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New Releases
The Breathless Present:
A Memoir in Four Movements
Carl Vigeland
At once a writer’s autobiography and a road book, with vivid portraits of an unusual group of people—ranging from an early mentor and one-time neighbor, the late poet Archibald MacLeish, to world renowned jazz great Wynton Marsalis (with whose bands Carl Vigeland traveled for many years) and the author’s charismatic, tormented father, also a musician—The Breathless Present tells several intersecting stories in a variety of voices that mirror music’s power to transmute memory and affirm life.
$22.00
Buy it Now
This Road Will
Take Us Closer to the Moon
Linda McCullough Moore
This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon is a life in stories, the life of Margaret Mackenzie, a woman whom the reader comes to love. Weaving back and forth across the years, these stories invite us in, they tell us secrets, whisper mysteries, allowing us to know and feel deep joy, distinct sorrow, the silliness and rich meaning, in the living of one precious lifetime.
“Like Raymond Carver, these linked stories attend unerringly to ordinary moments in ordinary lives. A life revealed in episodes, with breathless flights of imagination…..quiet, insistent, closely focused fiction.”
—Brad Davis
$15.00
Buy it Now
Girls Got Kicks
Lori Lobenstine
Girls Got Kicks… the first ever photo documentary of the badass females, told from a unique angle: their passion for sneakers. From celebrities like WNBA Rookie-of-the Year Tina Charls, legendary b girl Rokafella, and “Downtown’s Sweetheart” Vashtie Kola, to extraordinary young women famous only for their obsessive love of sneaker, Girls Got Kicks celebrates the beauty and diversity of female sneaker fiends the world over. Whether they’re running home in the rain barefoot to save their precious kicks or tearing them up at the skate park, whether they’re matching them to their wedding dress or their basketball uniform, Girls Got Kicks documents how these sneaker lovers push beyond stereotypes, using kicks to be both athletic and sexy, hip and tomboyish, grown and youthful, as they define who they are—and who women can be—on their own terms.
$30.00
Buy it Now
Learning in Mrs. Towne’s House
Tzivia Gover
“Tzivia Gover tells us that according to the educator, Paulo Freire, ‘It is impossible to teach without the courage to love.’ In this beautifully written memoir, Gover musters up the courage to love her students despite the often difficult differences between them. By having the pregnant and parenting teens in her classroom learn to read, write, and recite poetry, Gover exposes her students to a whole new world. Upon reading their poetry, Gover is exposed to a whole new world as well. Learning in Mrs. Towne’s House is a testimony to the power of poetry. Reading it will enrich your life.”
—Lesléa Newman Poet Laureate, Northampton, MA 2008-2010
$18.95
Buy it Now
Recent Releases
High Lonesome
Patricia Lee Lewis
High Lonesome is a pasture on a West Texas ranch, a state of being, an affecting personal mythology. Poet Patricia Lee Lewis writes, “Think how brambles catch her petticoats, hold them ‘til they tear, feed on blood….Say the old woman can find her way, can feel the thorns of walls,” and ”From her kneeling place between two great stones, she sends her voice.” These are poems of landscape and family, heart and perspective. “High Lonesome pulls you into the momentum of its sounds with urgency, shock, serenity and arrival. The language of Patricia Lee Lewis is devoted to noticing. Her poems digest the howling, look at what comforts, what invades to do harm, what remains.”
—Anne Love Woodhull
$17.00
Buy it Now
Called to Serve
Tom Weiner
The men speaking in these pages come from vastly different backgrounds, yet many shared a similar experience: they could plainly see, even at the time, that wealth, race, education and social standing divided all too often those who would go to Vietnam from those who would not, those who might really die from those who need not worry. The telling of such things is hard. The telling of shame, fear, loss, ambivalence, anger (even righteous anger) is hard. Raising old memories to the surface is a mighty work.
$22.50
Buy it Now
Bird of a Thousand Eyes
Janet E. Aalfs
The author of Bird of a Thousand Eyes does not tease or play games with the poetic toolbox. She is creatively honest, lyric and imagistic, and always gathering ideas and redefining the corners of perception. Readers comfortable with the narrow limitations of linear approaches to “Subject” will have to open and read with all of their senses. This poet mixes Schools. There are many styles and poetic containers here, all governed by the integrity of various ways of breathing––these lines, nearly, pluck themselves. It’s hard to poetically combine wisdom and experience without sounding like the know-it-all master of simile and metaphor, but Aalfs does so in stanzas that stay open long after they break or close. Enjoy the flight above voice and promise to, simply, the Art Spirit.
$17.50
Buy it Now
Vital Aging
Seven Years of Building Community and Enhancing Health
Sara S. Wolff
Six weeks of exploring aging with a group at the Senior Center in Amherst, Massachusetts leads to seven years of discoveries.
“Everyone ages. Some reflect on the process and find ways of retaining vitality in later years. Others are able to use the challenges of aging as a means of building community, thus enhancing their own health and the health of others. Among this last group is the talented psychotherapist, Sara S. Wolff, who led a group of elders through a seven-year journey of exploration and discovery. I highly recommend this book for anyone who cares about the well-being of older people, including, sooner or later, themselves.”
— Faye J. Crosby, Professor of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
$17.00
Buy it Now
Caring for Dying Loved Ones
Joanna Lillian Brown
Local first-time author Joanna Lillian Brown marshaled her own experiences to create this caring resource.
Caring for Dying Loved Ones: A Helpful Guide for Families and Friends is a useful guide book for persons already caring for chronically ill or dying relatives or friends as well as those who wish to prepare for care giving responsibilities in the future. The first chapter of the book, “Taking Your Own Temperature as a Caregiver” sets the tone for this practical and inspirational guide. Some other chapters in the book include “Financial Considerations,” “Family Dynamics and Conflicts,” and “The Final Days, Hours, and Minutes.”Helpful check lists, forms, and resource lists are interspersed with compelling personal stories from more than a decade of caring for dying relatives and friends. The final chapter on activism calls for a national dialogue about end of life care and proposes new options for providing and financing at-home care that are worthy of consideration.
$18.95
Buy it Now
Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts
Robert H. Romer
In this first history of slavery in western Massachusetts in colonial times, Robert H. Romer demonstrates that slavery was pervasive in the Pioneer Valley in the 1700s, where many of the ministers and other “important people” owned black slaves. To show the role of slavery in the valley, Professor Romer presents a “snapshot” of slavery, choosing a moment (1752) and a place (the main street of Deerfield) to present detailed information about the slaves who lived in that place at that time – and their owners. Working largely from original sources – wills, probate inventories, church records, and merchants’ account books – he shows that slavery was much more significant than had previously been thought. Some twenty-five slaves belonging to fifteen different owners lived on that mile-long street in 1752. He emphasizes that these were individuals, some born in Africa, some born as slaves in New England, forced to live their lives as property, always subject to being sold away at the whim of an owner.
His work brings out of obscurity the many black slaves who lived in the valley, the invisible men and women of our colonial past.
$22.50
ISBN 978-0-98198220-0-07
Buy it now
enough of a little to know the all
Richard Ballon
The Final Curtain
I left when I realized
the most expensive
piece of furniture
in our house
was your mother,
and you sat
in her lap
as she pointed
out to me
what needed to be done.
$17.00
Buy it Now
 |
A Memoir in Four Movements
Carl Vigeland
At once a writer’s autobiography and a road book, with vivid portraits of an unusual group of people—ranging from an early mentor and one-time neighbor, the late poet Archibald MacLeish, to world renowned jazz great Wynton Marsalis (with whose bands Carl Vigeland traveled for many years) and the author’s charismatic, tormented father, also a musician—The Breathless Present tells several intersecting stories in a variety of voices that mirror music’s power to transmute memory and affirm life.
$22.00
Buy it Now
 |
Take Us Closer to the Moon
Linda McCullough Moore
This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon is a life in stories, the life of Margaret Mackenzie, a woman whom the reader comes to love. Weaving back and forth across the years, these stories invite us in, they tell us secrets, whisper mysteries, allowing us to know and feel deep joy, distinct sorrow, the silliness and rich meaning, in the living of one precious lifetime.
“Like Raymond Carver, these linked stories attend unerringly to ordinary moments in ordinary lives. A life revealed in episodes, with breathless flights of imagination…..quiet, insistent, closely focused fiction.”
—Brad Davis
$15.00
Buy it Now
 |
Lori Lobenstine
Girls Got Kicks… the first ever photo documentary of the badass females, told from a unique angle: their passion for sneakers. From celebrities like WNBA Rookie-of-the Year Tina Charls, legendary b girl Rokafella, and “Downtown’s Sweetheart” Vashtie Kola, to extraordinary young women famous only for their obsessive love of sneaker, Girls Got Kicks celebrates the beauty and diversity of female sneaker fiends the world over. Whether they’re running home in the rain barefoot to save their precious kicks or tearing them up at the skate park, whether they’re matching them to their wedding dress or their basketball uniform, Girls Got Kicks documents how these sneaker lovers push beyond stereotypes, using kicks to be both athletic and sexy, hip and tomboyish, grown and youthful, as they define who they are—and who women can be—on their own terms.
$30.00
Buy it Now
 |
Tzivia Gover
“Tzivia Gover tells us that according to the educator, Paulo Freire, ‘It is impossible to teach without the courage to love.’ In this beautifully written memoir, Gover musters up the courage to love her students despite the often difficult differences between them. By having the pregnant and parenting teens in her classroom learn to read, write, and recite poetry, Gover exposes her students to a whole new world. Upon reading their poetry, Gover is exposed to a whole new world as well. Learning in Mrs. Towne’s House is a testimony to the power of poetry. Reading it will enrich your life.”
—Lesléa Newman Poet Laureate, Northampton, MA 2008-2010
$18.95
Buy it Now
Recent Releases
 |
Patricia Lee Lewis
High Lonesome is a pasture on a West Texas ranch, a state of being, an affecting personal mythology. Poet Patricia Lee Lewis writes, “Think how brambles catch her petticoats, hold them ‘til they tear, feed on blood….Say the old woman can find her way, can feel the thorns of walls,” and ”From her kneeling place between two great stones, she sends her voice.” These are poems of landscape and family, heart and perspective. “High Lonesome pulls you into the momentum of its sounds with urgency, shock, serenity and arrival. The language of Patricia Lee Lewis is devoted to noticing. Her poems digest the howling, look at what comforts, what invades to do harm, what remains.”
—Anne Love Woodhull
$17.00
Buy it Now
 |
Nightly, at the Institute of the Possible
D M Gordon
Weaving the “Fourth World” of snails, ravens, and sloths with imagined worlds of our human fragility, our power to destroy and to love, D M Gordon’s poems bring us face to face with the divine. Nightly, at the Institute of the Possible is often allegorical, language-rich, and always illuminating.
“In these sensuous, tough-minded and sophisticated poems, the possible extends its range to the clairvoyant. Like nature’s slow transformation of gleam to a rich patina of green brocade, the work of time and decay turns rich and strange in these poems of an original mind and an irrepressible spirit.”
—Eleanor Wilner
D M Gordon’s poems and stories have been published widely. Prizes include The Betsy Colquitt Award from descant, The Editor’s Choice Award from the Beacon Street Review, and First Prize for a short story from Glimmer Train. Phi Beta Kappa, Masters in Music from Boston University, she’s the recipient of a 2008 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in fiction, having been a finalist in poetry in 2004. She currently works as an editor and facilitates a weekly public discussion of contemporary poetry for Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts. She is the author of Fourth World (Adastra Press, 2010,) and is at work on a novel set in the Gulf Islands.
$17.00
Buy it Now
 |
Tom Weiner
The men speaking in these pages come from vastly different backgrounds, yet many shared a similar experience: they could plainly see, even at the time, that wealth, race, education and social standing divided all too often those who would go to Vietnam from those who would not, those who might really die from those who need not worry. The telling of such things is hard. The telling of shame, fear, loss, ambivalence, anger (even righteous anger) is hard. Raising old memories to the surface is a mighty work.
$22.50
Buy it Now
Bird of a Thousand Eyes
Janet E. Aalfs
The author of Bird of a Thousand Eyes does not tease or play games with the poetic toolbox. She is creatively honest, lyric and imagistic, and always gathering ideas and redefining the corners of perception. Readers comfortable with the narrow limitations of linear approaches to “Subject” will have to open and read with all of their senses. This poet mixes Schools. There are many styles and poetic containers here, all governed by the integrity of various ways of breathing––these lines, nearly, pluck themselves. It’s hard to poetically combine wisdom and experience without sounding like the know-it-all master of simile and metaphor, but Aalfs does so in stanzas that stay open long after they break or close. Enjoy the flight above voice and promise to, simply, the Art Spirit.
$17.50
Buy it Now
Vital Aging
Seven Years of Building Community and Enhancing Health
Sara S. Wolff
Six weeks of exploring aging with a group at the Senior Center in Amherst, Massachusetts leads to seven years of discoveries.
“Everyone ages. Some reflect on the process and find ways of retaining vitality in later years. Others are able to use the challenges of aging as a means of building community, thus enhancing their own health and the health of others. Among this last group is the talented psychotherapist, Sara S. Wolff, who led a group of elders through a seven-year journey of exploration and discovery. I highly recommend this book for anyone who cares about the well-being of older people, including, sooner or later, themselves.”
— Faye J. Crosby, Professor of Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
$17.00
Buy it Now
Caring for Dying Loved Ones
Joanna Lillian Brown
Local first-time author Joanna Lillian Brown marshaled her own experiences to create this caring resource.
Caring for Dying Loved Ones: A Helpful Guide for Families and Friends is a useful guide book for persons already caring for chronically ill or dying relatives or friends as well as those who wish to prepare for care giving responsibilities in the future. The first chapter of the book, “Taking Your Own Temperature as a Caregiver” sets the tone for this practical and inspirational guide. Some other chapters in the book include “Financial Considerations,” “Family Dynamics and Conflicts,” and “The Final Days, Hours, and Minutes.”Helpful check lists, forms, and resource lists are interspersed with compelling personal stories from more than a decade of caring for dying relatives and friends. The final chapter on activism calls for a national dialogue about end of life care and proposes new options for providing and financing at-home care that are worthy of consideration.
$18.95
Buy it Now
Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts
Robert H. Romer
In this first history of slavery in western Massachusetts in colonial times, Robert H. Romer demonstrates that slavery was pervasive in the Pioneer Valley in the 1700s, where many of the ministers and other “important people” owned black slaves. To show the role of slavery in the valley, Professor Romer presents a “snapshot” of slavery, choosing a moment (1752) and a place (the main street of Deerfield) to present detailed information about the slaves who lived in that place at that time – and their owners. Working largely from original sources – wills, probate inventories, church records, and merchants’ account books – he shows that slavery was much more significant than had previously been thought. Some twenty-five slaves belonging to fifteen different owners lived on that mile-long street in 1752. He emphasizes that these were individuals, some born in Africa, some born as slaves in New England, forced to live their lives as property, always subject to being sold away at the whim of an owner.
His work brings out of obscurity the many black slaves who lived in the valley, the invisible men and women of our colonial past.
$22.50
ISBN 978-0-98198220-0-07
Buy it now
enough of a little to know the all
Richard Ballon
The Final Curtain
I left when I realized
the most expensive
piece of furniture
in our house
was your mother,
and you sat
in her lap
as she pointed
out to me
what needed to be done.
$17.00
Buy it Now
Coming soon
Nuked: A G. I. Memoir
Bob Ellis
What an extraordinary accomplishment Bob Ellis has in NUKED: a G.I. Memoir. I am blown away by the expanse and detail of Bob’s memory, by his facility with language, both concrete descriptive detail and more abstract, meditative lyricism. And I am struck by the courage of his undertaking, a journey of moral suffering and extraordinary courage that should inspire all who live under the nuclear cloud. A riveting and unforgettable Pilgrim’s Progress for our own time — both in its conception and the persistence to see it through to the end.
—Margo Culley, Professor of English Emerita, UMass
Better Together: Caring and
Including Instead of Bullying
Sarah Pirtle
This resource includes a two CD set of 40 songs.
Teachers and parents can use these time-tested activities in classrooms, families, camps, houses of worship and community programs.
Combine with reading and writing skills, learn how to talk-it-out, or, take five minutes to play and discuss a song.
 |
Bob Ellis
What an extraordinary accomplishment Bob Ellis has in NUKED: a G.I. Memoir. I am blown away by the expanse and detail of Bob’s memory, by his facility with language, both concrete descriptive detail and more abstract, meditative lyricism. And I am struck by the courage of his undertaking, a journey of moral suffering and extraordinary courage that should inspire all who live under the nuclear cloud. A riveting and unforgettable Pilgrim’s Progress for our own time — both in its conception and the persistence to see it through to the end.
—Margo Culley, Professor of English Emerita, UMass
 |
Including Instead of Bullying
Sarah Pirtle
This resource includes a two CD set of 40 songs.
Teachers and parents can use these time-tested activities in classrooms, families, camps, houses of worship and community programs.
Combine with reading and writing skills, learn how to talk-it-out, or, take five minutes to play and discuss a song.
- Sarah Pirtle is the author of Linking Up: Using Music, Movement, and Language Arts to promote Caring, Cooperation, and Communication and three other books.
- She taught the first graduate course for teachers in New England on how to foster cooperation and conflict resolution skills.
- Sarah received the Magic Penny Award for life-time achievement in children’s music and has ten other recordings, sharing over 150 original songs.
“If you want to hear some of the best songs out there today for children, listen to Sarah Pirtle.”
—Pete Seeger