"Come home Boy, I got Cancer, Kill me." It was his father's voice, a thing he hadn't heard in twenty years. So begins Portisville, a story of love and betrayal, mystery and murder. Jimmy Wills knows he won't do what Truman Wills has demanded, but he finds himself drawn to the place of his birth by forces he isn't quite able to name. He discovers the town is remarkably the same. But in the course of his short visit, Jimmy begins to uncover disturbing secrets from the past, including the truth about his mother's murder. Truman was charged with the killing, but he was acquitted and the crime has remained unsolved. The murdered woman still haunts the dreams of her son, who was taken away at fourteen and raised by an aunt in North Carolina. Jimmy has tried since then not to think too much about his father, this hard and bitter man who had never once called him on the phone until his eerie demand to be killed. But when Jimmy pulls up to his father's house, rundown now and set deep in the woods, the two men slowly begin to reconnect, with all of the promise and tragedy that entails.

Portisville

Literature & Fiction

Cushman, Steve

Literary

Novello Festival Pr

In Heart With Joy, fifteen-year-old Julian Hale’s life is turned upside down when his mother suddenly moves from North Carolina to Venice, Florida under the pretense of running her parents’ motel and finishing the novel she has been working on for years. While Julian has always been closer to his mother and wants to go with her, she tells him he has to stay with his father until the end of the school year. 
 Six weeks after his mother leaves, Julian’s father decides to run a marathon. This surprises Julian because he has never seen his father exercise, but once he agrees to help him train the two develop the sort of close relationship they’ve never had before. Also, with the help of an elderly neighbor, Julian learns that the most important thing in life is to follow your heart. And Julian’s heart leads him to a passion for cooking and a young cashier at the local grocery store. By the end of the novel, Julian is forced to choose between staying with his father and going to live with his mother. 
 Heart With Joy is an uplifting coming of age novel about cooking and bird watching, about writing and pottery, and about falling in love and the sacrifices we all make. But ultimately, it’s about the importance of following your heart and trusting that it will take you where you need to go.

Heart with Joy

Genre Fiction

Dudley Court Press, LLC

"How Birds Fly" wrestles with fundamental questions of how to adapt to the various roles in which we may find ourselves over the course of a lifetime--that of child, of spouse, of parent. There's nothing coy or hesitating about this collection. Each turn is as unexpected as it is precise, each image as emotionally resonant as it is intellectually complex. "How Birds Fly" is lived, honest, and true. --Charlotte Pense, author of "Many Small Fires""How Birds Fly" is a tender, plain-spoken but impeccably-crafted book of poems that explore honestly what it is to be a father, a son, a husband, an x-ray technician in a hospital where one is daily confronted with pain and mortality. A job that, daily, changes him. Steve Cushman weaves together these themes so skillfully that the poems in the book make a unified whole, each poem flowing into the next. And images of birds, sparrow, hawk, owl, pigeon, sapsucker run like a red thread through the pages holding them further together as if to remind us of the beauty and fragility of those winged creatures. Like life itselfperhaps, as the father tells his small son in one gorgeous poem, "it's like magic, all of it." Each time I read this wonderful book, I loved it more.-Patricia Fargnoli

How Birds Fly (Lena Shull Poetry Competition)

Poetry

St. Andrews University Press

Hopscotch

Livingston Pr

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Books by Cushman, Steve