Stardust and Fate: The Blueroad Reader is the first volume in a collected series of new writing and art from the road, featuring the works of nearly four dozen established and emerging writers, poets, and printmakers from North America. The stories, essays, and poems in Stardust and Fate tour some of many routes -- seen and otherwise -- running through people's lives, in real and imagined journeys, literal and figurative, past and present. Pieces include fiction, literary journalism, verse, and memoir: offbeat, quirky, surprising, deep. Handsomely printed and illustrated with original wood engravings, the collection explores some of the intersections and side roads of landscape, history, people, places, curiosity, wanderlust, memory, moment, chance, and change. Neither travelogue nor guidebook, Stardust and Fate instead features pieces traversing a range of personal and political territories, where motion drives the narrative and people find themselves facing scenes sometimes unsettled, yet often sublime. In part tribute to William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways -- where, as he noted, the back roads on the old gas station maps were blue -- these stories and poems seek the unknown while celebrating a quiet restlessness running through us all.

Stardust and Fate: The Blueroad Reader (Blueroad Readers)

Travel

Robert Bly

Bill Holm

Nancy Paddock

Richard Robbins

Joyce Sutphen

Thomas R. Smith

Freya Manfred

Joseph Hutchison

Carol Barrett

John Calvin Rezmerski

Ron Gower

Candace Black

Roger Sheffer

Mark Dewey

Ed Higgins

Travel Writing

Blueroad Press

A Song at Twilight: Of Alzheimer's and Love is a feature-length memoir by acclaimed Minnesota poet Nancy Paddock. The book tells the story of her parents' descent into the netherworld of Alzheimer's, and the challenges and choices for care that she and her sisters faced while confronting this most baffling and tragic of diseases, now afflicting millions of people and their families. This is one daughter's story of Lois and Ralph Pearson, whose love of life and each other transcended the darkest moments of war, separation, heartache, and family tragedy to achieve a memorable state of grace spanning six decades of marriage. 
Paddock recalls her parents' early lives together on St. Paul's East Side, including their playful courtship on the city's ice rinks, as well as her own fond recollections of growing up in the post-war glow of the 1950s and '60s. Reflecting in part on the nature of memory, her book examines the confounding mysteries surrounding Alzheimer's as manifested in Lois and Ralph's experience, while remembering some of the stories that marked one family's journey through life. 
As scientists, researchers, and health-care professionals seek solutions for a growing ''epidemic'' of dementia in an aging population, families from all walks of life face a litany of issues for caring for their failing loved ones, including rising costs, social and political cross-currents, and institutional inertia in the nursing-home industry, among many. Against the odds, A Song at Twilight seeks ''the perfect place'' of care, dignity, and respect for our elders. 
At once tribute, chronicle, meditation, and self-exploration amid great uncertainty, A Song at Twilight searches for meaning in fading photographs and memories while celebrating the ties that bind. For Nancy Paddock, the quest becomes an exploration of the map of her own heart, a journey of struggle, spirit, discovery, and surprise--in gratitude for life's gift of renewal found even in the harshest regions of experience--the story of how love indeed endures.

A Song at Twilight - Of Alzheimer's and Love

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Poems by Nancy Paddock. Two original woodcuts by Lynne Burgess.

Trust the Wild Heart

Red Dragonfly Press

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Books by Nancy Paddock