In this debut memoir, Glen Cantrell recounts an accidental decision to volunteer and the year that followed leading the small, all-volunteer Chamber of Commerce in Twain Harte, a mountain town on Highway 108 in California's Sierra Nevada foothills, where one bad winter can travel from empty cabins to quiet restaurant tables to payrolls nobody is sure how to meet. What starts as an effort to help struggling businesses becomes a firsthand education in the invisible systems, relationships, an...

A reflective examination of life's most transformative momentsThis nonfiction collection brings together award-winning voices across literature and film as they reflect on the pivotal moments that reshaped their lives.Edited by Julie Cantrell and Janyre Tromp, these thought-provoking essays span personal, cultural, and spiritual terrain, tracing how true transformation takes root and matures over time to shift one's perspective.Honest, vulnerable, a...

From a single spark, a story takes hold.This short story collection gathers award-winning fiction shaped around the quiet longing, courage, defiance, or hope that begins small but eventually takes hold of a heart. Penned by cross-generational and cross-cultural writers, each selection explores what happens when that inner whisper grows and transforms the lives it touches.Edited by Julie Cantrell and Janyre Tromp, these stories reflect a wide range of voices...

Opening sentences alert you to what is ahead for you to step into, or not! It lets you know that you have a reading experience that may impress you or even change your way of thinking! Words from fictional stories, essays, memories and poetry; each has its own unique emotion to share with you. Do you dare to step inside the mental workings of another? Are you up for the challenge? This wide collection of writings may make you smile, cry, laugh, cry, shout in horror or make you feel warmly ...

Delilah Kersey has two degrees, a half-finished dissertation, and a bank balance headed straight for zero.What she does not have is one single day of experience training a dog.Which is a detail she chooses not to volunteer when she overhears a man in the next booth offering room and board to anyone who can work with his dogs.She is, after all, the daughter of the man who invented the Kersey Method. She learned every bit of it at his elbow and never once got to use i...

A Mysterious Clue. A Hidden Secret. An Adventure They'll Never Forget.The Secret Seekers are back, and this time the mystery begins with a clue hidden in plain sight.Riley and Ava should be enjoying the last days of summer at Veil Crest Manor. But with nothing exciting happening, the girls are bored. That changes when they discover a crumpled slip of paper on the library floor.It looks like trash until they read the mysterious message: ...

Nora Calder ran to the quietest place she could find. She didn't expect to find someone worth staying for.After months of being watched by someone who knows things about her no stranger should know, Nora flees to Thorncliff Bay, a speck of a coastal town where nothing ever happens. All she wants is to disappear.Declan Marsh isn't interested in her staying invisible. Ex-military, closed off, still haunted by a sister's death nobody else believes was murder, he takes one look...

Fifteen years ago, Joss Whitfield vanished the night of their high school graduation. Mara Voss was the last person to see her, and remembers nothing.When Mara returns to her lake-town home for her estranged father's funeral, a record drought does what fifteen years of searching couldn't: it drags her best friend's car out of the water. Suddenly the cold case is open again, and so is the ninety-minute hole in Mara's memory.Working the investigation is Nash Calder, the victi...

Some clients don't need saving. They need someone brave enough to finally listen.For thirty years, Walt Hendricks has been Hollowmere's answer to every question nobody wanted to ask twice, the reclusive man on the edge of town, quietly blamed for one disappearance after another, never charged, never cleared, just left to carry a suspicion that was never actually his to carry. When he's arrested for trespassing on the old Voss property, the case lands on the desk of...

Katrice Evans held on to the business card the handsome biker gave her months ago, never believing she'd actually call the number.Not until her ex-boyfriend broke into her apartment, trashed the place, and destroyed her roommate's furniture.Now Kat's alone, and things aren't getting any better.With one phone call, everything changes.All it takes is Pierce saying, "I'm coming to you," to give her hope.But hope and help are two very different ...

Sixteen years, and the only person who never stopped telling the truth was the one nobody would believe.Diane Voss walks out of Hollowmere Psychiatric Care sixty-one years old, having spent sixteen years institutionalized for two "delusions" her doctors were absolutely certain about: that her daughter Elena was still alive, and that she'd given birth to more than one child that terrible summer. Both diagnoses have just been proven catastrophically wrong, by a recov...

Some memories aren't yours to carry. She's carrying them anyway.Child psychologist Callie Ostrander has spent eleven years building a quiet, careful life specifically so she'd never have to think about the summer her best friend vanished. She has never told anyone not her colleagues, not her family, not even herself in any language louder than a whisper, what Elena Voss said to her three days before she disappeared.Then eight-year-old Sadie Marsh walks into...