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

In a celebration of family, history, culture and Chicago's South Side--as seen and heard through the eyes and ears of two lifelong friends who share an abiding love of America's great art form jazz--award-winning writer Philip S. Bryant presents a remarkable new collection of poems and prose pieces. A brilliantly conceived memoir in verse, Stompin' at The Grand Terrace arcs, spins, dances and whirls across 'an infinite universe' of music that helped define a country, an era and the author's life. 
Bryant beautifully captures the past in imagery taut, colorful and enduring, while describing the sound, motion and power of music as it mixes with memory. In the great tradition of jazz poetry, Stompin' at The Grand Terrace fuses the two art forms into something new, personal and transcendent. 
An accompanying CD features more than a dozen original compositions-inspired by Bryant's poems-by renowned jazz pianist Carolyn Wilkins. As lifelong Chicago friends, Phil and Carolyn perform A Stompin' Suite: he reads, she plays-a cross-country collaboration over time and place.

Stompin' at The Grand Terrace: A Jazz Memoir in Verse

Biographies & Memoirs

Philip Bryant

Arts & Literature

A beautiful collection of poems about nature, travel, country life, and the ''art of the unexpected,'' by a talented Midwestern writer. On the Farm, Down the Road is new collection of poems by Minnesota writer, teacher, and editor Ronald Gower. Exploring the mysteries and delights of rural living and traveling across a lifetime of experiences, Gower's poems map the intricacies and unexpected pleasures of chance encounters amid cycles of seasons. Woodsman, scholar, farmer, and family man, Gower casts a wry and curious eye upon a range of pursuits and adventures--alert to their surfaces yet keenly aware of what lies beneath. Reflective, lyrical, quirky, and deep, On the Farm, Down the Road sings to the nature residing in--and around--all things and people.

On the Farm, Down the Road - Collected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Ronald Gower

Poetry

Traversing hidden landscapes of memory and the American West, Other Americas, by noted Minnesota poet Richard Robbins, explores back roads and intersections of private history and public life--set against a vast terrain of rugged beauty and mystery. In evocative, haunting language, Robbins summons a cast of visionaries and ghosts seeking promises of the country's past while scanning uncharted, uncertain horizons ahead. 
From beaches and streets of Southern California across empty desert pans to lost mountain lakes high in the Rockies, Other Americas features a series of poems by a wonderful writer, illuminating shadowlands across an expanse of time and space.

Other Americas

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

Community & Culture

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Books by Blueroad Press