Love is your operating manual. These seventeen achingly funny and hilariously sad stories will give you invaluable advice on how to love, how to be crazy, how to be human." -- Ursula Le Guin, author of Lavinia and The Left Hand of Darkness "Crazy Love is crazy good! Leslie What's brain is evidently crowded with strangeness, awfulness, wonderfulness, wildness, madness of all kinds...and love. Lots of love. How lucky we are that her imagination runs deep, runs true, runs onto the page in crazily beautiful stories -- and lucky, so very lucky, to be holding those stories right now in our hands." -- Molly Gloss, author of Dazzle of Day and The Hearts of Horses "Count on Leslie What to give you something you never counted on. Original, delightful, and always, always surprising." -- Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club and Wit's End ABOUT THE AUTHOR Leslie What (Glasser) is a Nebula Award-winning writer and the author of a novel, Olympic Games, and a short story collection, The Sweet and Sour Tongue. She has worked as a charge nurse in a nursing home, in an unlocked psychiatric facility, as a manager for a low-income meal site, and as a maskmaker and artist. She currently teaches in The Writers' Program at UCLA Extension. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies and journals, including Parabola, Asimov's, The MacGuffin, Realms of Fantasy, The Clackamas Review, SciFiction and Midstream. Called "The Queen of Gonzo" by Gardner Dozois, her work has been translated into German, Italian, French, Japanese, Russian, Greek and Klingon. LINK TO LESLIE WHAT'S WEBSITE MARCH 2008 SMALL PRESS REVIEW Poetry Pick SPILLING THE MOON, poems by Matt Schumacher ISBN: 978-1-877655-57-9, LCN: 2008920991 First trade paperback, 6 X 9, 102 pages, $12, plus $3.50 s/h US ONLY Cover art: "The Red Chair," Jessica Plattner Cover design: Kristin Summers, redbat design "Matt Schumacher's poetry challenges the reader to imagine a rich, dreamy world where the improbable is never impossible, and the impossible is brought to life by the author, a puppet master with convincing zeal for all that is alien about being human." -- Micah Zevin, www.newpages.com "These poems are travelers abolishing distances at every turn. The journey from mirage to mountaintop, from haunting to home-place, and from crime to new creation—all suddenly effortless now thanks to the gracious turns of SPILLING THE MOON." --Donald Revell, author of A Thief of Strings "Where language is audacious as a pterodactyl-esque wingspan and tight as the rhyme between astronaut and not, in Matthew Schumacher’s new book SPILLING THE MOON, Selene is an originating source: 'I ’m meeting with the moon all afternoon' Schumacher writes in 'Lunar Ghazal.' Schumacher’s poems are big-hearted, humane, filled with mad - mad love for this life and an abundance of wit. Meditations on symbolist portraits by Arnold Böcklin along with carnivalesque dances on the moon, rain, an aluminum fishing boat, an abandoned lighthouse on Lake Huron, all claim our attention and warrant revisitings. In SPILLING THE MOON for every blast beyond gravity’s architectonics there’s a counter-balancing measure, and '[we] . . . fall like rain gently back into our footsteps.'” --Robert Grunst, author of The Smallest Bird in North America "The imagination’s redemptive powers cartwheel and cavort in Matt Schumacher’s SPILLING THE MOON, a phantasmagoria of breathtaking verbal ingenuity, the non-stop astonishments heeding Keats’s advice to Shelley that every rift of the subject be loaded with ore. These poems render the daily extraordinary and the impossible vividly plausible, their multifarious speakers boasting audaciously tender braggadocio. Matt Schumacher’s poems, big-hearted and heartbreaking, amaze and delight." -- Aaron Anstett, author of Each Place the Body's SAMPLE 1: "A Brief Correspondence Between Halloween and the Aurora Borealis" (PDF) SAMPLE 2: "The Cruelty of Foosball" (PDF) SAMPLE 3: "In High Speed Pursuit of Romance"(PDF) ABOUT THE AUTHOR Matt Schumacher possesses hard-earned degrees in poetry and poetics from the University of Maine and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and have won a Willamette Writers Kay Snow Award and a Hayna Award. They’ve also been anthologized by Manic D Press and performed live by a punk rock band named the Iowa Beef Experience. Schumacher has taught writing, literature, and humanities at a cornucopia of collegiate institutions and correctional facilities in California, Iowa, Illinois, Maine, and Washington. He currently teaches at Eastern Oregon University. SELF INTERVIEW: MARCH 2008 (PDF) NOVEMBER 2007 OUT OF PRINT SOON ENOUGH, poems by Donald Wolff ISBN: 978-1-877655-56-2, 1-877655-56-2 LCN: 2007939345 First trade paperback, 6 X 8.25, 88 pages, $12 Cover art: "Journey," by Terry Gloeckler Cover design: Kristin Summers, redbat design Limited edition of 500 copies "Donald Wolff's Soon Enough is a book haunted by danger, affliction, imminent disasters, and his poems are talismans against this ferocious onslaught. With these poems, Wolff stares down catastrophe and peril, and celebrates the sheer wonder of our survival-- the glory of our sad, fragile, beautiful lives." —Gary Young, No Other Life "Soon Enough's landscape is western, cut through by canyons and rivers, populated by bear, even the bison. Reality arises from the details of a life fully lived there: fatherhood, work, memory and hope. The best poems in this collection are the darkest, the squirrel in the belly of a coyote, a man in the grip of his life." —Dorianne Laux, Facts About The Moon "Soon Enough is a remarkable book of poetry if only for its range, the control of many contemporary modes--prose poems, short lyric poems, long line ekphrastic poems, multi-sectioned symphonic poems--each one with authority and a mastery of craft. And throughout, there is a sure, accessible, and memorable voice. This is a book of grit and gravity, of grace pushing for all it can against mortality. Wolff risks a great deal personally and intellectually, and cuts down to the bone, to the essential meaning." --Christopher Buckley, ...and the Sea, Sleepwalk Sample 1: "Ars Vita" Sample 2: "Soon Enough" Sample 3: "Guilietta dogli spiriti" ABOUT THE AUTHOR Donald Wolff lives and works in La Grande, Oregon. At Eastern Oregon University, he teaches courses in creative writing and applied linquistics, co-directs the Oregon Writing Project, and currently serves as Chair of the Division of Arts and Letters. He was born and raised in California, which informs many of his poems about the past, while life with his family in La Grande has so far guided many of his poems about the present. In May 2004, he was a resident writer at Fishtrap. His chapbook, Some Days, was printed in 2004 by Brandenburg Press. SEPTEMBER 2007 SMALL PRESS REVIEW Poetry Pick OUT OF PRINT PAPER BIRD, poems by Pamela Steele, ISBN: 978-1-877655-54-8, 1-877655-54-6 LCN: 2007931228 First trade paperback, 6 X 8.25, 76 pages, $12 Cover photo: SManohar, courtesy bigstockphoto.com Cover design: redbat design Limited edition of 500 Small Press Review "Pick" for Jan. - Feb., 2008, Vol. 40, Nos. 1 - 2, Issues 420 - 421. “Steele transforms the ordinary--cupping moments like the source of light in the palms of her hands. Here, she says, see beyond our time here. Paper Bird is a luminous collection of poems. Honest and spare, wistful and haunting.” —Debra Magpie Earling, Perma Red “Steele’s poems are honest and visceral. They get under the skin and instruct us on how to squeeze our eyes tight and still see real beauty in the world. An important collection of love letters to everything that bleeds.” —Frank X Walker, Black Box and Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York “Pamela Steele’s poems are compassionate and descriptive, steeped with a quiet wisdom, opening doors to the profound insights and sensualities of the ordinary. Her poems are both lyrical and narrative, with an intelligent, introspective voice. They are infused with a seductive music, and with duende.” —Michael Spring, blue crow and Mudsong “The heart of Pam Steele’s poems beats for all of us.” —Peter Sears, The Brink ABOUT THE AUTHOR Paper Bird is Pamela Steele’s first full-length book of poetry, though she previously published a chapbook of poems (Other Rivers, Distant Song, Spring Tree Press, 1997). Pamela is a Fishtrap Fellow who recently completed her MFA from Spalding University of Louisville, Kentucky. While in the writing program there, she was honored with the Jim Wayne Miller Poetry Prize from the Kentucky Writers Coalition. A turning point in her career came halfway through the MFA Program when two mentors, separately on the same day, told her it was time she got honest and stopped writing around what she wanted to say. “Up to that point, I’d been using imagery to flirt with ideas, but I’d never written about the difficult topics I’ve since addressed.” Pamela was recently awarded an artist’s fellowship from Jentel Foundation and spent a month living and writing on a working cattle ranch in Wyoming. “That lifestyle attracts me,” she says, “especially the landscape of the West, so I started a chapbook of poems about my experiences on my partner's small horse outfit on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. My father was a West Virginia boy who came out to Oregon to be a horseman, so that's a thread of my life that I want to keep.” Pamela teaches at Hermiston High School and hopes to teach at the college/university level. Sample 1: "Above Us Only Sky" Sample 2: "Tom Buzzard's Widow" Sample 3: "The Disappeared" September 2007 PRIMETIME, Book One of Dreamers' Round a postcyberpunk novel by David Memmott ISBN: 978-1-877655-53-1, 1-877655-53-8 LCN: 2007930089 First trade paperback, 272 pages $15, plus $3.50 sh (US ONLY) Cover art collage: Kristin Johnson & David Memmott Images for collage: www.bigstockphoto.com Cover design: redbat design If you think the world is crazy now, just wait. Worldbenders are trained to re-invent the past. Benito Cortezar creates a perfect past only to find it haunted by forces he cannot control. A shadow at the core of Primetime threatens our very humanity. So many depend on Benito, even the dead. At the watershed of human and posthuman, in the clash between Dreamtime and Primetime, a gaggle of fractured heroes are caught up in a struggle between those yet to come and those waiting to come back. “Primetime gives us a future where the sun shines while mythologies and realities of the past and future collide thanks to the emerging technology. It’s a pleasure to read...Come to think of it, it also comes close to my fantasy of science fction that makes you want to get up and dance...” — Ernest Hogan, High Aztech, Cortez on Mars, Smoking Mirror Blues "This novel explores the battle between two notions of virtual reality, one meant to allow people to experience the “real”, the other opening directly onto the id and an individual’s darkest fantasies. Add in the complications of an alien presence, virtual joyriders, and different strata (and substrata) of the real (and the unreal), and you’ve got a sf novel that doubles as a philosophical meditation on the nature of human reality. Move over, Second Life: Primetime is here.” --Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain, finalist for 2006 International Horror Guild Award "Memmott is intent on examining deep epistemological and ontological issues concerning the way humanity fashions its own reality, but he embeds his questions in a captivating thriller...This is philosophic SF at its best." -- Paul Di Filippo, "On Books" Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, July 2008 "A dizzying debut novel explores an extreme near-future that explodes into a post-cyberpunk extravaganza... Primetime is, inarguably and admirably, ambitious...and it will be interesting to see where the author goes from here. " F. Brett Cox, scifi.com “Memmott puts the stimulus of [Philip K.] Dick and [William] Gibson to good use, creating a story that takes the best of both and adds his own vision of the future to them, giving us characters that are original and engrossing, characters that we care about. This ability isn't common in science fiction…The point is: it's not easy to lift sci-fi to the level of literature, but Memmott has done it in brilliant fashion in Prime Time.” -- Duff Brenna, Perigee: A Publication for the Arts, Issue #20, April-May, 2008 "In Primetime, David Memmott...gives us a post-cyberpunk novel that's both entertaining and thought-provoking. A world of virtual reality that is futuristic and complex [is] brought to life by dazzling description...Overall, it's heady stuff in more ways than one." -- Bobbi Sinha-Morey, The Specusphere www.specusphere.com "OILING THE TINMAN'S JAWS: An Interview with David Memmott," by Greg Johnson, edited by Duff Brenna, for Perigee: A Publication for the Arts, Issue #20, April-May 2008 SAMPLE 1: Chapter 3 -- Papa Art SAMPLE 2: Chapter 7 -- House of Revelations SAMPLE 3: Chapter 12 -- Random Acts SAMPLE 4: Chapter 13 -- Piano Man ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Memmott’s work has appeared in mainstream as well as genre magazines and anthologies. His genre credits include stories and poetry in Interzone, Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Nebula Awards 27, Airfish, Alchemy of Stars: An Anthology of Rhysling Award Winners, L’Uomo Duplicato, (an Italian science fiction anthology), Back Brain Recluse (England), 2001: An Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, StarLine, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, New Realities, Works* (England), Ball Magazine, and New Pathways into Science Fiction and Fantasy. He co-edited, Angel Body and Other Magic for the Soul, with Chris Reed of BBR Publications, selected as a finalist for the British Fantasy Award for best antholgy of 2003. He has published four books of poetry including The Larger Earth: Descending Notes of a Grounded Astronaut, and a story collection, Shadow Bones. His most recent book of poetry, Watermarked, published by Traprock Books (Eugene, OR, 2004), received four Pushcart Prize nominations. A short story received a Worldwide Writers, Inc., fiction award and essays have been posted on-line including an essay for Writers on the Job at Web del Sol which will be included in an anthology of the same name to be published by Hopewell Publications. An interview and novel excerpt will appear in Perigee, an online literary magazine. Memmott received a Fishtrap Fellowship for his poetry and three Oregon Literary Fellowships for excellence in publishing from Literary Arts, Inc., of Portland, Oregon, most recently in 2006. He is a member of the Writers Guild of Eastern Oregon and serves on the board of RondeHouse Media Arts Konsortium. He lives with his wife, Susan, in La Grande, Oregon. Primetime is his first novel and Book One of the trilogy, DREAMERS' ROUND. July 2007 OUT OF PRINT MAGPIES & TIGERS, Misha Nogha, Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC: Original trade paperback, $10, black ink/colored coverstock, perfectbound, 5.5 X 8.5, 84 pgs. ISBN: 978-1-877655-49-4, 1-877655-49-X, LCN: 2007930088 Limited edition of 250 copies Cover art by Jessica Soo Hyun Ni, Cover design by Katherine James, Inside digital art by Michael Chocholak “My fictions are tour guides to the multiverse; a stone is not merely a rock, but a small living mountain, a horse is karmic psychic energy, a cat is the Great Mystery, and the seidr-working shamaness is the one person who connects you with your own fate, that special place in the wheel of time which is uniquely yours. The meditative mythologies of Magpies and Tigers are meant to unleash us from the tethers of the mundane.” “Misha Nogha’s poetry is like the good parts of life—and the good parts of life are often the most dangerous parts, if you’re paying attention. Most people are uneasily aware they’re gradually losing touch with something vital—Misha’s poetry will put you back in touch with that vitality.” — John Shirley, The Other End and Living Shadows “Misha Nogha knows not only the animal without but the animal within, and her words sing with this mystery.” — Annette Curtis Klaus, Blood and Chocolate and The Silver Kiss “Misha Nogha’s writings are a kaleidoscope of haunting images. As one poem says, “all realities are spoken here.” Small flashes of color reveal the wild immanence of nature; the image of a trotting wind-horse calls up the wideness of the world. Traveling territories seen and unseen, this poetry by a postmodern metaphysician speaks to readers in discordia concours of spectacular wordplay.” — Carol McGuirk, Florida Atlantic University, Co-Editor of Science Fiction Studies “A true shaman of the written word, Misha Nogha reminds us of our true human creature selves and our natural heritage through vibrant language, signaling a hyper-reality woven from dreamstates, mythical places, and animal avatars.” — Richard Truhlar, The Hollow and Parisian Novels ABOUT THE AUTHOR Misha Nogha is the award winning author of prose and poetry volumes, Prayers of Steel and KeQuaHawkas, and the novel, Red Spider White Web, winner of the 1990 Readercon Award, also a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke award. Misha won the 1989 Prix D’Italia with her piece, “Tsuki Mangetsu,” performed by two Australian artists. In addition to writing prose and poetry Misha is an accomplished musician and has collaborated with several composers on librettos. The first of these was written in conjunction with composer and cellist Jonathan Golove. Its World Premiere was performed by Mr. Golove and Misha at the Festival of 500 years of Western Music in Buffalo New York in the winter of 2000. Misha is currently writing another set of librettos with composer Arie Van Schuterhoeff of Amsterdam. Misha is of mixed blood Metis, and Norse ancestry. The Reverend Nogha is an ordained minister and her spiritual practices reflect both heritages. She lives a full life as author, musician and farmer. She is also a Skywarn Severe Storm Spotter for NOAA and an official National Weather Service Co-op Observer. Misha recently finished her novel Yellowjacket, a humorous and bittersweet literary western, and working on her third and fourth novels, Jack Jinx and Alruna. True denizens of a modern horse culture, Misha and her husband composer Michael Chocholak, own and operate a small farm in Eastern Oregon where they raise beautiful Norwegian Fjord horses. Misha's website: mishanogha.com For other books by Misha published by Wordcraft of Oregon (Red Spider White Web and Prayers of Steel), see Speculative Writers Series July 2007 FINALIST FOR SAN DIEGO BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY OUT OF PRINT CAMERA OBSCURA, Harry Griswold, Wordcraft of Oregon, LLLC: Original trade First trade paperback, $12 perfectbound, 6 X 9, full-color cover, 80 pgs. ISBN: 978-1-877655-55-5, ISBN: 1-877655-55-4, LCN: 2007925640 Limited edition of 500 Cover art: Harry Griswold Cover design: Kristin Johnson, redbat design This book was published in part due to a 2006 Literary Fellowship for Publishers, Literary Arts, Inc, Portland, Oregon “Harry Griswold’s reality presses in from all sides. He speaks in a calm voice, quiet for the most part, but we sense the wildness just under the surface, pushing against the words.” — Joseph Millar, Fortune “Harry Griswold is the kind of poet you would like to sit down with. He’s weaving stories and he knows just how much to show, how much to tell. You won’t find a false step or easy theatrics. Camera Obscura is the work of an experienced, astute man, very worthwhile taking in. We need more wisdom in our poetry and Griswold delivers.” — Eloise Klein Healy, The Island Project: Poems for Sappho “Harry Griswold’s aptly-titled debut collection of poems, Camera Obscura, is filled with people—real and imagined—at times isolated in their grief and locked in silence. The poet gives voice to their yearnings, and solace in his plain-spoken words. This is a poetry deeply focused in its seeing, its way of knowing. From the seemingly mundane to the near extraordinary, these poems look at the dailiness of our lives, as in the camera’s darkened chamber, ‘right in the middle of things.’” — Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize ABOUT THE AUTHOR A graduate of the MFA Program at Pacific University, Harry Griswold teaches poetry writing in a private workshop at Solano Beach, CA, and lives in San Diego. He is originally from Rochester, NY, where he graduated from Monroe Community College and the University of Rochester. His training was in computer science and experimental psychology. Camera Obscura is Harry’s first book of poetry. More info on Harry Griswold at his website May 2007 IN AN ELEVATOR WITH BRIGITTE BARDOT AND OTHER APPRECIATIONS, Essays by Michael Lee, paperback, 232 pgs., 5.5" X 8.5"; ISBN: 978-1-877655-50-0; Full-color cover $15 plus $3.50 sh (US ONLY) Cover art: Suzie Hutchins Bardot caricature: Michael Taylor Cover design: Kristin Johnson, redbat design In An Elevator With Brigitte Bardot is an irresistible collection of personal essays in which Michael Lee's characteristic humor and compassionate insight revolves around the experience of daily life in Cape Cod. Framed by broad-interest essays that travel far afield and far abroad, the appropriate center of these appreciations is a seasonal round informed by place. But Lee's sense of place is not provincial. He always finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, the universal in the local, narrows down soas to expand and open. Lee's achievement here in the short essay form is as remarkable as his achievement in short fiction with his debut collection, Paradise Dance, published by Leapfrog Press (2002). Read them both and marvel. "Each essay is only a few pages long, yet each strikes the heart of its topic with a deft flick of the wrist. A teasury to savor a bit at a time, or all at once." -- Michael J. Carson, The Midwest Book Review "I see Michael Lee once a week for therapy. Believe me, I earn every dime." — Gordon Barney, MA, LMHC "MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience." — Norman Mailer "Michael Lee's In An Elevator With Brigitte Bardot is by turns melancholy and hilarious, sweet and bittersweet, a gift of hard-won wisdom and wry observation from a shrimp header, soundboard man, delivery driver, short-order cook, bricklayer, fisherman, soldier, back trap hauler and self-described dyslexic carpenter who is first and foremost a writer of enormous gifts. If there is such a thing as painful joy, Michael Lee is its voice." — Thomas H. Cook, Edgar Award winning author of Red Leaves, Peril, Into the Web, among others. "Gold, silver and bronze—Barry, Keillor, Lee—though not necessarily in that order. With In An Elevator With Brigitte Bardot, Mike Lee steps into the natioal circle of champs. He makes it look so easy—how the hell does he do it? He'll make you chortle and chuckle before surrendering the last of your cool in a boil of laughter all the while your mist-eyed heart sputters, He's right! He's got it! That just exactly it! More, Mr. Lee! More!" — Thomas E. Kennedy, The Literary Review "In swift language woven with sparkling metaphors, Lee's wry, sometimes zany observations dissect the human comedy in ways that are ironic but seldom bitter or satirical. Lee has a big heart, and he sees the good in almost everything; or if not the good, at least the humor. If there is one thing we need more of in this sadly fracturing world, it is laughter. Michael Lee's In An Elevator With Brigitte Bardot provides a whole lot of laughter and plenty of food for thought." — Duff Brenna, The Law of Falling Bodies, The Book of Mamie, among others ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Lee has held an array of jobs that now seem standard in a writer’s profile: construction worker, shrimp peeler, commercial diver, short order cook, drummer in a useless band, bartender, and cemetery lawn mower. He began his writing career at age 16 with short humor pieces for Skin Diver Magazine. While serving with the Marine Corps at Khe Sanh in Vietnam, Lee also wrote dispatches for Stars and Stripes and his hometown newspaper in Framingham, Massachusetts. He holds a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. Currently, Lee is the Literary Editor of The Cape Cod Voice and the director of the annual literary soiree, “New Works Weekend,” in Orleans, Massachusetts. Lee is a member of the Writer’s Guild and the National Book Critics Circle, and his collection of short stories, “Paradise Dance,” was published by Leapfrog Press in 2002. He lives on Cape Cod with his wife Julia and is currently working on a novel. Paradise Dance, short stories by Michael Lee, 216 pgs., 0-9679520-6-9, 6 X 9, $14.95/paperback original available from Leapfrog Press www.leapfrogpress.com April 2007 FINALIST FOR FOREWORD MAGAZINE'S BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD FOR LITERARY FICTION A PASSION IN THE DESERT, a novel by Thomas E. Kennedy, paperback, ISBN:1-877655-52-X/978-1-8877655-52-4, 192 pgs., 5 1/2 X 8 1/2, full-color cover, $15 plus $3.50 sh (US ONLY) Cover artwork by Andi Olsen Cover design by Kristin Johnson, redbat design It is no concidence that Thomas E. Kennedy's eighth novel, A Passion in the Desert, borrows its title from a Balzac story about mistrust and betrayal—for these are the themes at the heart of this unsettling story about a man stalked by guilt over a choice he made two decades before. Now small strange happenings begin to plague his days—somebody else's words in his journal, one too many flat tires, things out of place in his home, damning evidence in his laundry... Somebody, it seems, is after him, but who? A colleague? His own son? Or is it all just a reflection of the guilt, festering in his own heart? "Readers have been introduced to a very troubled mind which only exposes itself slowly as the book progresses." -- Rochelle Ratner for American Book Review, Line on Line, Volume 29, Number 3 "In A Passion in the Desert, Kennedy's exploration of the many modalities of love delivers us to the convergence of sex and death. I don't know of another fiction writer today whose craft is a match for his." — Robert Gover, author of One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding "Spellbinding, at times terrifying, with prose that is heartbreakingly beautiful. Kennedy has written a story of the aftermath of an unforgettable passion, the cost of letting go, and then letting go." — Duff Brenna, author of The Book of Mamie "By the time readers finish A Passion in the Desert, they will know its central character, Fred Twomey, more intimately than they know the people around them, quite possibly even themselves.That's one of the powers of great fiction, and Thomas E. Kennedy possesses a special ability to explore the landscape of a man's inner world, exposing emotions and secrets he can barely admit to himself. Although Twomey's life is unique, caught up in its own particular drama, he is clearly one of us, and in discovering him, we discover ourselves." — Walter Cummins, The Literary Review ABOUT THE AUTHOR Thomas E. Kennedy, a native of New York and American exjpatriate in Europe since the mid-1970s, is the author of eleven books of fiction, including two volumes in 2007--the novel, A Passion in the Desert, and story collection, Cast Upon the Day. Other recent novels are the four books of The Copenhagen Quartet (Kerrigen's Copenhagen, A Love Story, 2002; Bluett's Blue Hours, 2003; Greene's Summer, 2004; and Danish Fall, 2005). Kennedy's fiction has won numerous awards including the O. Henry, Pushcart, Gulf Coast, and European Prizes, the Charles Angoff Award, and the Frank Expatriate Writers Award. Other Wordcraft of Oregon titles by Thomas E. Kennedy Realism & Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction The Book of Angels, a novel Unreal City, stories For more information on the author, see: www.thomasekennedy.com or www.thecopenhagenquartet.com Three-minute video interview with Bloomsbury about In The Company of Angels November 2006 FINALIST FOR THE SPUR AWARD FOR POETRY FROM WESTERN WRITERS OF AMERICA LESSONS FOR CUSTER, Poems by Thomas Madden ISBN: 1-877655-47-3 Trade paperback, 64 pages, 6 " x 9 " $14 + $3.50 sh (US ONLY) This collection is centered around a group of poems which focus on the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. "Tom Madden's poems sing of life, of rich histories, and the sad and beautitful landscapes that make us mourn and rejoice. His voice is quiet but insistent. Here, he is saying, look closely, more closely at the soul of the American West and our place here. This is a profound and beautiful collection." — Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red "These small rooms into which Thomas Madden leads us, quietly, hand in hand, burst with treasure." —David Axelrod, winner of the 2004 Spokane Prize for Poetry October 2006 SECOND PRINTING SOLDIER TO ADVOCATE: C .E. S. WOOD'S 1877 LEGACY, George Venn ISBN: 1-877655-48-1 Trade paperback, 98 pages, 8.5" x 11". $20 plus $3.50 sh (US ONLY) SECOND PRINTING: Send check or postal money order for $20 + $3 S/H (media book) to: Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC, P.O. Box 3235, La Grande, OR 97850. (See ordering information for shipping costs.) Only 24 copies of First Edition, First Printing, signed by author, remain. Get yours now for $35 + S/H. "GEORGE VENN IS BREAKING NEW GROUND..." — Jeff Baker, Book Section, The Sunday Oregonian Dec. 10, 2006 "...this fascinating book [is] a must-read, must-have for students of Nez Perce tribal history...[Venn's teamwork with Wordcraft of Oregon] has produced an outstanding work that will be a treasure now and in the future...the unique kind of scholarship represented by Venn...artistically, seamlessly ties modern tribal history to that earlier troubled time." -- Steven R. Evans, Oregon HIstorical Quarterly for full review see History Cooperative on-line ONE AMERICAN SOLDIER, ONE NEZ PERCE CHIEF: ONE SPIRIT Soldier to Advocate tells the story of 2nd Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944) who wants to be a lover and a writer. Stationed in 1877 at Vancouver Barracks near Portland, General Howard grants Wood the privilege of exploring Alaska, then recalls him to fight in the tragic Nez Perce War. Part II features Wood's transcribed diary from this period, a text enriched by Wood's drawings leaked to the New York press—the only eye-witness images of the Nez Perce conflict. Part III traces Wood's lifetime of prose and poetry defending Chief Joseph and finally opposing General Howard. The book concludes by documenting three 1990's events in the Wood family's legacy of friendship and respect for the Nez Perces: a joint exhibition, the gift of a stallion, and a reconciliation ceremony. With nearly two hundred notes and forty additional 19th century images, Soldier to Advocate shows us that history is the nightmare from which we should all try to awake. "I highly recommend that any serious student of the Nez Perce Campaign read this excellent and rich piece of work. Mr. Venn's research in Soldier to Advocate will add that "missing piece" to some of the misunderstandings of the Nez Perce War." -- W. Otis Halfmoon (Nez Perce), former Idaho Unit Manager, Nez Perce National Historical Park, contributor to the Encyclopedia of North American Indians "George Venn's work is a superb contribution to our knowledge of the Nez Perce War, particularly as it respects judgments about Charles E.S. Wood as historian, participant, and literary influence." -- Jerome A.Greene, historian and author of Nez Perce Summer, 1977: The U.S. Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis "Thank you for that wonderful publication, Soldier to Advocate. It's rich, rich, rich, and I congratulate you." -- Alvin Josephy, historian and author of The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Pacific Northwest Also by George Venn West of Paradise, poems, finalist for Oregon Book Award George Venn's website: georgevenn.com March 2006 An American treasure back in print — in a new and revised edition. THE BOOK OF MAMIE, Duff Brenna ISBN: 978-1-877655-45-6, ISBN: 1-877655-45-7 Trade paperback, 392 pages. $18 plus $3.50 sh (US ONLY) The Book of Mamie is the story of one person's struggle to overcome the abuse and traumas of her childhood. It is the story of a wonderfully gifted young woman, a young woman of genius, uncanny wisdom and primitive strength, whose revelations unfold in the course of an odyssey across the heartland of America. Mamie's story is told by her companion, a 15-year-old farmboy who shares her adventures with a wild variety of characters and whose own story becomes a rite of passage as they try to stay one step ahead of the law and Mamie's sinister father. "Duff Brenna's The Book of Mamie reminds us why we read...This novel is unforgettable." --James Michael Slama, The Literary Review "...a risky, graceful book...told in language that is lean and unpretentious, a language forged out of the hard landscape of the rural Middle West." -- New York Times "Duff Brenna is an American treasure." -- The Bloomsbury Review "And Brenna writes consciously in the American tradition, invoking Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn in both the voice and the story...and [he] is in good company with the great literary voices to whom he pays homage." -- San Francisco Chronicle Duff Brenna's website: duffbrenna.com March 2006 They set out to find J.D. SALINGER JD: A MEMOIR OF A TIME AND A JOURNEY, Greg Herriges ISBN: 978-1-877655-46-3, ISBN: 1-877655-46-5 Trade paperback, 136 pages. $15/3.50 sh In the mid-1970s, hiding out for nearly a decade, J.D. Salinger had long been a literary legend, the lost leader and vanished wiseman of millions of readers around the world, from the USA to the USSR. An unreachable hero. Or was he? Enter inner-city teacher Greg Herriges, determined to fulfill his dream of meeting and speaking with the reclusive author. Herriges’ tale is a double helix narrative of personal quest and romantic love as he and his former girlfriend, both young, big city high school teachers, hit the road one summer, Kerouac-style, on a mission to find the hidden giant, discovering America – and themselves – along the way. This journey of two young idealistic English teachers who set out to find J.D. Salinger is a love story as well as a tribute to the reclusive author. "Beyond the vividness with which Herriges conveys the surface adventures, JD is much more than a celebrity hunt. The book's profound human complexities give it emotional depth." --Walter Cummins, The Literary Review Derek Alger's interview tih Greg Herriges, PIF Magazine ABOUT THE AUTHOR Greg Herriges has published three novels: Somewhere Safe, Secondary Attachments, and the twice award-nominated The Winter Dance Party Murders, a murder mystery satire of the golden days of rock and roll. His short works have appeared in Chicago Tribune Magazine, Social Issues Resources, The Literary Review, Story Quarterly, Britain's World Wide Writers, and South Carolina Review. He is a professor of English at William Rainey Harper College in Palatine, Illinois.		BOOK LIST Scroll down list and click on title 2016: Blessings Galore, stories by Nate Liederbach 2015: The Girl on the Swing, two novellas, Peter Grandbois Mama & the Hungry Hole, novella, Johanna DeBiase Rooms for Ghosts, novel, Terra Brigando Sea-Level Nerve (Book Two), prose poems, James Grabill 2014: The Glob Who Girdled Granville, two novellas, Peter Grandbois Sea-Level Nerve (Book One), prose poems, James Grabill Wait Your Turn, two novellas, Peter Grandbois 2013: NO TITLES PLANNED 2012: Keeping the Swarm: New & Selected Essays, George Venn Mad Cursive, poems, Joshua McKinney Sudden Death: Over Time, stories, John Rember Murdering the Mom: A Memoir, Duff Brenna The Sky Is a Bird of Sorrow, poems, Steven Dieffenbacher 2011: Our Daily Bread, a novel, Lauren B. Davis A Chinaman's Chance, New & Selected Poems, Alex Kuo 2010: Blue Moon: Vincent Wixon (sold out) At This Distance, poems, Bette Husted Impulse & Warp: 20th Century Poems of Dan Raphael Clara and Merritt, literary historical novel, Peter Donahue The Fire Diaries, poems/short prose, Matt Schumacher Departing Through A Broken Gate, poems, David Axelrod 2009: The Procession of Memories, Martinson/Nordström A Democracy of Ghosts, novel, John Griswold Giving It Away, poems, David Memmott 2008: Between Desert Seasons, poems, Ellen Waterston White Jade & Other Stories, Alex Kuo Katherine's Wish, novel, Linda Lappin Crazy Love, stories, Leslie What Spilling the Moon, poems, Matt Schumacher 2007: Soon Enough, Donald Wolff Paper Bird, Pamela Steele (out of print) Primetime, David Memmott Magpies & Tigers, Misha Nogha Camera Obscura, Harry Griswold (out of print) In an Elevator w/ Brigitte Bardot, Michael Lee A Passion in the Desert, Thomas E. Kennedy 2006: Lessons for Custer, Thomas Madden Soldier to Advocate, George Venn The Book of Mamie, Duff Brenna JD: Memoir of Time and Journey, Greg Herriges Backlist/Speculative Writers Program Angel Body, Reed/Memmott (limited supply) Realism & Other Illusion, Thomas E. Kennedy Smoking Mirror Blues, Ernest Hogan Freaknest, Lance Olsen Contagion & Other Stories, Brian Evenson (limited supply) Splitting, Brian Clark (limited supply) Red Spider White Web, Misha Nogha Shadow Bones, David Memmott Winter Dance Party Murders, Greg Herriges (out of print) The Explanation, Don Webb The Din of Celestial Birds, Brian Evenson (out of print) The Book of Angels, Thomas E. Kennedy (limited supply) Burnt, Lance Olsen (limited supply) Unreal City, Thomas E. Kennedy (limited supply) The Blood of Dead Poets, Conger Beasley, Jr. The Eleventh Jagaurundi... Jessica A. Salmonson (out of print) Ke-Qua-Hawk-As, Misha Nogha out of print) Scherzi, I Believe,Lance Olsen (out of print) The Raw Brunettes, Lorraine Schein (limited supply) Pangaea, Denise Dumars (limited supply) The Seventh Day and After, Don Webb (out of print) Oceans of Glass and Fire, Rob Hollis Miller (out of print) The Liquid Retreats, Mecklem/Falk (out of print) Lifting, Mark Rich (limited supply) The Magic Deer, Conger Beasley, Jr. Prayers of Steel, Misha Nogha Backlist/Jazz Police Books Showing Light a Good Time, Dan Raphael Simulcast Yearning, John Noto Molecular Jam, Dan Raphael (out of print) A Celebration of Bones, Sandra Lindow Mr. Templeton's Toyshop, Thomas Wiloch (out of print) Invisible Machines, Joron/Frazier (out of print) House on Fire, David Memmott (out of print) Backlist/Ice River Press: The Wider Lens, Amy Minato (out of print) The Chronicles of the Withering State, David Axelrod The Rock's Cold Breath, Li He/Varon (limited supply) I Am Madagascar, Ellen Waterston (no longer availablet) The Other Side of the Hill, Jack Lorts, editor (limited supply) West of Paradise, Geroge Venn Graves in Wheat, Thomas Madden (out of print) The Kingdom at Hand, David Axelrod (limited supply) ,