They Plotted Revenge Against America

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGezsRbUMgQ

Lily's Odyssey

Lily's Odyssey
ISBN-13: 978-0984098453
All Things That Matter Press
Carol Smallwood

Lily's Odyssey unfolds in three parts with the inevitability, impact, and resolution of a Greek play. The dialogue rings true, the concrete conveyed along with moods and half-tones to paint Midwestern middle class flawed characters with poignancy. The psychological detective novel explores the once largely unacknowledged: it is not only soldiers who get post-traumatic stress disorder and child abuse whether it is overt or covert incest is a time bomb. From daughter to grandmother, Lily's voyage is told with lyricism, humor, and irony using a poet's voice to distill contemporary American women's changing role in religion, marriage, and family.

Carol Smallwood has appeared in English Journal, The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, The Writer's Chronicle, The Detroit News. Short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Award for Best New Writing in 2009, a National Federation of State Poetry Societies Award Winner, she's included in Who's Who in America, and Contemporary Authors. Writing and Publishing: The Librarian's Handbook is one of her recent American Library Association books. Contemporary American Women: Our Defining Passages, co-edited, is her 22nd book.

From the Preface:

     Weight of Silence, and Nicolet's Daughter were considered as novel titles but it remained Lily's Odyssey. Odysseus, the epic hero from Greek mythology in The Odyssey, helped by the gods with his band of men, maneuvers the Scylla and Charybdis passage as one of his many adventures in ancient times. Lily, from the Midwest, named by a gardener mother she doesn't remember, struggles with a subconscious she fears will destroy her. Her narrow passage is between reality and disassociation, her time the latter 20th and early 21st Centuries. Her odyssey without help from the gods reflects a passage through linear labyrinths women interpret as round. Lily's fragmentation is echoed in the writing style.


Excerpts:

     That evening after we saw Dr. Schackmann, Cal said, "You must realize that building my practice takes all my energy, and accept that as reality." He was mixing his martini before dinner on the glass-topped mahogany sideboard. As he spoke, I studied the sideboard's inlaid rosewood and ebony squares, again thinking he was a good surgeon, widely respected, and it must have been my fault that I wasn't a good wife.
     I got a coaster and placed it on the sideboard. He frowned and turned it so the pheasant on the coaster squarely faced him. "You don't even know why you're so dissatisfied," he said, and laughed. "How can you not even know that?"

       At the luncheon, I made as many trips as I dared to the restroom without causing people to wonder if something was wrong with me. Inside the unheated cement block room, my long deep breaths came out like smoke signals when I opened and shut my mouth to relieve my clenched jaw, shake my head in disbelief. Each time I went in, I saw cracks in the ceiling that I hadn't seen before. Some natural light came through a small casement window dotted with snow, and I recalled making dots of snow on windows into fairy tale pictures when a child.
       When people had complained about the cold rest rooms to Father Couillard, who was the priest before Father Mulcahy, he'd say, "Enjoy the cold while you can, my friends. Where many of you are headed, it will be plenty hot."


Comments:

Smallwood is a watcher. Her eyes are unblinking. And her ears can detect the mercurial ticks of a heart. As a storyteller, she's as sure as any Preakness jockey. She knows when words need to clip-clop up to the gate, when to bide, and when to unfetter them, to let the truth loose. Truth thunders in Lily's Odyssey.
      -Katie McKy, author of Pumpkin Town, Houghton Mifflin, and Wolf Camp, Tanglewood Press.

Smallwood is an incredibly gifted author with a broad range of experience. She demonstrates commitment to conscience in her work through Michigan Feminist Studies, The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, and Best New Writing 2009.
     -Sandra Potter, CEO & Founder, Dreamcatchers for Abused Children,
http://www.dreamcatchersforabusedchildren.com co-author, Unnecessary Roughness: Till Death Do Us Part;
The Child Abuse Survivor Project.

Literary novel

http://www.amazon.com/Lilys-Odyssey-Carol-Smallwood/dp/0984098453/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271336237&sr=1-1

http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/carolsmallwood

Shooting Angels by Nicolas Sansone

 Shooting Angels by Nicolas Sansone

A NASA Space Shuttle plummets to Earth. A team of eight rescue workers plunges into a treacherous Texan wilderness to recover the wreckage, and become entwined in a cosmic conspiracy. An uncouth disembodied head enslaves an elderly rancher and uses his cellar as the war room of its campaign against God, a noir-style slickster with a buxom blonde wife and a taste for margaritas, who rockets down from the suburbs of Heaven on a comet to do battle with metaphysical evils. "Shooting Angels" races from the jungles of Texas, to the dark corners of undiscovered space, to the innermost reaches of the human mind, to the smoggy streets of Central Heaven, where people are free to give in to their most detestable urges. The novel asks its characters to confront their ordering theories of the universe, and raises questions of how we are to envision divinity in a technological age.

Review from amazon user S. Lemme:
"Shooting Angels" is an immensely creative and eminently page-turning first novel from Nicolas Sansone. Sansone's imagination delivers a world in which the outrageous is entirely believable, the everyday and mundane are eerily unnerving, and God (as well as Mrs. God) is a truly relatable being. This fast-paced and quick read allows readers to readily consider the "big" questions of faith and reality with good measures of humor, compassion and irreverence. Sansone's tight depiction of his large cast of characters, who range from the ordinary to the downright bizarre, contributes to his characters' accessibility and believability (in the face of the extraordinary). After this read, I can only look forward to what will come next from Sansone's rich imagination. Though his characters and their predicaments may be out-of-this-world, to quote the novel, "They are born of the imagination, but so is everything real".

Amazon page:
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Angels-Nicolas-Sansone/dp/0984098488/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t AATMP e-store: https://www.createspace.com/3402575
Author Website:
http://nicksansone.yolasite.com
Author Blog:
http://ikillcutebunny.livejournal.com

Shaman Circus by Gail Gray

 Shaman Circus by Gail Gray

 In New Orleans following Katrina all bets are off; all masks dissolved. “Don’t forget the sham in shaman,” Jacob Laguerre lies to his new apprentice, Alex Hampton. When Alex, a twenty-eight year-old anthropology professor goes on field-study to post-Katrina New Orleans, he enters a chaotic and altered landscape where he’s psychologically, physically and spiritually challenged by the sarcastic mentoring of the mulatto, Laguerre, a current day voudou shaman.  
Both Laguerre’s and Alex’s psyches struggle through stages of transition and rebirth as their lives are enmeshed with a group of quirky fringe-dwellers, as colorful and eccentric as New Orleans itself. Lily Hampton, a sculptor, torn between her love for both men; Mavis, an artist who spent nights in her attic, but survived the floods;  Perry Laguerre, Jacob’s hermaphroditic twin, and Bad Jacqui, lesbian owner of a French Quarter bar: are pulled together to form the cynical but ultimately idealistic team who vow to stay in post-Katrina New Orleans. 
They all follow a taut path between madness and redemption in the no man’s land of Refrigerator Town as they assist in the aftermath and healing of both the city and those who remain. 
Shaman Circus is a magical realism/dark urban fantasy approach to the failure of the levees. This raggle-taggle group discovers how devastated and government-abandoned New Orleans leaves no quarter for societal charades and consumer societies. Cast adrift and crashing together they attempt to make sense of both internal and external wastelands, ultimately leading to transformation and sanctuary.

Review by Steve Lindahl, author of Motherless Soul
"Shaman Circus is a story of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The writing has great detail and provides an understanding of what life was like in that city with clarity that wasn’t in either the news media statistics or the graphic pictures provided at the time of the storm. I was especially affected by a section where an artist was cleaning her studio. When she discovered that one of her works was only half destroyed from water damage, she ripped off the ruined part and kept the rest hoping she could recreate the painting someday. Gray’s images of huge out of control trash fires and colorful Louisiana Voodoo rituals performed in half destroyed warehouses, pulled me into her story and held me there. There was also a fascinating love triangle between Alex, Jacob, and Lily. Their relationships swirled around with almost as much destructive force as the hurricane. Shaman Circus is the type of book that makes its readers want to slow down to carefully pull in every word. It is more than a good read. It is a wonderful journey." -
To purchase Shaman Circus:  Amazon  http://tinyurl.com/yk6b26v
ATTMP Press: https://www.createspace.com/3426747
For info on Gail Gray: http://theshamanpapers.blogspot.com/

For info on ATTMP Press: ATTMP: www.allthingsthatmatterpess.com

Why should I care? Am I my brother's keeper?

Why should I care if people don’t have health care?  I did my pro-life duty by seeing that a seed planted in the uterus has a chance to grow and create a new life.  What happens to the child afterward is not my problem.  I’m not my brother’s keeper.  Children are born with equal rights.  Just because they grow up and can’t get a job to support themselves, is not my problem.  If they get sick it’s because they didn’t take care of themselves.  They deserve what they get.  To care for them is socialism. To give help to those in need is socialism.  We’re a capitalist society.  You make your own way.  We can’t protect everyone. Why do we need a police force?  People can get a gun and protect themselves.  We must protect our freedom to do what we want to whomever we want.  Why would a country take care of its citizens?  That is socialism and socialism is evil. 
Then there’s the fairy tale about a man who healed the sick. Why would he want to do that?  Then he went so far as to feed the hungry.  Why would he do that?  Did he not know that was socialism and socialism is evil? 
Health care is for those who can afford it.  If you can’t, that’s just tough. Am I my brother’s keeper? 

(Sarcastically posted)

Motherless Soul by Steve Lindahl

Motherless Soul is the story of Emily Vinson, a woman whose entire life was impacted by the loss of her mother when she was 2 years old. At 82 Emily contacts a hypnotist hoping to draw out hidden memories and to discover as much as possible about the short time she spent with the woman who gave her life. Glen Wiley, the hypnotist, teaches her more about herself than she had expected. He helps her bring out memories of many past lives, including an experience that took place on a smoke filled battlefield. All of Emily's lives have had the same tragic outcome, the loss of her mother at a young age. Her soul is caught in what Glen calls circularity, meaning that the tragedy will occur again and again unless she can break the pattern. She and Glen must revisit her past lives and use what they learn to find the other souls who are part of the circle. They must use the past to change the future. Emily's stubborn desire to know her mother is realized in intricate and unsettling ways no one could have imagined possible.

Excerpt (from Chapter Four)

Glen asked her to count backwards from one hundred. When she passed fifty-nine he started to guide her saying, “Go back, back further to a time before you were Emily Vinson. Keep going back.” His words seemed to run right through her body, like a shot of whiskey. Glen seemed to be growing distant, although she knew he was right next to her. She kept counting toward zero, even as he spoke.

Emily lost track of the counting. She was certain she’d repeated some numbers, but she tried to keep them coming. She knew she had to do what Glen told her to do. She closed her eyes. Shortly after that the dim light she could make out through her lids faded into absolute darkness.

“You’re slipping through time and space into a place that’s been buried in your heart for ages upon ages. Something important happened to you in this place. You’re starting to remember what it was like: the smells, the sounds, the texture of the world around you.”

Her eyes started to burn. Memories were flowing into her head after a period of nothingness and those sensations were different from what she’d experienced the day before. This time it was as if she were two people. The person she had been before the session began, the old woman nearing the end of her life, was now watching someone else from inside that other person’s body. The other person was very young, but in trouble.

“Talk to me, Emily. Let me know what you’re feeling.”

Emily started to cry. She wasn’t able to hold back. Her cry was the loud wail of a hungry baby. But Emily knew what she felt wasn’t only hunger. Something was very wrong.

Review: Jen Knox (Author of Musical Chairs)
This is a profound work about the cyclic nature of pain and one woman's desire to confront it and move on. The story begins with Emily's search to demystify the mother she never knew, the figure whom she believes to hold the secret that will break a cycle of discontent. Where this leads her is on a journey of self-discovery that begins with a trip to a hypnotist and introduces Emily to generations past. Emily's journey is filled with realizations that grow exponentially, and ultimately lead to a philosophical and spiritual awakening. This book is phenomenal. The chapters are short and engaging, and the writing is fantastic.

For a video reading of an excerpt go to -  Motherless Soul

For more information about Steve Lindahl go to http://www.stevelindahl.blogspot.com/
http://www.stevelindahl.com/

To purchase Motherless Soul go to Amazon, All Things That Matter Press or
Barnes and Noble

Is it time for Revolt?

Is it time for Revolt?
Are Global Warming and Health Care Reform issues politically related?

In discussions about Global Warming, the far right doesn’t buy into the notion that pollution is the cause. In discussions about healthcare reform, the far right doesn’t feel change is needed. There are thousands of scientists who have studied the causes of global warming. Scientists have seldom, if ever, been in total agreement on any issue and it is easy to find scientists that will support one’s political agenda. There are doctors and insurance companies that want things to remain as they are and find political support.

Past arguments to delay implementation of pollution controls on industry was purported that it would hurt the economy. It would require corporations to spend much money to reduce emissions.

Past arguments to prevent controls on financial markets and institutions was that it would inhibit a free market economy. The freewheeling of the financial institutions, without controls, led to the crash on Wall Street, and that hurt the economy. The freewheeling of insurance companies to insure only healthy people, exclude pre-existing conditions and maintain high profits, are fighting to block change with political support.

The middle class is declining as more slide into the poor category. These same people, many without a healthcare program or one that is adequate, support political views that benefit the rich. Why? Brainwashing by highly paid public relations firms know how to tap into the psyche of Middle America. They talk about long waiting lines and substandard care if government controlled. They use terms like communism, socialism and other isms as scare tactics to keep the poor in their place, and people succumb to this propaganda.

In the preamble to our constitution it states, “…promote the general welfare…” It did not mean the general welfare of the rich, but of all Americans. Abe Lincoln expressed in his Gettysburg Address: “…a government of the people, by the people and for the people…“ Not having a government “for the people” is part of the reason 13 colonies revolted. Is it time for another revolt?