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Author: Mina Samuels Short Story: Castle Peak
Literary Curator: Joni Evans, Founding Member CEO of wowOwow.com; former President and Publisher of Simon & Schuster and Publisher at Random House
Author’s Statement of Work: This story gently, almost tangentially, immerses the reader in the topic of women’s loneliness, even within a relationship; the interiority of a woman’s experience, her mental and physical strength, and her ability to navigate the subtext of the world.
Curator’s Comment’s on Selection: Castle Peak echoes the elements of one of my favorite stories, Jack London’s To Build a Fire, where a calm, beautiful walk in the snow descends – almost imperceptibly – into the panic (surprise?) of hypothermia and then, certain death. Mina Samuels writes beautifully, with lovely pacing and perfect control. You can “see” the scenery and “feel” the wind, the cold and the snow with her. You, the reader, sense far more danger than the main character, Liv, does… which is what gives the story such tension. Reading it, you want to urge Liv to get on the phone and seek help immediately, to get moving instantly! Instead you are trapped in the main character’s optimism and arrogance of independence. During this walk up and not quite down Castle Peak, you get to know the psychology of a woman desperate to be in control of her own life and proud of her isolation. It is her badge of courage. Her independence, is, in this story, her downfall. So ironic. – Joni Evans
Author: Enid Harlow Novella: Love’s Wilderness
Literary Curator: Carey Salerno, Executive Editor, Alice James Books
Author’s Statement of Work: Love’s Wilderness is a short novel concerning a woman (Veronica) who, not long into her marriage, comes to believe that her husband, a gifted pianist, has stopped truly seeing her. What follows is Veronica’s attempt to be seen.
Curator’s Comment’s on Selection: Love’s Wilderness is a poignant and dizzying tale of madness and loss. Harlow pushes at the boundaries of sanity with artfully woven syntax that blurs its definitions and questions self and social constructs of identity and womanhood.
Her tale rivets, coursing with themes of identity, mental illness, loss, and feminism. What is autonomy and how is that defined within a relationship? How does it evolve over time, and particularly when deep chasms develop between partners? Harlow pursues these questions and more voraciously, proving the greatness of her methods within madness. – Carey Salerno
Author: Kathleen Wakefield Novella: In The Foam Of The Blue Waves
Literary Curator: Kate Angus, Founding Editor, Augury Books
Author’s Statement of Work: In The Foam Of The Blue Waves, was, as I worked on it, what I called “my father’s book.” He was a missionary who traveled from Arizona to California with a 19-year-old purpose to do “the church’s work” – documentation in hand, and uncertainty in his heart, I’m quite sure. But this is where the truth ends and odd thoughts and memories conceived, possibly in the back seats of traveling family cars or on interstate Greyhound busses, became, so many years later, a ‘story.’
We lived in Morro Bay, at some point, and in a cabin by the Russian River, at another point – narrative reality ending there – the 2 women in the story, not me, not my mother; the running-away anguished man, Nicholas (except for the visual of him, blonde and heartbreakingly handsome), more or less, in still-adoring honesty, not my father. I do know that as an 8-year-old astonished girl, taking in what I learned a thousand years later is the California- State-Of-Mind, I looked at what seemed like the edge of the world and the longest and most beautiful place in the universe.
Curator’s Comment’s on Selection: Kathleen Wakefield’s novella haunts me. Months after reading the book, her desolate landscape and peripatetic characters are still wandering through my imagination. Her book is a beautiful elegy to a different world, a gorgeous fever dream. – Kate Angus
Author: Lauren Amalia Redding Three Short Poems: After Emily Dickinson; Yo Voy; Coral Lips Punch Drunk
Literary Curator: Kate Angus, Founding Editor, Augury Books
Author’s Statement of Work: Though I consider myself a visual artist, I first expressed myself by writing poetry, an interesting beginning that has followed me despite the evolution of my studio practice. Within my writing, I explore origins: cultural vacillations between a Midwestern father and Cuban mother, discovery of an emancipated self, and deeper, fearful reflections upon my most intimate and budding relationships. My writing encompasses a much more broad scope of myself than my visual art does, acting more as an intrinsic questioning that needles into my vulnerabilities whereas my art is more about the external projection of various personas and narratives. However, I can’t separate the way my head works from my visual art. Recording how images correspond to my content or how I associate images with the emotion at hand, I write as I see.
Curator’s Comment’s on Selection: Lauren Amalia Redding’s poems have a visceral immediacy to them – like a punch to the gut, or a new lover’s kiss. Her images are sharp, her diction askew but ornate; her poems bleakly beautiful. This is a voice that will keep blossoming. – Kate Angus