Sonoma County Literary Update

Sonoma County Writers Published in 2010

Mark Adair: The Father’s Child

A debut suspense novel, recently published and available on Amazon. John Truman, a bright, introverted, college student belongs to the New Dawn…he just doesn’t know it yet. The 300-year-old, Oxford-based, secret society designed him, created him, and built their organization to interface with him. They cannot survive without him; he cannot survive without them. All he wants is a simple life: hanging with his friends, succeeding in business, and living happily-ever-after with Susan. All they want… is to rule the world.

This is a Kindle book priced at an introductory rate of only $2.99 at www.amazon.com/The-Fathers-Child-ebook/dp/B004DCB3W0.

Kathleen Barry: Unmaking War, Remaking Men: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves

In Unmaking War, Remaking Men: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves Kathleen Barry answers the perennial question: Is war inevitable? with an emphatic “no.”  She explores soldiers’ experiences through a politics of empathy and reveals how men’s lives are made expendable for combat in which they suffer loss of their own souls. She then probes the psychopathy that marks world leaders from George W. Bush to Ariel Sharon to Osama bin Laden to show how war is made from remorseless indifference to human life.

Kathleen Barry asks: ‘What would it take to unmake war?’ by scrutinizing the demilitarized state of Costa Rica and comparing its claims of peace with its high rate of violence against women. Ending war requires unmaking masculinity, a change already under way in men who resist and refuse combat and transform their lives into a new kind of humanity.

Denise Christian. What Does The Doggie Say?

Martin Pearl Publishing, SAN 885-6857, ISBN: 978-0-9814822-6-2
What Does The Doggie Say? is the first book in the What…Say? series by Denise Christian. This engaging, fun, beautifully illustrated book has readers joining a mother and two children on a car trip to Grandma’s house. The family enjoys a game and demonstrates encouragement through the use of “onomatopoeia” – words that imitate sound.  The 28-page softcover, 11″ x 8.5″ book is easily held and  visually appealing and its rich illustrations lend visual support to a story that touches hearts.

Teachers will find this book beneficial for students learning to read. Purposely designed for beginning readers and ease of use in classrooms, the text for each character is uniquely colored, which lends well to Reading Theater. Teachers may also refer to What Does The Doggie Say? as students begin to perfect the writing rules for onomatopoeia. The author makes local classroom and library visits by arrangement, which adds a personal dimension to a student’s reading experience. Mrs. Christian has developed fun, educationally-packed presentations that are delighting Pre-K through 4th grades.

Signed copies are currently available at Sunnyside Cottage Gifts & Toys, 599 Montecito Center, next to Oliver’s (in Rincon Valley) and at Copperfield’s in Montgomery Village. Other booksellers may order via: Baker & Taylor or Partners West. Also available from the author: denisechristian1@yahoo.com or online at Amazon.com

Bill Varnaw and Don Hagelberg: Finnish-American Poetry

The New Chapbook: Finnish-American Poetry by Rauhala, Vartnaw, Hagelberg
57 pages long, with biographical shorts and after thought available at:
The Finnish Kalevala Hall, 1970 Chestnut Street, Berkeley, CA 94702-1723
for $6.95 uncut; & $7.95 cut;
$3.95 postage/ handling costs for each volume in  U. S.;
$3.00 extra for Europe.
Make check$ payable to: U.F.K.B.&S. #21
More information: 707-935-1963 or voinyt@yahoo.com

Bill Vartnaw (Estonian, Väärtnou) was born and raised in Petaluma next door to his grandmother Elmi and her sauna. He established Taurean Horn Press in San Francisco in 1974, which has published 14 books of poetry, including his own: In Concern: for Angels (1984). Vartnaw has had two publications come out in 2009: Suburbs of My Childhood from Beatitude Press in Berkeley, and Postcards from Round Barn Press in Santa Rosa. He can be found online at the Red Room, www.redroom.com/author/bill-vartnaw.

Don Hagelberg of the family Pyhanoja is a founding member of the Bay Area Poets’ Coalition (BAPC). He has been published in The Oakland Tribune, Exit #13, New World Finn, and in Vintage Voices. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, he won third prize in the International Poetry 2008 competition, and first prize in the winter 2009 Kippis competition.

Joel Rudinow: Soul Music: Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Motown

Soul Music: Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Motown is now published by the University of Michigan Press. Andy Weinberger, of Readers’ Books says, “This is a book that breaks new ground in both philosophy and music. Let’s state it another way: If you can put Schopenhauer, Duke Ellington, Bo Diddley, Nietzsche, Robert Johnson, Wittgenstein, and Charlie Parker in the same room and have them speak to one another (metaphorically at least) you’re onto something.  This is an event for those who play music, those who love music, and those who love to think about music and why it is so important to being human.” For more information: www.press.umich.edu:80/titleDetailDesc.do?id=173611. Joel Rudinow teaches in the Philosophy and Humanities Departments at Santa Rosa Junior College and is the coauthor of Invitation to Critical Thinking and the coeditor of Ethics and Values in the Information Age.

Chad Sweeney: Parable of Hide and Seek

Chad Sweeney’s new book of poems Parable of Hide and Seek was released mid-September by Alice James Books and is available at www.alicejamesbooks.org. Individual poems were previously published in Best American Poetry 2008, American Poetry Review, Black Warrior, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Verse, Volt, Slope, Forklift, Poetry Flash and elsewhere. If anyone is interested in reviewing Parable or inviting me for a reading or class visit, please contact Chad at ChadSweeney777@gmail.com or Alice James at ajb@alicejamesbooks.org.

Charles Markee: Otherworld Tales: Irish the Demon Slayer

Announcing publication of Otherworld Tales: Irish the Demon Slayer, an action-adventure-fantasy middle grade novel. Irish and his two friends travel across time and space to save his kidnapped sister in a mystical world where monstrous evil demons threaten earth. Acclaim by local writers:

• A breath-taking ride through ancient Ireland.
• Imaginative and fully realized. A terrific first novel!
• Makes Celtic mythology come alive.

The story will entertain anyone age 9 and older: boys, girls and adults. The book is available through the author’s website, www.charlesmarkee.com or from Amazon.com.

Arlene Mandel and Donna Emerson

Arlene and Donna are featured in the anthology When Last on the Mountain; The View From Writers Over 50, published by Holy Cow! Press, 2010.

Janet Jennings’s new chapbook, Traces in Water

Traces in Water begins with the lines: “A conjurer stands/outside the door.” Janet Jennings—a gifted poet—is the conjurer. She writes with elegance and luminosity. Images of dream and water soar yet are grounded in the images of the poet’s twin daughters, their world where “Living close to the ground/can change things.” This is a book of magical moments steeped in the present as well as the past, a book where orb spiders spin and a sand dollar becomes “an ivory disk fallen from the moon.” Read slowly and savor these beautiful poems.
–Susan Terris, author of Contrariwise

Available at Booksmith in San Anselmo, Book Passage in Corte Madera or by emailing Janet Jennings at jjsirena@comcast.net. Conflux Press, $14.00.

Ransom Stephens, The God Patent

The SF Chronicle said: “The first debut novel to emerge from the new paradigm of online publishing…epic themes grounded in authentic science… sings of the heart and the scientific method as two parts of the same song.” It did so well as an e-novel (13 weeks in the top ten, number 4 all time) thata new publishing company, Numina Press, sought me out for publication rights.

You can check it out here: www.TheGodPatent.com – reviews, synopsis, readers guide, where to buy it, all the details. Numina Press, the publisher is small and fleet and navigating like a speedboat around the huge publishing barges. The back copy says: “Sex, drugs and quantum physics collide with artificial intelligence, faith and free will in this perspective altering story.”  On the cover, that’s the main character, Ryan McNear staring into the cosmos going, “WTF?” The angel looking back at him is Katarina and she’s sort of the answer.

Check the calendar tab at www.TheGodPatent.com for details.

From Sixteen Rivers Press

The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed

The book features a foreword by former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass, poems by luminaries such as Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Jane Hirshfield, Al Young, Gary Soto, Ursula LeGuin, Adrienne Rich, Kay Ryan, and Gillian Conoley. It also features fifty poems by local writers, including D.A. Powell, Donna Emerson, Daniel Polikoff, Nancy Cherry, Kim Addonizio, and many more.

The poems in this anthology embody what it’s like to live in the astonishing weave of cities and towns, landscape and language, climate and history that make up the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Selected by the members of Sixteen Rivers Press, a regional poetry collective named after the web of rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay, the poems in and a metaphoric watershed. From the granite slopes of the Sierra to the Delta, through the Coastal Range to the bay and shores of the Pacific, one hundred poems by poets well known and not well known, living and dead, map this improbable region. There are egrets and grievous losses here; prayers, panhandlers, Delta mornings and sunsets in the ’hood; the fog, certainly, and the bridges, but there are shades of Dante on a Miwok trail, and Wang-wei haunts the slopes of Grizzly Peak. These poems are internal maps, “the mental maps that for humans,” writes Robert Hass in the foreword, “make a place a place.” Gathered together, they evoke the San Francisco Bay watershed, the place that inhabits us.

Dean Rader, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle says, “Sixteen Rivers Press is one of the best Bay Area literary projects. Modeled after Alice James Books cooperative in Maine, Sixteen Rivers has been publishing excellent books by Bay Area poets for 10 years. The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press; 142 pages; $20 paperback) is a viscerally pleasing anthology that celebrates a successful first decade.”

“What a splendid volume of poetry and what an incredible range of poets—including some of the greats as well as the yet unknown—and what a rich and impressive array of topics, themes, settings, and emotions! If you love poetry and poetics, you will be smitten over and over again by this cornucopia, this amazing, diverse harvest.” —Michael Krasny, host of KQED’s Forum

“One of the great pleasures of this anthology is that, at a certain moment, a group of early-twenty-firstcentury poets made a selection of poems about the place that mattered to them, so that this book is about the experience of place—and about being given the remembered expression of the experience of place by others who have lived here. And that begins to be a culture.” —Robert Hass, from the Foreword to The Place That Inhabits Us.

Iris Dunkle’s Inheritance

Iris Dunkle’s new poetry collection Inheritance, was published by Finishing Line Press in June, 2010.  You can purchase the book online at www.finishinglinepress.com by clicking on 2009/10 New Releases and scrolling down to my book. Copies are $12 each and shipping is only $1.

“In Inheritance, Iris Jamahl Dunkle wipes the tarnish off an old family mirror, focuses her light onto it and back out onto the mythic labyrinths of a pastoral childhood, onto the harrowing city, and onto the straw-gold strands that bind the speaker and a distant beloved. A mother hums “the song of the sink,” the speaker packages the city into a “box, oil-stained and almost translucent,” and looks ahead to bones with “swollen rings (as) in trees”. Many of them sonnets, these small intense poems race past each other like cloud-spots, sun-spots on a wind-eager day, toward the beloved and an intertwined human destiny.”
–Phyllis Meshulam, Sonoma County Coordinator for California Poets in the Schools.

“With shining images and language, Iris Dunkle explores childhood’s maze to find the self at the center, only to lose that center, as we must, to love…These poems celebrate two of the greatest tools we have for fixing the unfixable, love and language.”
–Gwynn O’Gara, Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, California 2010-2011

Mary Lynn Archibald’s Accidental Cowgirl

Accidental Cowgirl: Six Cows, No Horse and No Clue is Mary Lynn Archibald’s hilarious and poignant memoir of twelve years she and her husband spent trying vainly to run a small cattle ranch in far northern California.

ML Archibald, Wine Country Writer
1083 Vine Street, #185
Healdsburg, CA 95448
Phone/Fax: (707) 395-0542
Business Hours: M-F, 9-5 PST (PDT)

Author of two touching memoirs, Briarhopper: A History, and Accidental Cowgirl: Six Cows, No Horse and No Clue.

accidentalcowgirl.com
www.redroom.com/author/mary-lynn-i-archibald
www.winecountrywriter.com

95% Naked: Fictions and Nonfictions, edited by Dan Coshnear

Some say there’s a thick line between nakedness and indecency, some say there’s no difference, and still others contend that in this and all things, there’s a 5% margin of error. The ten of us, fictioners and nonfictioners, dress  as variously as any ten you’ll meet, but when we write, we’re 95% naked.

The writers: Dan Coshnear, Kathleen DePuydt, Elaine Maikovska, Jennie Orvino, J.L. Parsons, H.B. Reid, Linda Loveland Reid, Jo-Anne Rosen, Teresa Ruden, Lee Alan Stein

Wordrunner Press $12.95
To arrange a reading or interview: dan@coshnear.org

To purchase: https://www.createspace.com/3417260 or search at amazon.com

The Remembrance Album of Harriet Pruden by Richard K. Pate

Richard K. Pate’s work of historical fiction is now available at Booklocker.com or at Amazon. The Remembrance Album of Harriet Pruden effectively fuses an authentic 19th century pioneer-settler poetry collection with a fictional narrative, revealing an endearing story spanning eight decades; a true American love story from the Old West.

The poetry collection around which this work is built is, according to Rick, a Narrative Poetry Anthology. The term means “a collection of poems by multiple authors which chronicles the same story, in real time, as the story unfolds or progresses.” Rick asserts that this may be the only known example.

You can get more information or order this book at www.rkpate.com.

Katherine Hastings’s New Book Updraft

Founder of Sonoma County’s WordTemple readings and publications, Katherine Hastings has a new book of poems coming out this spring from Finishing Line Press. Pre-orders are now welcome for Katherine’s new collection.

You can order on-line by going to http://www.finishinglinepress.com Once there, click on “New Releases” and then scroll down to the author’s name.

Finishing Line Press
P. O. Box 1626
Georgetown KY   40325

Toni Wilkes’s Stepping Through Moons

Santa Rosa poet and host of the Londenberry Salon, Toni Wilkes is also one of Finishing Line’s newest authors.

You can order on-line by going to http://www.finishinglinepress.com Once there, click on “New Releases” and then scroll down to the author’s name.

Finishing Line Press
P. O. Box 1626
Georgetown KY   40325

Catharine Bramkamp’s Don’t Write Like You Talk:
A Smart Girl’s Guide to Practical Writing and Editing

You Should Not … Write Like You Talk

OMG: Don’t write like you talk! We live in a culture saturated by improper English and grammar where continual text messages, incoherent posts on Twitter or Facebook, and poorly written emails pass as writing. Well, time to toss out those embarrassing grammar errors and change your “naughty” (a.k.a., lazy) writing ways. Smart Girls ready to improve their writing will not only laugh their way through this funny, entertaining and informative book, but also learn tips, tricks and insight to: Sex in the City (the book not the movie)  Don’t Write Like You Talk: A Smart Girl’s Guide to Practical Writing and Editing helps writers of all skill levels understand basic principles to improve all writing, from emails to blogs — and from short stories to novels. Using fun, sassy and useful examples, Don’t Write Like You Talk provides tools to polish your writing — or just look really smart. Put a little moxie back into your writing.

Available on Amazon right now!

Catharine Bramkamp, Writing Coach: 707 478 1855
www.YourBookStartsHere.com