Ranging from third person accounts to essays in the form of notes, instructions, and extended meditations, this collection of creative nonfiction unfurls like an idiosyncratic playlist of the possibilities available to the writer of creative nonfiction.\nThe title essay tells the story of Vollmer's growing up in rural North Carolina, and catalogs the psychological pressures exerted by a religion that, while all-consuming for the author, seemed invisible to the rest of the world.\nWritten using a variety of forms and points of view, these immersive, voice-driven essays are a testament to the dexterity of the form: 
- An essay in the form of instructions for how to write a love story centers on two young star-crossed lovers at a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school. 
- A story of a trip to a mountain home built to resemble a castle reveals a secret underground bunker that houses tens of thousands of dollars' worth of Nazi militaria. 
- An essay written in the form of notes takes stock of forbidden music. 
- At the story of a husband and wife who take a walk after dark, encounter a spectacular cosmic phenomenon, and return home to discover a distraught child. 
- An investigation into NASA's Symphonies of the Planets, an album of electromagnetic impulses emitted by various planets, which was transformed into sound waves, occasions an extended meditation on space, music, and the meaning of sound. 
- An eyewitness account of the aftermath of the shooting at Virginia Tech considers the surreal and sorrowful reactions to an unfathomable violence. 
- In another essay, a preoccupation with his inevitable death causes Vollmer to imagine who his wife might remarry, and the cataloguing of his potential replacement's superior characteristics and preoccupations creates a kind of portrait in reverse. 
- An essay that unfolds in a single paragraph recounts the house of Vollmer's best friend, which has since been razed, and becomes a requiem for the loss of a childhood filled with Nerf footballs, a farting dog, Intelevision track pads, and an obsession with finding hidden messages in rock music. 
- A retelling of a trip with his family to visit his parents in their mountain home over Thanksgiving becomes an occasion to grieve a recent miscarriage, while dramatizing peculiar family dynamics and bearing witness to the beginning stages of a mother's early onset dementia.

This World is Not Your Home

Literature & Fiction

Matthew Vollmer

Essays & Correspondence

Eastover Press LLC

In her award-winning collection, YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION, author Louise Marburg captures turning points in the lives of twelve disparate women. Marburg's crisp, clear-eyed prose, infused with dark humor, reveals the inevitable collapse of pretension beneath the struggles of loneliness, death, and the all too human need to be seen. From a pre-teen attempting to understand her father's suicide to a ninety-year-old caught in shadows of past marital abuse, each of these women is made to confront the reality that change is the only certainty. This collection, Marburg's finest yet, invites us to face ourselves and our own life journeys with sympathy, humor, and courage.

You Have Reached Your Destination

Marburg, Louise

Literary

Intimacies in Borrowed Light: Poems is Darius Stewart's first book-length collection of poems drawn from his three previous chapbooks in addition to new poems not collected in those volumes. The result is a book that is more than the sum of its parts, but one that coalesces around themes of love, addiction, violence, sexual identity, and the corporeal body to betray the intimate moments that illuminate, especially, Black gay male experiences.\nDiscovering the self is fraught enough, let alone under the ever-present threat of HIV and AIDS. Ranging from the private to the confessional, the lyrical to the narrative, the elegiac to the celebratory, Stewart's writing is gritty, often blunt, but always beautiful as he strives to understand the grief of lost love and lost youth without losing hope.

Intimacies in Borrowed Light: poems

Stewart, Darius

Poetry

Author of Mrs. Rossi's Dream, a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver and Bronze Winner (War & Military Adult Fiction); and A Mother's Tale & Other Stories, a Foreword Reviews INDIES Bronze Winner\nFrom Vietnam to America, this story collection, jewel-like, evocative and layered, brings to the readers a unique sense of love, passions and the tragedy of rape, all together contrasting a darker theme of perils. The titular story captures a simple love story that transcends cultural barriers. The opening story "A Woman-Child" brings the shy eroticism of adolescence set against a backdrop of the seaside with its ever present ecological beauty. A youthful love affair between an older American man and a much younger Vietnamese girl has its poignant brevity in "All the Pretty Little Horses." In "The Yin-Yang Market" magical realism and the beauty of innocence abounds in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. "A Mute Girl's Yarn" tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child's fairy book.\nBringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb by their own doing to the call of fate, their desire to survive never dying, it is a great journey to inhabit this world where redemption of human goodness arises out of violence and beauty to become part of its essential mercy.

All The Rivers Flow Into The Sea: and other stories

Ha, Khanh

United States

Hidden Cargoes

Arthur, Chris

Until All You See Is Sky is a report from the front lines of a first-generation American life: growing up as the outsider, parenting without a clue, and persevering in plague times. From the vital meaning of Stan Smiths at the Payless Shoes in his Tampa childhood to what you should have ordered at the now-closed best bakery in Manhattan, from a childhood as a first-generation Greek-Cuban boy who has never lived in Greece or Cuba to being a modern parent wondering how to negotiate life in a pandemic, George Choundas has a story to tell. This award-winning author of short stories now turns to nonfiction, telling true stories with playful language and engaging wit. He sits in the lobby of the Boston Parker House Hotel at dawn to write and imagines what is going on in every head but his own; he survives in a elementary new school by means of The Illiad; he imagines the ends of all the near-strangers who populate our lives; and he wanders through Midtown Manhattan mapping the geography of its idiosyncratic but thoroughly intriguing denizens and visitors with the eye of an expert anthropologist of everyday life. These are the best sort of essays-full of unforgettable characters rendered with clarity and compassion by an inventive and imaginative writer at the top of his form.

Until All You See Is Sky

Humor & Entertainment

Choundas, George

Humor

Richard LeBlond has had quite a life-he's been stranded on a Montana mountaintop, chased by a bear in Labrador, splashed through torrential downpours to document the unsuccessful mating game of the spadefoot toad, crossed a union picket line as a teenager in Oregon, and wrangled errant lovers on a Cape Cod dune as a park ranger. LeBlond travels across North America with his eyes and ears open, and reports in these essays with clarity and humor on the natural world and the two- and four-legged animals who inhabit it. His wit and compassion for the foibles and blessings of being human shine through in each chapter. He also shares what he has learned about the supportive role writing can play in the aging process.

Homesick for Nowhere

LeBlond,Richard

Travel

Exquisite by September

Hawkins, Shayla

The Cutleaf Reader Volume 2 collects short stories, essays, and poetry by some of the best established writers of our time, as well as exciting work from emerging authors. Perfect for college and graduate classrooms and for readers who prefer print editions, this collection exemplifies the best work of contemporary writers, giving readers a chance to sample a broad variety of approaches to fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in current literature. Cutleaf has been celebrated by the online community, and the journal is annually anthologized in print form.

The Cutleaf Reader: Volume Two

In The Sins of Sweet Mortality, Marilyn Fox and Nancye McCrary combine poetry and painting, juxtaposing voice, image, and sensation, to create a multi-layered collection that readers will view as rich, textured, and full of possibility. Poetry and painting communicate and illustrate the long history of humanity. They tell the story of our journey through the centuries, documenting in artistic forms both the ordinary and the extraordinary in human experience. Both aspire for a kind of beauty that can bring tears to our eyes. Both aim far beyond what educational theorist Maxine Greene called "the anesthesia of daily human activity." As the poet Wallace Stevens opined, because poetry and painting operate at the intersection of imagination and reality, these art forms assume a prophetic stature and become a "vital assertion of self." In this book we explore how assertion of self in confluent poetry and painting can enhance the reading and viewing experience while maintaining the friction of creative independence. The intent is to awaken the reader/observer to imagine what may not be immediately obvious in either language or image alone. The convergence of both elements-the visual and the literary-are layered like a palimpsest, inviting the audience to uncover other worlds.

The Sins of Sweet Mortality: An Artistic Confluence

Fox, Marilyn

McCrary, Nancye

Arts & Photography

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