Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology
edited by Dustin Brookshire and Julie E. Bloemeke
ISBN: 978 1 956440 51 5 paperback $20.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 52 2 eBook $9.99
Launching January 19, 2023. Happy Birthday, Dolly!
Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology offers 54 poets’ takes on often unsung facets of this diamond in a rhinestone world calling in Dolly’s impeccable comedic timing, her lyric mastery, her business acumen, and her Dollyverse advocacy. These poems remind us to be better and to do better, to subvert Dolly cliché, and they encourage us to weave Dolly metaphor into our own family lore. Within these pages, Dolly takes the stage and the dinner table; readers see the public Dolly of the silver screen and the private Dolly of identity contemplation. Dolly raises praise and question, and she butterflies into our hearts to unabashedly to claim the mantra In Dolly We Trust.
Thanks to Michelle Lytle for allowing us to reproduce her Dolly mural here.
With Dolly poems from 54 contributors:
Kelli Russell Agodon Nin Andrews Lana Austin David Matthew Barnes Nicky Beer Julie E. Bloemeke Emma Bolden Dustin Brookshire Phillip Watts Brown Marina Carreira Denise Duhamel teri elam Rupert Fike Diamond Forde Chad Frame Makayla Gay Tyler Gillespie Kari Gunter Seymour Robert Gwaltney Beth Gylys Karen Head Raye Hendrix Collin Kelley Dorianne Laux Chin Sun Lee Arden Levine Katie Manning Kelly McQuain Lynn Melnick Jenny Molberg Rachel Morgan Caridad Moro Gronlier Carolyn Oliver Dion O’Reilly Jeffery Perkins Stephen Roger Powers Steven Reigns Linda Reising Benjamin Rhodes Micah Ruelle Anna Sandy Elrod Roberta Schultz Maureen Seaton Gregg Shapiro L.J. Sysko Nicole Tallman Kerry Trautman Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer Dan Vera Isaiah Vianese Donna Vorreyer Julie Marie Wade Jennifer Wheelock Yvonne Zipter
Dustin Brookshire (he/him) a finalist for the 2021 Scotti Merrill Award, is the founder/editor of Limp Wrist, curator of the Wild & Precious Life Series (a Zoom based poetry reading series), program director for Reading Queer, and founding chapter president of the South Florida Poets. He is the author of three chapbooks: Never Picked First for Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). Visit him online at www.dustinbrookshire.com.
Julie E. Bloemeke (she/her) is the 2021 Georgia Author of the Year Finalist for Poetry. Her debut full length collection Slide to Unlock (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) was also chosen as a 2021 Book All Georgians Should Read. Winner of the 2022 Third Coast Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2020 Fischer Prize, her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including Writer’s Chronicle, Prairie Schooner, Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, EcoTheo Review, and others. An associate editor for South Carolina Review and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, she is also a freelance writer and editor. Visit her online at www.jebloemeke.com
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The Dog Years of Reeducation
Poems by Jianqing Zheng
ISBN: 978 1 956440 39 3 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 40 9 ebook $9.99
February 2023
In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, millions of middle school and high school graduates, called the zhiqing or Educated Youth, were sent up to the mountains and down to the countryside to receive reeducation from the poor peasants. With deep conviction that they would play an important role in the transformation of rural China, the zhiqing became field hands, never realizing that reeducation was both a physical and psychological challenge. This collection of poetry is the representation of those reeducation years in the fields. Half a century has passed, but memories remain fresh, each a page of suffering, cheering, or dreaming to turn.
What people are saying about The Dog Years of Reeducation by Jianqing Zheng
Jianqing Zheng’s startling collection of poems, a reliving of the author’s experience as a young scholar relocated to a farm, summons nature as companion. The poet’s exile is “a double plow”: “plain laughter / flavor / of plain life”; “We remain silent as if / we must accept the fact that / our bodies deserve / bending or transplanting / like rice seedlings.”
As from the work of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, we absorb history absorb it the only way we can: as experience. Dazzle of fireflies, leeches glomming to legs in rice paddies. Hard work and rest, lit with hand rolled smokes. Each night “the moon peeks through / the broken window.” And, finally, there is this compelling invitation: “Tell me when you want to smell the scent of new rice, and I will bring you a whole bag of it grown with my muddy hands. It’s my sweat of love.”
Angela Ball, author of Talking Pillow
What I like best about Zheng’s poems is nearly every line has an image: I see what he’s saying verbal movies. He shows, rather than tells. I’m entertained by what he says and by the way he says his what. Unforgettable pictures: “Our husky voices / sandpaper the muggy heat,” “Straw hats float like life preservers / in a white sea of cotton,” a roommate bubbling snores, and “Light recedes / field to field / into a big tomato / toothed in half by hills.”
DC Berry, author of Yes, Cancer French Kisses
What will wake the reader here and keep attention from beginning to end is the series of original and important metaphors that reveal how deeply Jianqing Zheng’s memory was cast within the confines of his reeducation. In Zheng’s book, we experience the actual human side through the author’s keen perceptions, as well as compelling moves in the writing of his poetry.
Theodore Haddin, author of By a Doorway, in the Garden
Jianqing Zheng is the author of A Way of Looking and two poetry chapbooks, editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia, Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku, and five other books. He received the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Prize and two literary arts fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, among other awards and honors. He is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University, where he serves as editor of the Journal of Ethnic American Literature and Valley Voices and is the former editor of Poetry South. A reeducated youth in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Zheng has lived in Mississippi since 1991.
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Biggest Little Girl
a novel by Jodi Angel
ISBN: 978 1 956440 41 6 paperback $21.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 42 3 ebook $9.99
March 2023
In Biggest Little Girl, unloved and abused 14 year old Joey has run away from home in smalltown California in search of anything better. She’s got a few dollars and a bus ticket north, but at a truck stop just 30 miles from home, she meets Jerry with his gold watch and wad of cash. Jerry buys Joey a hamburger and offers her a job in Reno making deliveries and desperate for someone to trust, she accepts. In Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World, shacked up in a motel, Jerry cuts off Joey’s hair, gives her new clothes, and sends her out to run envelopes of product into casinos in exchange for money. Joey makes a new group of friends at the motel, all teenagers, and when Joey falls for the ringleader, Amber, they all start making big plans to scam Jerry and run to Portland like a makeshift family. It doesn’t take long before everything starts to dissolve when the suppliers get shorted, Jerry gets desperate, and the future becomes a gamble with a deck that has already been stacked against her. Joey is not the name she was born with, but it will be the name she dies with if she doesn’t find a way out soon.
What people are saying about Biggest Little Girl:
Jodi Angel is a rock star. Jodi Angel is one of my literary idols. Anything she writes is solid gold wrapped in black leather. This novel is gorgeous.
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels and The Water Museum
Every sentence of Biggest Little Girl is pure poetry. Gritty, beautiful, and raw, Jodi Angel takes her characters and her readers on one hell of a ride. Hold on.
Jennifer Pashley, author of The Watcher, The Scamp, and The Conjurer
Jodi Angel is the author of two story collections, The History of Vegas and You Only Get
Letters from Jail, which was named as a Best Book of 2013 by Esquire. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope: All Story, Electric Literature Recommended Reading, and Byliner, among other publications and anthologies. Her short story, “Snuff,” was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014. She grew up in a small town in Northern California in a family of girls.
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Splinter
Finalist for the 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Poems by Susan O’Dell Underwood
ISBN: 978 1 956440 29 4 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 30 0 ebook $9.99
March 2023
On a collective level, the human diaspora is incalculable. Our leaving and resettling are as ancient as we are, whether immigrant, refugee, exile, or pioneer. In Splinter, Susan O’Dell Underwood’s poems trace the unique experiences of the Appalachian diaspora. Splinter suggests the deep ambivalence in the breaking away, a sundering which can never be mended. These poems test the emotional spectrum, weighing the joyful possibilities and sorrows of leaving against the obligation of those who stay “home,” grateful yet bereft in an altered place.
What people are saying about Splinter:
Susan O’Dell Underwood’s poetry shares a deep understanding of the signs and symbols of Appalachian life in the twenty first century, how our voices change from one situation to the next and, as happens in “Assimilation,” the dread we feel at being asked, “Where in the hell are you from?” Art and the feeling of lived experience converge through ingenious allusions to Allen Ginsberg in “Holler” and Tillie Olsen in “I Stand Here Frying Okra.” Underwood’s vision is unfailingly wise and expansive, and the joy and laughter in these poems provide a counterweight to the knowledge that so many loved people are gone and not returning. Splinter offers readers an irresistible music of time and place, of “Exile,” where each of us comes into our own being: “We bloomed out of the barn loft’s hay mow / like one at a time petals dropping.”
Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place
"Everybody lived closer to the ground then," says Susan O'Dell Underwood at the beginning of Splinter, her rich evocation of Appalachia the land, the people, the animals and the changes that occur as its sons and daughters leave to find different lives, but who cannot forget that fireflies were once lightning bugs and cicadas were jarflies. Beauty and darkness are woven throughout these pages, and they will leave you with a moving portrait of a place forever changed.
Barbara Hamby, author of Bird Odyssey and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems
Susan O'Dell Underwood is a native of East Tennessee, where she has lived most of her life. She's the director of creative writing at Carson Newman University. She has published one earlier collection, The Book of Awe (Iris Press, 2018), a novel, Genesis Road (Madville Publishing, 2022), and two chapbooks. Her poems and fiction have appeared in journals and anthologies such as A Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Still: The Journal.
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The Green Mage
A novel by Michael Simms
ISBN: 978 1 956440 18 8 paperback $21.95 ISBN: 978 1 956440 19 5 ebook $9.99 March 2023
Volume One of The Talon Trilogy
Norbert Oldfoot is a simple mage who makes his living traveling the Bekla River Road, selling trade goods, performing healing magic, and singing traditional songs of heroes. He becomes friends with Kerttu, a coppersmith who has developed a new alloy which is perfect for manufacturing swords. When Kerttu is kidnapped by the evil Wizard Ludek, Kerttu’s teenage daughter Tessia, a skilled hunter, recruits three friends, including Norbert, and sets out on a quest to find a legendary dragon who lives in the mountains. With the help of the dragon, Tessia plans to save her father. Little do they know that in order to save Kerttu, they will first have to save the kingdom.
Original cover art by Andrew Dunn “Tessia meets the Dragon.” To be published under the new imprint, MADFantasy
Born and raised in Texas, Michael Simms has worked as a squire and armorer to a Hungarian fencing master, stable hand, gardener, forager, estate agent, college teacher, editor, publisher, technical writer, lexicographer, political organizer, and literary impresario. He is the author of seven collections of poetry and a textbook about poetry. In 2011 Simms was recognized by the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his contribution to the arts. Simms and his wife Eva live in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Mount Washington overlooking the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers.
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Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear
A novel by Michael Gills
ISBN: 978 1 956440 31 7 paperback $21.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 32 4 ebook $9.99 274 pp.
March 21, 2023
Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear, Michael Gills’ fifth novel, plumbs the depths of the Stepwell family tendency toward theatrical catastrophe. When Weldon Stepwell, bare knuckled catcher for the Danville Little Johns and town florist, has his leg amputated in a wood cutting accident, the team shows up on the hospital lawn to give blood, pray, and curse God. Mostly they gather to be with the stricken wife, daughter, and son and wait to see if their teammate will live through the night. One teammate is sent to retrieve the leg, and just what on earth do you do with such a thing? Rural Arkansas in 1950, they are men who’d just whipped Hitler and come home to play ball, volunteer firemen, rural mail carriers, the stray senator to be, hardware store workers, and fish farmers. Spanning three generations, they just can’t seem to outrun whatever it is that stalks their periphery. Finally, an adult grandson must contend with the Stepwell business in the form of a plague that comes on them and the world from nowhere. Quarantined between a gleaming football stadium on one side of the road and the city cemetery on the other, a moment comes when they must walk out under the sun and re commune. A story that dives as deep as you like into the abyss, then fights its way out with all the hope and grace this life allows.
Arkansas native Michael Gills is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel New Harmony (Raw Dog Screaming Press), Book 4 of the Go Love Quartet. A fourth collection of short fiction, Burning Down My Father’s House, will be published by Texas Review Press in 2023. Other work has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Southern Humanities Review’s Theodore Hoefner Prize for Fiction, Southern Review’s Best Debut of the Year, recognition in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize Anthology, and inclusion in New Stories from The South: The Year’s Best. His undergraduate novel writing workshop has been featured in USA Today, and several of his students have gone on to publish books of their own, including Emi Wright’s Alegría (Madville Publishing, 2021). Gills is a Distinguished Honors Professor at the University of Utah, where he lives in the hills with his wife of thirty four years, Jill.
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Turbulence and Fluids
poems by karla k. morton (2010 Texas Poet Laureate)
ISBN: 978 1 956440 33 1 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 34 8 ebook $9.99
April 2023
Immediately in karla morton’s poetry collection, Turbulence and Fluids, the tables are turned as the waters of the Earth speak first. Not only do they speak in their power and vulnerability, but in relationship to the humans that use and so often abuse them. This tells us the speaker of these poems is in close relationship to the natural world, especially water’s lifegiving necessity in the dry Texas of the poet’s childhood. In “Fish Multiplication,” with a reverence and gratitude found throughout the book, morton writes, “I hope when they pull their chairs / up to the table, they taste / the prayer of thanks / that flowed through those gills…”
Equally powerful in these poems is the force of the speaker’s voice, which pulses with color, range, passion, and ironic humor. This voice dares us to live fully, to crack open our hearts, to chance it all: “Dare to be lotus. / Dare to live down among this mucked mire. / The world needs the hope of your struggle. / Do not be consumed / rather be the fight, / be your one perfect bloom…” Also paramount for the poet is the family in community, even the four legged variety: watering new sod beside her father in an unforeseen drought; moving him to a care facility, his guiding voice ever in her ear; making chow chow in a hot kitchen; lifting and mourning the beloved dog (“be dove like with his soul”). Equal to this expansive voice and heart is an overarching spirituality, a Christian echo that never proselytizes, but girds and deepens the speaker’s worldview.
It’s fitting that the book flows poem to poem, with no section breaks to interrupt the movement as the speaker recounts not only the geographical but ancestral waters from which she rises, as in “Shine Shine Shine” and “Washita River”: “What magic breaks a river / through earth and flint and time; / what makes our lives eternal / but each legend of bloodline.” We each have this river of time and history and blood within us and, despite being drenched in grief as our losses mount, we and these poems travel and sing with it and in it.
Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth
karla k. morton is a professional speaker, award winning author, photographer, the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Described as "one of the more adventurous voices in American poetry," she has been featured on Good Morning Texas, NPR, PBS, ABC News, CBS News and in countless newspapers, blogs, and magazines.
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Everybody Here Is Kin
A novel by BettyJoyce Nash
ISBN: 978 1 956440 35 5 paperback $22.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 36 2 ebook $9.99
April 2023
On Boneyard Island, Georgia, where everyone’s weirdly kin, 13 year old Lucille is marooned when her mother goes AWOL with an old flame, leaving Lucille with only her father’s ashes, two half siblings, and Will, the misanthropic manager of the island’s only motel. The abandonment kills hope of Lucille’s promised snorkeling trip to the Florida Reef before ocean heat kills the coral and illusions she’s harbored about her mother’s sanity. Everybody Here Is Kin explores the lives of this sinking family, the island community, and fears of exposing wounds, old and new, when natural disaster forces them to trust, and depend on, strangers.
What people are saying about Everybody Here Is Kin:
In her beautiful Everybody Here Is Kin, BettyJoyce Nash has laid bare the ways our blood betrays and restores us. The book is a powerful exploration of love’s shadowy forms and the ways our relationships are as shaped by desire as they are by the places we’ve called home, the places we keep running from and toward.
Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This, and Corpus Christi: Stories, and editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer
In Everybody Here Is Kin, BettyJoyce Nash tells a coming of age tale that challenges notions of motherhood, both familial and as guardians of the Earth. Lucille is a girl on the brink of adolescence whose intelligence is matched only by her intuitive knowledge of the natural world where she’s been left to monitor her two younger stepsiblings. This story transcends time and place and will be a joy for anyone who loves this transient world.
Gale Massey, author of The Girl from Blind River, Rising and Other Stories
This novel makes your heart swell, waterlogged with love and admiration. BettyJoyce Nash’s heroine, 13 year old Lucille, worries about the planet sinking into the ocean, even as everyone in her life is going under, including the cranky motel manager, Will. Whom can she save and whom can she trust? Living inside Lucille’s head is a rare treat in BettyJoyce Nash’s astute, funny, and poignant book.
Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of Man Alive! a Washington Post Notable Book, The Bowl Is Already Broken, and The Frequency of Souls.
BettyJoyce Nash’s writing has appeared in journals including North Dakota Quarterly and Across the Margin, as well as in newspapers, magazines, and online; her fiction has been recognized with fellowships from MacDowell (2013), The Ragdale Foundation (2015), and VCCA (2018) In 2014, she was selected as the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fiction fellow to the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland. She’s taught writing at the University of Richmond, community writing centers, and in jail; she teaches at WriterHouse, a nonprofit literary arts center in Charlottesville, Virginia.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
With Access to Tools
Poems by Dana Wildsmith
ISBN: 978 1 956440 37 9 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 38 6 ebook $9.99 May 2023
In the same spirit as the iconic The Last Whole Earth Catalog: access to tools, Dana Wildsmith’s With Access to Tools offers a means for navigating a new time of change. Opening with a series of odes to traditional tools, each tool is inextricably bound to the hand and heart of the worker. The book then shifts, as has our world, to cyber tools which work at a physical remove that echoes the pandemic’s societal disruption. The book concludes with persona poems offering a note of hope through the strength of individual cerebral tools.
What People are saying about With Access to Tools:
With Access to Tools is beautifully crafted, strong, and wise. It is filled with amazing insights. Dana Wildsmith’s ability to see the truth in things and speak of it with such eloquence and quietness is a true gift to us all. This book gives us new and important paths to move through the world. It is unforgettable.
Philip Lee Williams, author of Eden’s Last Horizon: Poems for the Earth
With Access to Tools is an elegiac owner’s manual that helps readers “bushwhack through the thick” of a virus fueled world, except this is no ordinary how to guide. No. Wildsmith’s musical and striking sonnets, ballads, and songs veritably lift from the page to form an ars poetica that instructs and delights us while speaking to our collective trauma, where every poem finds “a home for grief, / stitching it like squares for a quilt.” These poems are a joy of cadenced verse and memory that honor the work of writing and will fill you up with anticipation and hope.
Marianne Worthington, editor of Still: The Journal and author of The Girl Singer: Poems
Dana Wildsmith is the author of six collections of poetry, a novel, Jumping, and an environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South, which was the finalist for Georgia Author of the Year. Wildsmith has served as Artist in Residence for Devils Tower National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Everglades National Park. She is a Fellow of the Hambidge Center for Science and Creative Arts. Wildsmith works as an English literacy instructor for Lanier Technical College. She lives with her husband on an old farm in the toe of the Appalachians.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
STAY
Hybrid flash essay by Sarah Leamy
ISBN: 978 1 956440 43 0 paperback $20.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 44 7 ebook $9.99
May 2023
STAY is a hybrid visual story of a British tomboy & clown negotiating place/identity, trauma/neurodiversity, friendship/play, sexuality, and violence. Mixing illustration, photography, and narrative non fiction, this experimental work transcends the binary, bravely imagining a world that makes space for all of us. What happens when an awkward and shy tomboy doesn't always feel safe at home or at school? Leamy has fantasies of another life and at 18 she finally takes flight. She leaves her small town to study languages and migration patterns in London before setting out with a rucksack, teddy bear (John), and juggling toys to hitch across Europe and the States. Leamy begins to wonder: Will she ever find her people, her place, her purpose? Or will each new home be forever as inconsistently hospitable as the first?
Sarah Leamy is a gender queer writer, editor, and non traditional academic, currently living on the road. She is the author of When No One's Looking (2011), Lucky Shot (2012), Lucky Find (2014), Van Life (2016), Hidden (2021), and G'Dog (2022).
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http://www.sarahleamy.com/
Valediction
Poems by Linda Parsons
ISBN: 978 1 956440 61 4 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 62 1 ebook $9.99 June 2023
Paul Éluard writes, “There is another world and it is in this one.”
Within these worlds, we travel outward and inward, straddling our lives’ oppositions: parental/relationship struggle and loss, home and away, isolation and reconnection, the spiritual/mystical realm and physicality always balancing grief and reemergence, hello and goodbye. The hybrid nature of Linda Parsons' sixth collection, Valediction, with poems, diptychs, and micro essays, brings those oppositions into focus and reconciliation and grounds her in the earth under her feet, especially in her gardening meditations. In this striving, we are balanced and grounded with her as she lifts the veil on what it means to live and create fully, even in the face of impermanence.
Cover art by Gary Heatherly
What People are saying about Valediction
These poems contrast ordinary, daily situations with deeply mystical, imagistic imagination. I found the family poems and those connected to the rituals and surprises of gardening powerful and moving. This collection makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which each person’s local, specific experiences connect to the larger world, both human and nonhuman.
Lisa Roney, author of Serious Daring and The Best Possible Bad Luck
Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, and Shenandoah, her fifth poetry collection is Candescent (Iris Press, 2019). Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she lives and gardens.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
All Night, All Day: Life, Death & Angels
Edited by Susan Cushman, foreword by Sophy Burnham
ISBN: 978 1 956440 45 4 paperback $22.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 46 1 ebook $9.99 June 2023
There is something mystical about holding the hand of a person who is “crossing over.” It can be heartbreaking, of course, but also very holy and beautiful. Some of the pieces in this collection share the experience of personal loss when a loved one dies. Often the presence of an angel or another mystical experience is shared. But not only in death there are also stories here of the way the mystical world interacts with us in daily life. And not only angels, but also mothers, fathers, sisters, grandfathers, friends, and even a homeless man and a dog.
Contributors:
Cassandra King Suzanne Henley River Jordan Sally Palmer Thomason Natasha Trethewey Sonja Livingston Johnnie Bernhard Frederica Mathews Green Angela Jackson Brown Christa Allan Renea Winchester Jacqueline Allen Trimble Mandy Haynes Wendy Reed Lisa Gornick Jennifer Horne Ann Fisher Wirth Averyell Kessler Lauren Camp Cathy Smith Bowers Nancy Dorman Hickson Joanna Siebert Susan Cushman Claire Fullerton Julie Cantrell
What people are saying about All Night, All Day: Life, Death & Angels
All Night, All Day is a gracefully executed anthology of hope, a merciful reminder we are not alone in this world. Each story, poem, and essay: a feather knitted upon an angel’s wing.
Robert Gwaltney, award winning author of The Cicada Tree All Night, All Day is an inspirational collection of personal essays, stories, and poems by outstanding women authors who write about the appearance of the divine in their lives. Some of these angels come to save a life or change a flat tire. Some appear to warn people, tell them what to do, suggest more vegetables and maybe better shoes.
They appear as a tap of intuition, a whisper, a whoosh of warmth, a rainbow, or an act of kindness. They are the stranger ministering to you in the hospital, the sound of voices singing in the attic, the sudden light at the window, the man by the side of the road. They are nurses and sometimes they are you. In this stunning anthology which explores so many heartwarming brushes with celestial beings, all these angels are messengers come to assure us we are not alone, and we are loved.
Margaret McMullan, author of Where the Angels Lived All Night, All Day is an anthology to be savored. This collection includes powerful first hand accounts, interwoven with short fiction and poetry, beautifully exploring the themes of life, death, and angels. Jewels include Cassandra King Conroy's unforgettable tale. It takes courage to write the raw truth of last moments, as Renea Winchester did in her touching story of her mother’s death titled “Waiting for Her Angel.” I loved Mandy Haynes’ heartwarming story, “Rose’s Angel” (plus, she's a lovely person!). “The End” by Lisa Gornick is an intimate, touching tale. I shed tears over Susan Cushman’s “Hitting the Wall.” Within this collection are remembrances and memorials, which pay homage to a loved one or to a mystical experience. At the end, Claire Fullerton’s beautiful, final words offer the hope of peace. Crafting an anthology is an art. Susan Cushman has done a big topic justice the sum of the parts is greater for having been compiled together. Savor this book for its wisdom, humor, and truth.
Carol Van Den Hende, award winning author of Orchid Blooming and Goodbye, Orchid
Stories that evoke a sense of peace, reassurance, and safety, as well as strength and encouragement through reported angelic activities. These stories tell of unexpected humanity and love in the lives of those who needed affirmation of spirituality in the human world. The presence of angels is recounted through brilliant and descriptive imagery and intriguing yet identifiable characterization.
Francine Rodriguez, author of A Woman’s Story
Life, death, and angel stories are usually only shared with those whom we trust and only during the quiet hours of our souls. Susan Cushman is the finder and sharer of these stories. She is the editor and the force behind All Night, All Day. She has collected a wide spectrum of authors and encouraged them to contribute their personal stories and poems, thereby giving us a glimpse into their souls and the unspoken truths of our universal beliefs. The reader is treated with a wide range of storytelling and writing styles each pointing a way to introspection, restoration, and healing. In the hush of a still night there is a soft beauty in the laughter and tears the reader will discover as love gently laps at the door of all the things we hold dear.
Donna Keel Armer, author of Solo in Salento: A Memoir
Susan Cushman is author of five books two novels, two memoirs (most recently Pilgrim Interrupted), and a short story collection and editor of three previous anthologies, including Southern Writers on Writing. A native of Jackson, Mississippi, Susan lives in Memphis with her husband of 53 years. Susan has not yet seen angels in person, but she has a growing relationship with her guardian angel, who has been with her in at least two near death experiences.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure
a novel by David Rothman
ISBN: 978 1 956440 47 8 paperback $22.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 48 5 ebook $9.99
July 2023
In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic in New York City, Andrew, the assistant director of a funeral home one mile from Elmhurst Hospital, the “epicenter of the epicenter,” meets a legendary Coney Island witch doctor (Lelya Dorche), who makes him an offer that could better his chances of keeping his COVID positive elderly parents and his severely asthmatic 13 year old son, Miro, off the ever expanding list of virus mortalities. To keep up his end of the bargain, Andrew will have to find his way to Bulgaria (no small task considering that there’s a ban on passenger flights to Europe) to secure 10 liters of a rare Macedonian pine sap, a key ingredient of Lelya Dorche’s proven remedy.
What people are saying about Lelya Dorche:
David Rothman’s Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure is one of the first COVID 19 novels and it is an adventure, a family drama, and very funny. This is the New York of real people: denizens of Queens and Brooklyn, not Manhattan day traders, not Brooklyn hipsters, but the immigrants, the Jews, the Muslims, and Hindus. Rothman has imagined a melting pot of a novel with a Roma witchdoctor, a Filipino nurse, a Jewish funeral home director, and an alcoholic Ukrainian smuggler in a race against time to save lives outside the official realms of government and capitalism. Like the Coney Island Cyclone that makes an appearance in the early pages of the book, once you get on this ride, you wouldn’t want to get off even if you could.
John Talbird, author of The World Out There
"Sometimes life puts you in the darkest corner,” and what corner could be darker than a vicious virus which (at that point) h ad no cure or even treatment? Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure is bright, and moving, illustrating how will, magical thinking, and the power of love can overcome the insurmountable. Guided by his sister’s ghost, warm, pragmatic Andrew risks it all to save his family. With sharp prose, an endearing cast of characters, and the haunting background of Coney Island, David Rothman’s novel reiterates the biggest lesson that came with the global pandemic: Love is absolutely everything.
Claudia Zuluaga, author of Fort Starlight
Rothman treads a fine line between reality and fantasticality when he portrays a mental health break, as many people’s mental health problems were exacerbated during COVID and by grief, too. Andrew, the narrator, is semi unreliable, and yet, he is also smart, sensitive, and capable in many ways. I also like the way it shows how people in desperate situations will search out whatever they think might help, whether there is much evidence of that fact or not. It feels like a book rooted in parental love and the gap between helping and hurting and being overbearing in the process
Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies
David Rothman teaches writing for the City University of New York. A novella, The Lower East Side Tenement Reclamation Association, won the Omnidawn 2018 fabulist fiction prize and was published in 2020. A short story, “Guided by Voices” won a fiction prize with Glimmer Train Other short stories were published in such journals as Hybrido, The Prague Review, Newtown Literary, The Piltdown Review, among others. He is the drummer for the NYC based band, The Edukators, and is a proud resident of Jackson Heights, Queens.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
ECHOES
or, The Insistence of Memory (a novel) by Tom Shachtman
ISBN: 978 1 956440 49 2 paperback $22.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 50 8 ebook $9.99 July 2023
Ell, a millennial of European and Mexican heritage, has one humorous children’s book published, but her more serious writing projects are stalled, her boyfriend has dumped her, and she is deeply frightened by a recurring dream. To solve her problems, she delves into family mysteries Civil War era slaveholding, madness, and theft of artifacts. The key to all, previously unknown to Ell but remarkable, is a female Confederate warrior ancestor whose nightmare echoes her own. By tracing both of their dreams to ancient times, and by using insights from modern genetic theory, Ell solves the mysteries and enables herself to move forward.
What people are saying about Echoes or, The Insistence of Memory:
Ell’s own searching identity merges with that of her rediscovered Warrior Princess as the novel moves beyond its characters to explore how our notions of history and memory are comprised of an infinity of fragments that interrelate in many ways. from an early reader
Tom Shachtman has published forty books, most recently The Memoir of the Minotaur (Madville Publishing, 2020). His histories include The Day America Crashed, Skyscraper Dreams, Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, and The Founding Fortunes; his social analyses, Rumspringa and
The Inarticulate Society; non fiction children’s books such as Growing Up Masai; and an eclectic trilogy of short novels about sea lions, Beachmaster, Wavebender, and Driftwhistler. His award winning documentaries have aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and BBC. He holds degrees in experimental psychology and in drama and has taught writing at NYU and lectured at Harvard, Georgia Tech, the Library of Congress, Stanford, and other institutions.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
Passport Stamps:
Searching the World for a War to Call Home
A memoir by Sean D. Carberry
ISBN: 978 1 956440 55 3 paperback $20.95
ISBN: 978 1 956440 56 0 ebook $9.99 August 2023
A candid, darkly comic, and emotionally naked tale of a journalist who driven by grief, loss, and the desire to find his “tribe” seeks solace in the world’s most dangerous places and his pursuit to join the ranks of combat tested war correspondents. The learning curve of reporting in hostile environments is steep and at times comical, at others nearly fatal. He encounters a lot of dust, ragged infrastructure, weaponry, scary driving, whiskey, lust, and way too much food poisoning. When the assignment ends, he is left to confront the mental and emotional impact of the years of danger, death, and destruction.
What people are saying about Passport Stamps:
Passport Stamps tells the story of a wartime journalist earning his stripes as he seeks out danger in Kosovo, Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Tripoli. With the obvious discussions of foreign policy that are inherent to relaying the story, this memoir is not journalism per se, but rather a narrative about a man’s search for fulfillment, adventure, and companionship, as Carberry relays what it was that first motivated him to become a war journalist and then also how the experience of seeing violence, danger, and poverty up close changed him as a person. A man who begins the novel much like a bored American seeking romance and adventure and wanting to earn his stripes, or his passport stamps, if you will (in the book, he also refers to having first experiences like being shot at as “merit badges”), in the world of international journalism, which he hopes will grow his career and benefit him both emotionally and financially. However, as the memoir moves along, we see a man torn by what he sees, who has trouble readapting to his routines after being in a warzone for ten days, and who increasingly comes to weigh the costs of his desire to write a good story versus his knowledge that in a warzone, a good story means violence, and violence always has a human cost that is hard to reconcile with how it promotes career advancement.
Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies
Sean Carberry an award winning writer, editor, and foreign policy and national security expert. In his more than 15 years as a radio and print journalist, he traveled to dozens of countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. He was NPR’s last Kabul based correspondent, covering the country’s security and political transition 2012 through 2014. Before journalism, he was a Gold Record winning recording engineer and producer. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his cat Squeak who he rescued from the streets of Kabul.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
A NEW ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF THE AWARD WINNING NOVELLA
Cover art is Estella Canziani’s The Piper of Dreams, The Medici Society, Grafton Street, Bond Street, London
Photo by Eliza Pickering.