Sonoma County Literary Update

Sonoma County Writers Published in 2015

Igor Goldkind – Is She Available?

A collection of poetry, art, comics, music and animation, Is She Available? is published by Chameleon Publishing in both hardcover and eBook editions:
Amazon product page : http://tinyurl.com/is-she-available-com
GooglePlay: http://tinyurl.com/Is-she-Googleplay
iTunes link: http://tinyurl.com/mmp4g7e

“Is She Available? is an experiment, and reading it feels more like an act of discovery… nonetheless there’s a thrill to scrolling through its pages. It’s an ambitious step toward what digital media can (and will) be.” ~Chicago Tribune

Spoken word/jazz tracks may be listened to here: https://soundcloud.com/igor-goldkind/sets/is-she-available-spoken-word
View the animations here: http://content.madefire.com/s-199904c1dc094e0589f5987c5ce3f942/index.html#

Sandra Lofaso Sheffer – Dreams and Journeys in Poetry and Prose

“They all had dreams / before the journeys,” our immigrant ancestors. The author’s emigrated from Hungary.

How did her fourteen-year -old mother, a gifted pianist, work her way through a Hungarian high school because her father would not pay to educate a girl? What happened after she became editor of Pictures and Decorations, a magazine on Broadway in the 1920s?

What happened to Cinderella centuries after she married the prince?

Why did Sherlock Holmes’ ghost appear in a San Francisco boarding house in the 1950’s?

Find the answers to these questions and explore matters of the head and of the heart in Dreams and Journeys in Poetry and Prose by Sandra Lofaso Sheffer, a collection of poems, stories and one-act plays on consignment in the poetry section of Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma.

Jean Hegland – Still Time

From the author of Into the Forest, a moving novel about memory, Shakespeare’s green worlds, and the power of reconciliation. For over fifty years, John’s faith in the work of William Shakespeare has shaped his life as both a professor and a man. Even when his mental powers are diminished by dementia, and his beloved wife has reluctantly moved him to a residential care facility, he continues to use his knowledge of the plays to try to make sense of his fractured world. Yet, when his only child, Miranda—with whom he has not spoken since a dreadful misunderstanding a decade earlier—comes to visit, John begins to question some of his deepest convictions. In his devotion to the Bard, did he lose his way? Did he wrong the child who wronged him? As the story of an imperfect father and a wounded daughter’s efforts to achieve an authentic connection before it is too late, Still Time celebrates redemption and the gift of second chances.

“The wonderful Jean Hegland returns with a moving, beautiful story.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Only a master could bring off this feat. Jean Hegland brings it off.”
—Rebecca Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex

“Still Time is a novel Shakespeare would be proud of.”
—David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and Shakespeare’s Words

Katherine Hastings, editor – Digging Our Poetic Roots: Poems from Sonoma County

Digging Our Poetic Roots — Poems from Sonoma County is a collection of poems by Sonoma County authors written, in large part, in response to mini-essays and writing prompts Katherine Hastings sent out during her tenure as Sonoma County Poet Laureate (2014 — 2016). With 43 poets and 84 pages of poetry, Digging sings from all corners of the County and showcase many different styles, voices and entrances to poetry.

“What pleasure to read these poems from Sonoma County poets both new to the craft and well-accomplished on the path. From the intimacy of the Sunday dinner table to the unforgettable image of a funeral gondola in Venice, these are poems that reach toward the world to meet it at the precipice. Connecting to nature, art, myth, and back to self scavenging for truth in the inner journey, the poems here remind me that the act of writing is both a call and response, the most artful kind of listening.” — Jennifer K. Sweeney

Edited by Katherine Hastings. Contributing editors: James McLaughlin Award winner Jennifer K. Sweeney, New York poet and writer Lee Slonimsky, and Patrick Cahill, San Francisco poet and co-editor of Ambush Review.

Word Temple Press, 104 pages. Available on Amazon, at readings and directly from Katherine Hastings.

Julia Park Tracey – Veronika Layne Has a Nose for News

Booktrope Editions is pleased to announce the second in a series, Veronika Layne Has a Nose for News, penned by Julia Park Tracey. The series, Hot Off the Press, features Veronika Layne, an intrepid young newspaper reporter in search of the truth and the next big scoop. The first book in the series, Veronika Layne Gets the Scoop, was awarded Honorable Mention in General Fiction at the 2015 San Francisco Book Festival, and was a number one bestselling book on Amazon in December 2014. In the new book, Veronika, sassy tattooed reporter, is on the trail of another news scoop, and this time there’s a Hollywood TV house-flipper, a pirate and his treasure, new friends and old friends, long-distance love and heartache. Will Veronika find out what true love – and true gold – are worth?

Author Park Tracey is well known in the Bay Area for her regular features in Oakland and Alameda Magazine and East Bay Monthly; she was the founding editor of the Alameda Sun, and later, its publisher. Her adventures and experiences as a reporter give the Hot Off the Press stories their authentic newspaper setting and characters. Available through Ingram and any online bookstore, in trade paperback and e-book formats. $10.95 (136 pages)
Print ISBN: 978‐1‐5137‐0176‐9
Epub ISBN: 978‐1‐5137‐0198‐1

Jeane Slone – She Flew Bombers From the Factories to the Bases During WW II

Audio book. A funny, sad, and heroic historical fiction about heroine Violet Willey and her colleagues who join the experimental civil service organization, the Women Air Force Service Pilots. All the escapades from meeting the Soviet Night Witches to brushes with death and sabotage are based on fact. These daring young women fight against gender discrimination as they portray a vital role for a nation in crisis. Length: 6 hours and 32 minutes.
http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/She-Flew Bombers-Audiobook/B013TBEIEK

Pat Nolan and friends – Poetry For Sale

The eleven haikai no renga included in Poetry For Sale were written over period of nearly thirty years by Pat Nolan and his renku collaborators, Keith Kumasen Abbott, Sandy Berrigan, Gloria Frym, Steven Lavoie, Joen Eshima Moore, Maureen Owen, Michael Sowl, and John Veglia. This collection of linked poetry presents a fascinating excursion in comparative literature by a cross-section of exceptional, widely-published American poets. What these poets bring to the collaborative linking of stanzas is a visceral sense of the poetic that transcends two disparate languages and the gap of centuries. In these pages haikai no renga is synthesized as a brief, highly suggestive, well spoken, maddeningly ambiguous, read-between-the-lines kind of poetry tuned to a common understanding.

Nullain House Press: 152 pages ~ $16 ~ paper ~ ISBN978-0-9840310-4-7

For more information: http://nuallainhousepublishers.com/poetry-for-sale/

Daedalus Howell – Quantum Deadline

A genre hybrid of science fiction and detective fiction, the darkly comic novel is the first of a series of Petaluma-themed books called The Lumaville Labyrinth.

When his newsroom intern jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge, 40-something reporter Daedalus Howell’s reputation also takes a dive. Five years later, he’s still trying to clear his conscience and his byline when Jude, a lost 11-year-old would-be thief, seeks his help to get home. Ever on the prowl for a career-redeeming story, Howell is game but there’s a catch – the kid claims to be from a parallel universe. The reporter soon learns that anything is possible on the strange streets of Lumaville, a sleepy Northern California college town in the grips of a startup boom. As hard-drinking Howell grumbles about the waning relevance of his profession and generation, he uncovers a maze of dark truths that connect the boy, his brilliant ex-flame and a ruthless tech mogul. When Jude disappears, Howell’s assignment is clear – save the boy, write the story of a lifetime, and make his deadline without getting killed. A rousing kickoff to the Lumaville Labyrinth series, Quantum Deadline is an entertaining, tell-your-friends tale of suspense and self-satire as the tantalizing prospect of redemption hangs in the balance.

Quantum Deadline is published by Berkeley-based FMRL and Distributed by Ingram Book Company. It’s available in paperback from better bookstores everywhere (including Copperfield’s Books) and as an ebook from Amazon, Apple iBooks, Kobo, Nook, and other online retailers.

Quantum Deadline (The Lumaville Labyrinth, Book One) • FMRL • Paperback • 250 pages
Release: August 2015 | Trade Paperback & Ebook | ISBN-13:978-0-9671001-7-3 | Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015908076 | DaedalusHowell.com

Leona Silberberg – Every Word an Arrow

Every Word an Arrow is a fictionalized memoir about one mother’s battle for justice in the California family court. Josie Blume faces her sudden and shocking plunge into adversity with humor and tenacity and is guided by powerful visionary dreams through a corrupt and unjust system. She returns to the Montana college town of her youth and finds herself among an eclectic tribe of friends and neighbors who become her rag-tag legal team and fight alongside her. She learns the truth about family court and becomes a warrior for social justice.

The book is available on Kindle or Amazon Createspace and will be released on Kobo, BN, Ibooks and smashwords in September. The author can also contact me directly to order a paperback: leonasilberberg@gmail.com

Marilyn Skinner Lanier – Hardpan

Set in Clark, Wyoming in the mid-1950s, Hardpan tells the story of a young ranch family caught in the vicissitudes of the changing American West after World War II. After returning from the war to manage the family ranch in eastern Oregon, Kurt Glover confronts familial challenges to his new role. His decision to relocate his family to a remote cattle ranch in Wyoming introduces risks to his young family that he never imagined. It is a tale of external forces tearing at the ranching roots of a family, recounted from the points-of-view of the father, Kurt, and his older daughter, Linda. With the disintegration of the life they have known together, while Linda is thrust into the glamour world of televised wrestling, instant religion, and people desperate to reclaim a daughter they have lost through a tragic accident, her father is struggling to reestablish himself as the family breadwinner by taking on jobs in central California that are foreign to his upbringing.

A chapter from this novel was the basis for a short film, The Fence, directed by Matt Silas and selected for the director’s award at the UCLA Film Festival in 2008, and again for the Ashland Film Festival in 2009.

To be released August 1, 2015. See: www.marilynskinnerlanier.com. Pre-orders of novel available on Amazon.

Daniel Coshnear – Homesick Redux

Daniel Coshnear’s Homesick Redux was selected by Fiction Fix guest editor Raleigh Rand, author of Brightleaf: A Novel, to win its second novella award. The novella is a masterfully non-linear tale that follows the life of Reggie, whose saccharine-sweet memories of the past fall apart as reality sets in: his past love is married, his mother is dying from A.L.S., and his daughter Lucy needs him to step up and take care of her needs. “With his rare perception of the human landscape, Dan Coshnear takes us upon one man’s odyssey through a labyrinth of loneliness, loving and loss,” says HB Reid, author of The Adventures of Charles T. Woolley.

Dan Coshnear is the author of two collections of stories, Jobs & Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine 2001) and Occupy & Other Love Stories (Kelly’s Cove Press 2012). His stories have been published in Fourteen Hills, juked, The Missouri Review, Third Coast, and Zyzzyva.

To purchase the book in paperback or read it online (free the first two months), and for more information: http://fictionfix.net

Sons of Noir: Murder and Mayhem by San Francisco North Bay Writers

Edited by Ed Coletti and David Madgalene. (Round Barn Press). Murder and mayhem by San Francisco North Bay Writers. Come with us now to an earlier time when we can still see enough of the darkness to distinguish the light. For example, read Ed Coletti’s “His Mother Was a Whore” to find out what happens when drug runner Mickey Morgan bumps into his doppelganger in the men’s room at the Bogotá Colombia International Airport. Find out who the real villain is in Pat Nolan’s “Gone Missing.” You’ll never feel the same about the postman, or his predilection for ringing twice, after reading Gary Brandt’s hilarious send-off, “Cigarette Breakfast.” David Beckman tells you what friends are good for when Jimi Preston attempts to set things straight in Beckman’s story, “In the Mission.” Meet Omar Olvidos, the brainchild of Jonah Raskin, a gun-eschewing detective who finally gets wise when “Omar Olvidos Gets His Gun.” Meet “Lt. Oni Cha,” the brainchild of David Madgalene, a strong, independent policewoman who don’t take no mess. And, meet Sam Sludge, the brainchild of Waights Taylor, Jr., a private dick with a personality all his own who parodies the legendary Sam Spade in name only.

Buy from authors or at http://www.amazon.com/Sons-Noir-Murder-Francisco-Writers/dp/0692378111/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1433265044&sr=8-1&keywords=sons+of+noir

Jo-Anne Rosen – What They Don’t Know: Selected Fiction

The 18 stories in Jo-Anne Rosen’s first collection probe the lies and secrets, the “fictions” in the lives of of parents and children, siblings, Germans and Jews, confused adolescents, and elderly lovers.

“The actors in these beautiful, often sad stories carry with them complex histories of desire and pain, often longing for what they can’t or shouldn’t have. You’ve met them, fathers and mothers, daughters, sisters, uncles, lovers, presented here with humor and dignity, with a keen and dispassionate eye, reminiscent of another great Canadian storyteller, Rosen’s cast will surprise you, instant by instant.”
– Daniel Coshnear, Occupy & Other Love Stories

“In Rosen’s book, amidst gorgeous imagery, people we care about stumble through attraction and betrayal. And move over Portnoy, with your raw liver in a milk bottle. Let a girl show you how it’s done. The title story contains the most imaginative portrayal of self-pleasuring you’ll ever read.”
– Norma Watkins, The Last Resort: Taking the Mississippi Cure

Wordrunner Press, ISBN 978-1-941066-07-2
perfect bound 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 280 pages
Available at www.createspace.com/5345619 or on Amazon, as well as in Kindle and Smashwords editions.

Ed Coletti – The Problem with Breathing

Ed Coletti’s new poetry collection The Problem with Breathing  has been published by Edwin E. Smith (Little Rock).  Copies may be purchased through Amazon, which describes the poetry book as “a collection of highly personal meditations on aging and reconciliations with life’s vicissitudes.” Coletti has published many books of poetry and has had work in North American Review, The Brooklyn Rail, ZYZZYVA, Dunes Review, So It Goes: Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine (YJHM), Spillway, Lilliput Review, Big Bridge, Noir Nation, Hawai i Pacific Review, Italian Americana, California Quarterly Review, The New Formalist, Blueline, The New Verse News, and Pinyon. He is Internet publisher of Ed Coletti’s P3 and also No Money In Poetry. More recent poetry collections have included When Hearts Outlive Minds, released 2011, and Germs, Viruses, and Catechisms,  December 2013. Books may be purchased at:
www.edwinesmithpublishing.com/?page=shop/flypage&product_id=142 or
www.amazon.com/Problem-Breathing-Ed-Coletti/dp/0991090470/ref=s

Charles O. Prickett – Remembering Mississippi Freedom Summer

The year is 1964. Imagine a country where you are a slave. You have no rights. You cannot attend public schools, the public library, restaurants, parks, churches, or movie theaters. You cannot vote or meet and organize with others like yourself who are denied these rights. That country is the United States of America, in the State of Mississippi. You are black. Remembering Mississippi Freedom Summer is a first-person account of Charles Prickett, a college student and civil rights activist, who worked during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. This moving account explores rural Mississippi and the black community’s efforts to change the stifling and brutal system of racism that touched every life. All these efforts were met with violent resistance. What emerges is a triumph of democracy, as Mississippi became the state with more black elected public officials than any other state in the U.S.

Wordrunner Press, ISBN: 978-1941066-06-5
This book is in the SRJC bookstores and Copperfield’s. Available on Amazon and at: https://www.createspace.com/5094129. A Kindle edition is also available.

Michael Nagler – The Nonviolence Handbook

This new offering by Michael Nagler is both a “how-to” manual for activists and an in-depth study of the potential of nonviolence, which can be used by anyone to better their lives and the lives of those around them. It condenses thirty year of experience Michael has had in teaching and practicing what Gandhi called “the greatest force that mankind has been endowed with.” It can be ordered from your local bookstore or Amazon Smile and is also available on audible.com. For more about nonviolence see the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma.

Jonah Raskin – A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature

Jonah Raskin’s new book, A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature, explores 400 years of writing in North America about woods, forests, Indians, settlers, pioneers and the West. There are hefty sections on Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Austin, F. Scott Fitzgerald and more, plus discussion of the Puritans, Lewis and Clark, the romantics and the notion of the wasteland. A useful guide to our national literature, A Terrible Beauty is also a helpful introduction to contemporary ecological and environmental concerns. (Available in local bookstores and on Amazon; $15.95)

Else Rosager – So Far

As well as being a tender celebration of the natural world, So Far is a courageous exploration of the experience of trauma and healing. The images and insights in these quiet poems and lush photographs will leave readers feeling moved, soothed—and inspired.
—Jean Hegland, author of Into the Forest and Still Time

This is Else Rosager’s first book. So Far is a self-published collection of poems and photographic images. Book launch and other readings to be announced.

January 2015 • 64 pages • paper • full color • $20.00 + $2.75 shipping.

Copies of this book are available from the author:
Else Rosager, P.O. Box 544, Graton, CA 95444 — or poetwriter@sonic.net.

Catharine Bramkamp–Future Girls

On October 10, 2145, eighteen-year-old Charity Northquest’s whole future is ahead of her–and the future sucks.

On October 11, 2145, she unexpectedly has a chance to fix it. When her best friend is reported killed, but then re-appears the next day as an old woman, everything Charity has been taught is called into question. Even if she does not believe in time travel, she has little choice. So the ill-prepared Charity travels back to the mysterious and captivating 21st century where her single purpose of changing the future fades with the increasingly more urgent question of whether she can survive the past.

Released by Eternal Press, December 2014. Click to purchase print edition; or Kindle edition.

Robert K. Koslowsky–The Upstart Startup: How Cerent Transformed Cisco

Robert K. Koslowsky’s latest book, The Upstart Startup: How Cerent Transformed Cisco (ISBN: 978-1505303827, $21.95), recounts the story of a startup company that achieved major success in the telecom marketplace and has since spawned many other innovative companies in both Silicon Valley and Telecom Valley. The author captures not only the colorful individuals involved with Fiberlane-becomes-Cerent, but also the vibrant interplay of technology, business, money, politics, and competing cultures that defined the telecom industry before, during, and after the “dot.com” bust.

Cerent’s co-founder, Ajaib Bhadare, says, “I very much enjoyed reading Rob’s carefully researched and well-written book about not just the history of telecom but also how Cerent played such a major role in enabling Cisco Systems to enter and alter the telecommunications space.”

More info: http://robkoslowsky.weebly.com/blog
Order book: https://www.createspace.com/5141130
Order Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R3K3TMG