Learning and Teaching Creativity
By Dan Hunter
Radio Ranch Press
296 pages

In his new book, Learning and Teaching Creativity, Dan Hunter invites us to take our brains out and play with them from the inside out. It is a masterful guide in learning how these “thingies” work. Every page in this inspirational handbook is a passionate exposition of the enabling connection between a teacher’s curiosity-fueled imagination and their students’ ability to learn to grow theirs. Citing current neuroscience, credible exemplars, and his work with students, Hunter interweaves his assertions with practical exercises that help us experience the delight in imaginative growth.

A penetrating light
Valediction | poems and prose by Linda Parsons
Madville Publishing
79 pages

Linda Parsons’ Valediction takes full advantage of all the qualities and connotations light casts upon our world. The warm glow of a blaze, of autumn, of human radiance, and of life coming to an end.

The Fine Art of Camouflage
By Lauren Kay Johnson
MilSpeak Books, 2023
254 pages

In The Fine Art of Camouflage, Lauren Kay Johnson refers several times to Greg Mortenson’s 2007 best-seller, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations . . . One School at a Time. This intertextuality shines a sharp light on the unvarnished Afghanistan Johnson reveals in her fantastic new memoir.

Tamp
By Denton Loving
Mercer University Press
62 pages

When a poet invites you on an intimate tour of his native Appalachian countryside: Go. Such is the invitation Denton Loving extends to us with Tamp, his bittersweet, atmospheric second collection.

Tender Machines
By J. Mae Barizo
Tupelo Press
68 pp.

What must we do? What do societal norms expect of women, and of all of us? And if we reject these circumscribed norms, what are the alternatives?

When We Were Twins
By Danuta Hinc
Plamen Press
232 pages

Good novelists write stories for readers to be heartily entertained. Exceptional novelists write stories for readers to become deeply thoughtful witnesses.

Flash Fiction America:
73 Very Short Stories
by James Thomas (Editor), Sherrie Flick (Editor), John Dufresne (Editor, Florida International University)

W.W. Norton
304 pages

If a novel is a deep dive down into the ocean of story, flash fiction is often a jump into a swimming hole: short, sharp, brisk, done. Even when engulfed, you can see the pond walls and river banks. The water might be warm, or cold, or filled with life. You might even touch bottom.

will the story never stop

stand proud, grow, wait

And our land is decorated with bloodied fragments of cement walls.

It’s so hard to live when they’re killing you.

Walking the Ojibwe Path:
A Memoir in Letters to Joshua
Richard Wagamese

Milkweed Editions, 2023
Doubleday Canada, 2002
205 pages

A heart, once shattered, can never heal back to its original shape. Always, there will be lesions and scars that keep it from beating exactly as it once did. Still, with care and gentle nurturing, a heart can re-form stronger, more polished and faceted than before its breaking.

BookEnds: Elizabeth Reed and Ann Bookman

“I stood before the mirror in my parent’s bedroom, admiring my grownup look, unaware whose shoes I walked in.”

An Uneasy Legacy

She’s paddling a canoe among lily pads when her grandmother’s heirloom ivory comb falls into the muddy water.