Flutie lives on the edge of an enormous quiet that she wants to transcend. Her family's life on a dirt road in Western Oklahoma, her father's job repairing old cars and tractors belonging to impoverished hay farmers, her brother’s betrayal, and her mother's indifference are all parts of a story Flutie wants to tell if she can find the words.In a library book, Flutie reads the myth of Philomela, whose tongue was cut out by her sister’s husband so she cannot tell that he raped her. A...

A professor hears the voices of Biblical women. She begins writing. What was it like for Dorcas to die and be brought back to life? What was it like for Philip's daughters to live with the threat of persecution after Christ was crucified? What did Miriam feel when she sat in the leprosy tent? What did they all say as the professor wove her own story between their voices? It was Michal, David's first wife, who made a bolster of goat's hair for David's bed when Saul, her father, was trying t...

In 1838, thirteen thousand Cherokee were forced to leave their homeland in the Southeast and walk 900 miles to present-day Oklahoma. Hunger, cold, fatigue, and disease threatened their very survival. Their grueling relocation trek-the Trail of Tears-takes on new immediacy and meaning with this stunning work of fiction. Maritole loses not only her home and her settled life in North Carolina, but also many of the people closest to her. A chorus of voices joins hers to vividly recreate the tr...

"My father, Wood Hume, worked for the railroad. We followed him from town to town, through Texas and Louisiana in the tomato-red sun that sank into the plains. I learned to read on highway signs." So begins the beautifully told story of Rachel and her itinerant Southern family. In The Only Piece of Furniture in the House, Diane Glancy captures the language of the rural south in the tradition of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.Sometimes the Humes lived in the Cajun town of Po...

A minister's wife finds herself in hell. The story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 gives a chilling insight into the afterlife. It is a story that is not often addressed because it makes clear the separation of people upon death. Frank Winscott, a retired minister, works at comparing translations of the Bible. Eugena has ignored her husband's work and his sermons all her life. Instead, she finds meaning in her potter's shed, where she makes different forms of ziggurats that sh...

Diane Glancy was working on two manuscripts. The prose poems of The Lost Notebooks of the Painter's Wife and the variants of The Cubist. Notebooks was narrative; the other, in the Cubist style, looked at subjects from several perspectives. The manuscripts began calling to one other, though they seemed to have nothing in common. One day, she had the thought they could be the same manuscript. She combined them--alternating poems from each, one after another--until she found they came out eve...

Constructed as a series of reports to the Department of the Interior, these poems of grief, anger, defiance, and resistance focus on the oppressive educational system adopted by Indian boarding schools and the struggle Native Americans experienced to retain and honor traditional ways of life and culture.

Many towns have their murderers, but are they also members of a church, a Boy Scout leader, or president of the congregation? Could they be trusted to bring a covered dish faithfully to church suppers? This novel takes the BTK murders in Wichita, Kansas, as inspiration to question issues of evil. How could a man commit murder and yet sit in church all those years until he was caught? What is a Christian? What is Christianity? Can a Christian murderer go to heaven? Mark Cabot and Ralph Ghea...

No Word for the Sea is built on several layers of questioning: What is language? What is memory? Where does the mind go when the circuits shut down? The novel covers seven years in the lives of Solome and Stephen Savard in St. Paul, Minnesota. Stephen is provost at Cobson College, and Solome has raised three children. The events alternate between Stephen's first-person narrative and Solome's third-person narrative in accord with the breaking text of their lives. "Once there was a common In...

The Book of Bearings puts the puzzle pieces of the New World together without a picture on the puzzle box. The characters struggle to situate themselves between what they were and what they are supposed to become. The poems include voices from the mid-nineteenth-century Cherokee Female Seminary in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and the mid-twentieth-century Eskimo experience in Alaska, as well as personal narratives. This book addresses the Native American process of assimilation from first contact ...

Crippled in childhood, Mary Wesley, sister of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, speaks of the Wesley household in first-person narrative built on the facts of her life. Mary lived in a strict Christian family, one of 19 children, 10 of whom survived. Her mother, Susanna Wesley, imposed a regiment where "not one child after a year old was heard to cry out." Her father, Samuel Wesley, a minister at Epworth, could not provide for his family, and spent time in debtor's prison. The ...

4 x 4 The first words were footprints of the wind in our ears. Sometimes we cried with earache. We wrapped our heads in animal-skins. Our cries were feral in the dark. We packed dried berries and pieces of meat and camped for the night. We followed hoof-prints in the snow. We saw a tuft of animal-hair on a thorny branch jittering as we passed We dreamed of it at night. We followed the course of streams and rivers. It was an old knowing of the world. Our journeys were written on the lines o...