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 ...

A Companion for Your Journey from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost"Let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free."—St. John ChrysostomLent is a pilgrimage of the soul when Christians have always commemorated the death and resurrection of Jesus with a season of reflection. Through poems, essays, and devotional readings, A Radiant Resurrection invites you into the time of reflection from Ash Wednesday through Eastertide. Writt...

Love in one form or another is the commanding force of this new collection of short fiction. The Servitude of Love holds the revelations of love in different manifestations--love of work, love of another, love of journey, love of mission, love of justice, of foolishness, of duty. These thirteen stories take place along the north/south corridor of the central plains of America, in Afghanistan and Spain. Fictional characters such as Noe in Brownsville, Texas in the first story, and actual hi...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

A 1994 trip to Syria and Jordan as an Arts America Speaker for the United States Information Agency began the group of poems for The Collector of Bodies. The manuscript stayed in a file until the Civil War began in Syria, March 18, 2011, the author's 70th birthday. The poems were retrieved, and the manuscript continued. Glancy wrote as an observer--as someone who had talked to the students in the universities--who had experienced a foreboding of what was ahead for Syria, especially after l...

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...

Rediscover the Wonder of Christ's Birth with 42 Days of ReflectionPrepare your heart and spirit for the Advent season with A Radiant Birth, an inspiring anthology written by the members of the Chrysostom Society. This collection offers six weeks of deeply reflective readings, guiding you through the seasons from the first Sunday of Advent through the twelfth day of Christmas.Readings in this volume include:Star by Eugene Peterson...

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...