Christmas Lake Communiqué

It’s hard to believe nearly a year has passed since we pressed publish on the last Communiqué. So much has happened since then. It would seem we’ve been remiss—from Latin remissus "relaxed, languid; negligent,"—and yet, though at times we’ve been all three of those things, during the past eleven months we’ve also been active, energetic, and conscientious. We just haven’t written about it, and for that, we humbly ask your forgiveness.

To toss a bit more Latin into the mix: mea culpa.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can’t wait to tell you about all the exciting things we’ve been up to since last May

But first, a few pictures of spring, which, after numerous false starts, seems finally on this first day of April to have found its footing.

In the past, we’ve organized the Communiqué into five sections: What we’re working on | What we’re looking for | What we’re reading | What we’re listening to | What we’re cooking up. One section—What we’ve published—was noticeably absent, since last year most of our books were in process. With two titles out last month, another three coming soon, and still more in the making, we’ll be starting off each issue with news on our new and soon-to-be-published books.

What we’ve published

Sidanela—A Story of Family by David Long — March 4 2023

First-time author David Long grew up in the Piedmont area of North Carolina, near a Native American archaeological site, the Town Creek Indian Mound. David always wanted to know more, as did the archaeologists, about the Pee Dee Tribe that inhabited the site.

His debut novel, Sidanela—A Story of Family, blends his extensive research of Pee Dee history and culture with the compelling tale of how seventeen-year-old Red Willow, a courageous and spirited young woman, navigates an agonizing choice. Featuring spellbinding ceremonies, tender moments of love and loss, and prophetic dreams, set against a tribe’s struggles to survive hostile neighbors, famine, and a sociopathic leader, Sidanela is a book that both educates and entertains.

Sidanela, by David Long, is available on Amazon. Bookstores can order from Ingram.

“I was excited to read this book because I’m from the area it’s set in. I was not disappointed by this great story. I love how it blends history and Native culture with the story of family and perseverance. It’s a wonderful read and I’m looking forward to reading more from this author.”

— Lisa, Amazon Reader

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Becoming Visible to Myself: An Unexpected Memoir by Kathryn L Kaplan, PhD — March 19 2023

Kathry Kaplan’s remarkable memoir has garnered praise from all corners: an esteemed management professor, a documentary filmmaker, a grief counselor, a leadership and development coach. The book is brimming with her hard-won knowledge gained through extensive reading and intensive introspection, rich with experiences that will resonate with readers, and illustrated throughout with entries from the journals she’s kept—her “Wise and Wonderful Black Book Series”—that guided her on her unique and illuminating path of self-discovery. The first line of the jacket copy says it all: Told with aliveness and honesty, Becoming Visible to Myself is an invaluable guide for anyone, and especially women, looking to step into their full power.

For Tom, working on Becoming Visible to Myself with Kathryn was a joy, as they formed a creative partnership and achieved a synchronicity in the workflow that energized them both. And starting next week, they’ll begin work on Kathryn’s second book, Dying With His Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Love and Grief.

Kathryn L Kaplan holding her copy of Becoming Visible to Myself: An Unexpected Memoir

Journal entries from Becoming Visible to Myself: An Unexpected Memoir

Becoming Visible to Myself, by Kathryn L Kaplan, PhD is available on Amazon.

“This book comes at a time when all people, especially women, need to find wholeness within themselves. Kathryn’s search for her own acceptance of her many talents—intellectual, emotional, creative—serves as a model. Her approach is well organized, practical, and poetic.”

— Sandy Prins, MS - ECSE, Grief Counselor

“This multi-talented author skillfully weaves together accounts of how she came to grow from, rather than resist, her own vulnerabilities. Any professional who has labored to better understand herself will find confirmation and consolation here. Kathryn’s memoir will inspire you—with its examples of courage, healing, and grace.”

— Janet Bickel, MA, Leadership and Career Development Coach, and author of Equip Your Inner Coach

We’re nearly ready to release Joyce Rickards Newcomb’s charming, probing, and enlightening historical novel, Sophia’s Journey, after putting the finishing touches on the cover (featuring an illustration by her sister, Carol Mazzocco) today.

Young Sophia is a marvel—innocent, ingenious, intense, and indefatigable as she confronts one crisis after another at Great House, her family’s homestead on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, with her strong internal compass serving as her guide. Set in the early 1800s, the novel explores a time when slavery was already drawing dividing lines across a fledgling nation.

“Reminiscent of Mark Twain’s tales, Sophia’s Journey is an impressive debut—a heartwarming early American coming-of-age story sprinkled with delicious bits of the Southern Gothic.”

— James Conroyd Martin, author of The Poland Trilogy

“A work of art . . . rich with all the elements of story that entice young readers.”

— Francie Arenson Dickman, award-winning author of Chuckerman Makes a Movie

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The next two books to hit the market will be Where the Light Is Brighter, by C. C. Griffin and Thomas G. Fiffer, and Last of the Famous International Playboys by Adam Lenain. We’ve written about both in previous editions, but these books are now much farther along after many months of collaborative work, thorough copyediting, and preparation for successful launches.

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A third book in process is the second novel by Greg Lawrence, author of With You. Greg has moved from the arena of artificial intelligence to the underside of the art world. The Damsel and the Knight is an action-packed, globe-spanning thriller with a sizzling romance thrown in for good measure.

Instead of summarizing Greg’s book, we’ll share a particularly compelling early passage, narrated by his heroine, Francesca Ambrosino.

We waited outside the Church of San Domenico for my father every Sunday at the same spot. I was never sure if it was because he so wanted to be with us, or he thought there was a need to protect us. But each Sunday was the same. My mother, my sister, and I would attend Sunday morning Mass without my father. Upon his arrival to the church, he would kiss my mother on the mouth, pick up my sister, hug her, and kiss her on each cheek. Still holding her, he would then bend over and kiss me on the top of my head. At one time it was me, not my sister, that he would pick up, squeeze, and carry home in his arms. Two things changed that: the arrival of my now four-year-old sister, and the change in my body brought on by puberty. I knew that it was no longer appropriate to have my father hold me as he now did my little sister. But that did not change my desire for the contact with this man.

My father’s name was Vincent Ambrosino. He was what was referred to as a capo, a third tier down from what is known as a godfather. In our case the godfather was Salvatore “Toto” Riina. My father’s father was also a capo. Though I am uncertain as to my great-grandfather’s position, I know he, too, was involved in the same “family business” commonly known as the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian enterprise dating back to the 1500s. The local landlords originally created, then used this group to keep their tenants in line and collect the requisite rents. By 1993, it was a vast multinational web in every line of both legal and illegal transactions spanning three continents.

My father was always surrounded by a retinue of various soldiers and associates. He was both feared and respected in our community. I could see this in everything we did and in every place we went. We had a fine home, new cars, and new clothes. My father always carried a thick roll of bills in his pocket, unafraid anyone would dare threaten his safety.

But now, there was a change in the air. The Italian government, which had historically worked with the family business, now sought to destroy it. I could feel the shift in how people treated us in our daily routines, and in the tension in our household. Every day, heated conversations amongst my father’s associates erupted in our living room. Of course, I was not allowed to be a part of these discussions but chose to insert myself by sitting unseen at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping on the meetings below. It turned out there was a cause for all the consternation.

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Farther down the road, we’ll be publishing a spare and touching novel about a young man’s coming of age encounter in the American west involving a kidnapper, a medicine woman, and wolves you’ll fall in love with—Barbara Hetler’s Once in Ordinary Time.

Illustration by Kim Nyland

And we’re about to begin work with local author Lauren Barnett on her first novel, Don’t Tell My Mom That I Love Her—a hilarious, thought-provoking, heart-wrenching story told through the eyes of Maggie, a precocious twelve-year-old writing in her diary.

Here I am trying to be so cool and grown up and independent, and the truth is, I need my parents to kiss me goodnight. I like my own bed, and I like my dolls. I swear I feel like I am straddling two universes—one where I fully imagine myself as this sophisticated, glamorous supergirl and the other where I can’t even manage to brush my own hair. It’s gonna be a long night.

What we’re looking for . . .

We continue to seek out groundbreaking, genre-breaking, barrier-breaking, and of course heartbreaking fiction and moving memoir.

What we’re reading . . .

Given all the publishing activity, there hasn’t been much time for other author’s books. But a recent trip to Atticus in New Haven had Julia and Tom pulling books off the shelves to check out first lines between sips of black bean soup.

What we’re listening to . . .

Right now, we’re mostly hearing the sound of Amazon boxes thudding onto the doorstep with author copies inside. In addition, Julia is listening to An Exaltation of Larks by Suanne Laqueur and Tom just finished Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown by Anne Glenconner.

What we’re cooking up . . .

After spending the better of a glorious day putting this issue together, tonight’s meal will be ordered from Joe’s Pizza just down the road. They don’t do Chicago-style deep dish, but they do make a wicked crust.

And of course, we’re cooking up more books!

As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Onward and upward in 2023 and beyond!

Christmas Lake Communiqué

The garden of ‘wordly’ delights is flourishing at Christmas Lake Creative, and we’re nurturing many projects for a rich harvest of books to come. The work of editing involves intense devotion to the growth of a book from a first draft’s tender shoots—or in some cases the seed of an idea—all the way through to the beauty of full bloom. While there is some science to streamlining sentences and perfecting paragraphs, there is also an art to letting the story unfold, and to envisioning the flower with its bud still tightly wrapped or the invisible seedling underground. The latest episode of Krista Tippett’s On Being features a conversation with botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who has written that “Science polishes the gift of seeing; Indigenous traditions work with the gifts of listening and language.” The best editors go beyond examining—and rearranging—words on the page and, in concert with the author, listen to the story that is often beneath the surface, waiting, and eager to be told.

If you’re interested in exploring more deeply the kinship between gardening and writing, you might enjoy this long piece on The Marginalian, “200 Years of Great Writers and Artists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Gardening.”

It begins:

Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden — something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and the scale of stars, touching evolutionary time and the cycle of seasons at once, you find yourself rooted more deeply into your own existence — transient and transcendent, fragile and ferociously resilient — and are suddenly humbled into your humanity. (Lest we forget, humility comes from humilis — Latin for low, of the earth.) You look at a flower and cannot help but glimpse the meaning of life.

Peonies in waiting

Editing is also a slow, thoughtful process requiring patience, knowing when to pause and when to keep moving, and always keeping the final destination in mind.

The Christmas Lake resident turtle

In a nod to the deep wisdom of Indigenous peoples, we’re devoting a portion of this edition to an excerpt (which includes a passage on gardening) from our upcoming Native American thriller, Sidanela, by first-time novelist David Long.

Secrets are strange and wily creatures, binding together unstable groups while tearing apart the individuals who bear them. Red Willow carried a secret that weighed heavily on her shoulders, as if she were toting a black bear cub on her back. She desperately wanted to be free of the burden, but she simultaneously dreaded that freedom, knowing it would cause her entire world to crumble. Memories of “the horrible event”—the only words she could find to describe it—seeped into her mind, the way darkness slips in to overtake day, creating a mental fog that made it hard for her to focus. But she had to find a way to press through and ground herself. It was spring, and there was critical work to be done. Her family was relying on her to help keep them fed.

Red Willow and her family were part of the Pee Dee Tribe, a close-knit group of some five hundred villagers. The tribe was over two hundred years old. She lived on the outskirts of the Town Creek ceremonial center—in what is now known as North Carolina—with her mother, Grey Dove, and her brother, Running Wolf. The enormous wave of European immigration was still over three centuries away, and the Vikings were the only Europeans who had ever set foot on Red Willow’s continent.

A large temple, where the priests conducted worship and the Leadership Council made essential decisions of the tribe, dominated Town Creek. The temple sat high upon a mound, and the people could only gain access by climbing a tall set of stairs—as if they were walking straight to the heavens. The temple’s base was a large and open court, where the tribe would gather for their seasonal and ritual ceremonies. A spiked barrier bordered the court on one side, a river touched it on another. Together, these two boundaries provided vital security against neighboring hostiles, chief among them the fierce Tuscaroras.

The political situation of the village was surprisingly complex, given the relatively small population. There were four distinct clans within the larger tribe: the bear, the deer, the wolf, and the beaver. Red Willow and her family were members of the bear clan. Each group lived in separate enclaves surrounding the ceremonial center, and each elected its own leaders. The leaders of the four clans met together as a council regularly to discuss matters of importance to the tribe.

Though Red Willow was only seventeen, she was mature beyond her years and even beyond the her tribe’s wisest elders. Since the death of her father, her family had experienced many hardships, forcing her to take on adult responsibilities. Her father’s absence also required her to do things not customary for women. She hunted as well as or better than all of the men. But despite being highly skilled at this typically masculine pursuit, she maintained a robust feminine nature. She had long, jet-black hair tied into a single braid that hung to one side and deep, brown eyes that revealed a depth in her soul that seemed to stretch to infinity.

One of Red Willow’s primary responsibilities was maintaining her family’s garden, and she used the traditional Pee Dee method referred to as the ‘three sisters’. The three sisters of the plot were corn, bean, and squash—planted together in a mutually beneficial way to create an abundant harvest. The sustenance the plants provided for each other reminded Red Willow of the strength her tiny family of three took from their closeness. The first seed to be planted was sister corn. Her job in the garden family was to provide a tall and solid support system for the beans to climb when they started to grow, much like her mother’s stability aided the growth of Red Willow and her brother. Red Willow’s first task was to mound several planting hills and plant four corn seeds in the center of each mound. She set out to get this done early one morning and worked tirelessly throughout the day, sending thoughts of the horrible event to the far reaches of her mind. She wished she could pull these thoughts out, like weeds, but by now they had deep roots. The best she could do was snap off the tops and hope they wouldn’t return too soon.

Skunk cabbage

We’re also honored that Christmas Lake Creative was featured in a local writeup by Westport’s HamletHub on small businesses. We can’t say we’ve made the big time yet, but we’re definitely getting air time.

Spring sky

What we’re working on…

Rather than update again on our four exciting books in progress, we’d like to expand a bit more on the magic of editing. If you have a cat, you already know that cats see things that are not there. But you might not know that the phenomenon of intuiting the presence of what you don’t see, or hear, or perceive with one of your physical senses, is called amodal completion. We recently encountered it in an article in Psychology Today, and the passage below is the best description we’ve found of how one moves a narrative forward as a writer. Our perceptual system engages in amodal completion, seeing what isn’t there—yet—but makes perfect sense being there once it appears.

Every time we see an object occluded by another object (which means every time we see anything in real life, barring odd cases of fully translucent visual scenes or very simple visual displays), we use amodal completion of the occluded parts of perceived objects. We can't understand perception without understanding amodal completion.

It also echoes something Tom wrote a while back about the emotion evoked by great writing.

The best creators of content don't just provide words and images. They offer us an experience. It's not what we read or saw, but how we feel while reading or seeing, and how we felt afterwards, that we remember most vividly. And when we share content, it's that experience—the epiphany, the swell of joy, the fresh determination, the feeling in the pit of our stomach, the tears, the stab of regret—that we want our friends to experience with us so we can connect through it, so we can say to each other, "Yes, I felt that, too."

This faith in our second sight or sixth sense is truly, in the words of poet Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

Red azalea, wet

What we’re looking for…

Bring us your seeds and seedlings, your creative plants in need of nourishment. We’ll take good care of them, we promise.

Red maple samara

What we’re reading…

As you can see from the plethora of photographs in this edition, our eyes are mostly on the wonders of this glorious New England spring. More on what we’re reading next time.

Lilac blossoms

What we’re listening to…

The songs of the birds enlivening the meadow when we wake up in the morning.

Japanese mazus

What we’re cooking up…

A pop-up Zoom workshop for some time in May or June.

As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Onward and upward in 2022 and beyond!

Christmas Lake Communiqué

As the trees in coastal Connecticut leaf out and bloom, and the azaleas erupt in pink, red, and purple, our list of books to come keeps growing. Now in the works for January 2023 is our first middle grade novel, a captivating exploration of the complex social issues and family dynamics of early 19th century America as seen through the eyes of a sweet, sensitive, and whip-smart young woman. We couldn’t be more excited about this book, written by an octogenarian who spent 10 years researching her setting, characters, and historical backdrop after turning up information about her ancestors in a genealogical search. The tale is purely fiction, but it rings true from start to finish, and we know you’ll fall in love with the heroine, Sophia, just as we did.

Azalea - just opened

Tom put his memoir-in-progress on pause for a couple of weeks to launch his new book, The Alphabet of Love. In entries ranging from Love is an Art to Love is Compassion, Love is a Question to Love is Vast, this 128-page volume takes readers on a poetic, lexical tour of what is unquestionably the most powerful force in our lives. Intent on helping us find new definitions and expressions of love, Tom explores the language associated with the ever-present and elusive, invisible yet palpable presence that we struggle to describe and define as much as to find and to keep. Look for love too hard, and it vanishes; hold it too tightly, and it melts away in your hand. The Alphabet of Love brings the magic of love into our minds and hearts and reminds us that love is, indeed, a many-splendored thing.

Click here to buy the book.

In the news travels fast department, a write-up about Tom’s book on a local news blog, 06880, resulted in a new submission to Christmas Lake Press from a local author and garden enthusiast. We’re reading his manuscript with interest and encourage local authors to think of us—your neighbors—first, when considering where to plant your book projects.

Greg Lawrence, author of With You, our techno-thriller about an artificial intelligence with a conscience, is running a Goodreads giveaway for the Kindle edition. You can sign up here to be one of the 100 lucky recipients. Greg’s book has five stars with over 20 reviews on Amazon and received a thumbs up from Kirkus: “A subtle story of family, friendship, strong women, and the hopeful side of technological advancement.”

Click here to buy the book.

After a short time at home, Julia has returned to Marblehead, MA, for another writing retreat to work on projects for television and film for various interested companies. Every writer needs a clean, well-lighted place for the intense concentration and focus required to finish work for release into the world.

Marblehead, MA

A spot still remains in our weekly Wednesday night flash fiction workshop. Join us for a generative experience creating short pieces of writing that can be polished into stand-alone stories or integrated into a larger work you’re contemplating or already constructing.

What we’re working on…

Editing is in full swing now on Kathryn Kaplan’s memoir, Becoming Visible to Myself: An Unexpected Memoir. This remarkable journey of self-discovery through journaling speaks to—and squelches—our self-doubt, affirms—and abolishes—our endless need for external validation, and reminds us that we don’t need a guru, spirit guide, or self-help book to let us know we are and have always been enough. We’re having fun integrating Kathryn’s journal entries, consisting of quotes, notes, diagrams, and drawings, into the book’s narrative flow.

Flowering dogwood, Compo Hill

Tom is also enjoying the editing drill on our coming-of-age novel set in the age of the deconstructionists at his old haunt in New Haven. As he and the author unearth opportunities to further develop the colorful characters and their relationships with each other as well as the book’s themes of isolation and belonging, the book is nearing completion. It’s fairly rare to find a perfect scene in a novel and even rarer to encounter a perfect chapter. But Chapter 19 is as pitch perfect as they come. (Sorry, no excerpt, we’re keeping this one under wraps until it’s ready to be published.)

Where the Light Is Brighter by C. C. Griffin (co-written by Tom) is also growing shinier by the day, with work now focusing on the “Fourth of July” chapter featuring our 98-year-old femme fatale, Edith.

Suddenly I startle as Nurse Hurry (that’s what I call her) barges in with her cup full of pills, each one a different color and size. I guess I didn’t take them after all.

“Jumpy today.”

“I’m fine.” I’m not going to tell her I think something’s wrong—Lord knows what extra pills she’ll try to give me. I just open my hand to count. This one needs to be reminded that I studied bookkeeping and I’ve always been excellent with numbers.

But she’s not smiling, and those chipped nails need to be trimmed.

“Everyone needs their pills on time Edith, not just you. Let’s move this along.”

Apparently, I’m counting too slowly, but you can’t be too careful here. “You’ve given me eleven pills, and I only take ten.”

She shrugs. I put the yellow pill—supposedly for memory—back in the cup and hand it to her, then swallow the rest, one by one, saving the white oval for my osteoporosis for last. “Satisfied?”

She puts the cup with the yellow pill down on my tray and walks out of the room. I toss the cup in the trash. My name is Edith. My son is William. I remember what I need to remember. I’m doing just fine.

This chapter is full of fireworks, but if you want to see them, you’ll have to buy the book when it comes out.

Fireworks, Compo Beach

What we’re looking for…

Hybrid publishers bridge the gap between authors taking the risk of publishing books themselves—often with no editorial or marketing guidance—and undertaking the arduous—and often fruitless—process of seeking an agent who will then seek an editor at a traditional publishing house. We’re fast to read and return a decision, fast to market (6 to 9 months instead of 18 to 24 for traditional), and fairly priced. If you have a good book—novel, memoir, collection of essays, something you’ve polished and of which you feel proud, send it our way.

What we’re reading…

Tom got just a few pages into rereading William Zinsser’s classic, On Writing Well, which grew out of a class Zinsser taught at Yale in the 1970s, well (and we emphasize the well) before Tom attended. So much of writing is editing, and so much of editing is working a paragraph, sentence, line, or word over and over again until you get it right. The best writers make this look effortless, but that ease is an illusion, and the passage below is more than an allusion to the strenuousness of the writer’s craft.

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.

[Note: Links to books we’re reading usually go to Amazon for a new copy, because we want the recommended author to receive his or her royalties on the sale. Buying at your local bookstore accomplishes the same result. But the link to On Writing Well above will take you to Thriftbooks, a wonderful alternative for purchasing used books. The reseller market is essential to keeping millions of older books in print, and outfits such as Thriftbooks are phenomenal resources for finding older titles at reasonable prices. And of course, Zinsser did receive his cut on the first sale of the book :)]

While enjoying the scenic beauty of Marblehead, Julia is also revisiting the lyrical beauty of Rilke’s poetry.

What we’re listening to…

Tom started Ron Chernow’s The Warburgs, an intriguing blend of history and storytelling. He’s also listening to more On Being podcasts, and in one featuring author and Torah scholar Avivah Zornberg on the interpretation of Passover, she said something along the lines of: what really happened is less important than how best to tell the story. This gem of wisdom should help fiction and memoir writers alike. Julia has been listening to a favorite classic, The Great Gatsby, which, in light of our note about resellers above, entered the public domain in 2021. It took a long time for her to find an edition with the right narrator, one who sounded like he was a character of the time period telling the story, not just a professional actor reading it out loud.

In producing audio books, we always strive to find a narrator who breathes the passion of the book (without making breathing sounds, of course) and creates a listening experience that makes the story come alive.

What we’re cooking up…

We’re still, yes still, yes still, planning our first pop-up Zoom workshop for some time in May.

As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Onward and upward in 2022 and beyond!

Christmas Lake Communiqué

Spring is the time when everything seems new again, and we’re excited and delighted to have signed a new author, Kathryn Kaplan. A powerhouse in the field of organization development, her book, Becoming Visible to Myself: An Unexpected Memoir, grew out of a long, loving, and ultimately revelatory exploration of her journals, a collection of thirty-two 7” x 10” hard-bound spiral sketch books filled with observations, questions, quotes, images, and sketches that she came to call her “Wise and Wonderful Black Book Series.” Her discoveries deepen our appreciation for the struggle so many of us with challenging childhoods (and even those without) face: forming an identity when we are not allowed to be ourselves. Here is the book’s opening:

The first thing to know about me is that I have always been a seeker—someone looking not just for answers but also for “the” answer—for “IT.” What was this “IT” that was always eluding me? You know it well, whether you have it or whether you’re still looking: that sense of confidence, self-esteem, something solid inside that you can trust, that feeling everyone craves and so many of us believe only others enjoy, the basic knowledge that we’re really OK. My experience of myself was that something essential was missing. I felt that I had no direct access to my core and that filled me with shame. So it didn’t matter how much I excelled as an achiever, how many professional accolades I accumulated, how many happy moments I managed to experience. None of these brought “IT” any closer.

We’ll be sharing more on Kathryn’s book in the weeks to come.

Pink hyacinth

Meanwhile, Tom’s trip down memoir lane continues, with a foray back to his first kiss at age 14.

Tom and his first girlfriend

Of these things, I remember so much, and yet so little. Like the laws of physics, memory breaks down at the extremes. Go in too close, and the details dissolve. Pan out for the big picture, and the map becomes blurry, the meaning of the experience falls maddeningly out of focus. Words that approximate feelings are all that remain.

As for Tom’s first love, that’s a different story, which many of you already know.

Julia spent a productive week in Marblehead, MA, collaborating with another writer on episode three of a tv series and will be returning later in the spring for a self-imposed writer’s retreat to work on her own feature film script.

Moon over Marblehead

For anyone interested, a spot has opened in our weekly Wednesday night flash fiction workshop, where our talented and always supportive group continues to flourish.

What we’re working on…

To date, we’ve focused much of the reporting here on the goings-on at Christmas Lake Press, so this week we’d like to feature some of our coaching clients.

Writer extraordinaire Dale Thomas Vaughn, with whom Tom works weekly, just got a short story accepted at SIAMB (Something Involving a Mailbox), to be published later this year in Issue #9. Dale is also the author of Birthright: Recall, an action-packed sci-fi novel in which a mysterious signal from earth reaches colonists on Mars after 500 years of silence.

Another client had a major breakthrough with his non-fiction book (which grew out of a Good Men Project article) realizing that his own personal story of loss and recovery will become the framework for what had been a primarily instructional volume. Writers often need help moving into vulnerable spaces, and the support of a coaching relationship can make this endeavor less frightening and more fulfilling.

And Jordan Kozey, an international mentor and consultant and founder of Promethean Men’s Groups, is writing the final battle scene of the final chapter of his fantasy novel, the first of a trilogy. Think Lord of the Rings meets Braveheart. It has been so rewarding to watch the quality of Jordan’s writing improve to a level that can now honestly be called mastery.

Work at the press continues apace, with editing of Where the Light Is Brighter by C. C. Griffin (co-written by Tom) in full gear. In the chapter, “Mother’s Day,” Terri, the daughter of a resident with memory impairment, shares her challenges with one of the staff members, a wise Mexican woman everyone calls ‘Grandma.’

“Listen, Terri. You can’t control everything. This disease your mother has—there’s no magic pill. There will be good days…and bad days, some better than others. I know it’s not what you imagined this time with her would be like, but you have to meet your mother where she is, enjoy what you can, when you can. All we have are the moments.”

“But what if she has one of her outbursts—in front of everyone?”

“But what if she doesn’t? And so what if she does? You can’t let her withdraw completely into herself.”

I start to hang my head.

“Terri! There’s no judgment here…no one is failing a class…no mistakes. It’s all about finding…a moment, if it will come, if you let it come…taking a breath…drinking a cup of tea for all…a way to find the joy.”

I shake my head. “Joy. I think I’ve forgotten what that feels like.”

“Oh, honey. I know this is so hard. I know she smiles at you, then screams at you. I know she tells you to turn on the news, then calls security ‘cause she thinks you’re a criminal.”

I shake my head, crying, but also laughing.

Grandma nods. “I hear what you’re saying, but who are you keeping her in her room for? Her? Or you? She’s your mother, and today is her day. Let her enjoy it.”

Last but not least, Tom’s little book, The Alphabet of Love, is set to release on May 1. Some lucky readers pre-ordered the e-book and will receive free signed copies of the paperback. It’s not too late if you’d like to join this group. Tom is honored to have received four humbling endorsements for the book from fellow coaches and authors Ella Hicks, founder of Rebel Thriver; Quentin Hafner, author of Black Belt Husband: A Marriage Book for Men; Bryan Reeves, author of Choose Her Every Day (Or Leave Her); and Nate Bagley, founder of Growth Marriage.

What we’re looking for…

Our door continues to be open for stories that make the heart sing, or shudder, or skip a beat, or soar. Fiction and non-fiction. Words that leave us indelibly altered. Anne Lamott put it best: “I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”

What we’re reading…

Tom has yet another new, and as yet unread, book on his desk, Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson, who brings innovation, insight, and risk to the art of memoir. He is hoping her experiments with form will inform his own. Julia’s nightstand is also piled high, but her recent focus has been reading source material to conduct research for her writing projects.

What we’re listening to…

Runaway, a book of stories by Alice Munro, is Tom’s current audio adventure, to which he was drawn after Robert Boswell cited the author’s remarkable craft in The Half-Known World. The breathtaking title story, which ends with a haunting twist, exposes the fault lines that define love, marriage, and friendship and forces us to reconsider what freedom means. Julia has been filling her ears with music.

What we’re cooking up…

We’re still, yes still, planning our first pop-up Zoom workshop for late April, or early May, so keep your pens and notebooks handy.

As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Onward and upward in 2022 and beyond!

Subscribe to our updates on Substack.

Christmas Lake Communiqué

This edition of the Communiqué will be brief. Tom and Julia have both been deeply involved in personal projects, with Tom devoting time daily to his memoir (first longhand, then typing it up) and Julia immersed in editing scripts. The coming week will have both of us leaning into this legacy work—Tom at home, at the partners desk he bought in Chicago 35 years ago with a vision, even then, of himself and Julia engaged in cooperative creative endeavors; Julia in Marblehead, MA, enjoying the peace of a quaint airbnb to focus on finishing the next episode of a series.

Tom’s side of the partners desk

If you’d like to read more of Tom’s memoir, which he’s no longer posting publicly, please let him know at tom@christmaslakecreative.com.

Here’s a teaser:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby  

“Aunt Ruthie, Uncle Buddy! Come quick! Something’s happened!”

Those eight words, screamed by nine-year-old me as I jabbed frantically at my aunt and uncle’s doorbell in the freezing cold after freeing myself from the back of the Mersa-deez by pushing my mother forward and scrambling out across their icy driveway, those words signified a signal moment in my life, though I didn’t yet know it. I knew something terrible, horrible, was afoot…

Our weekly flash fiction workshop continues to entertain and inspire. One of our writers broke through a block and, in the days after our session, completed and posted a lovely essay—both edgy and enchanting—that may just be the beginning of her book.

Forsythia blooming in the rain

What we’re working on…

Once again, we’re all about audio.

The audio edition of The Big One is finally nearing completion. Stay tuned for its release on Audible.

Greg Lawrence’s techno-thriller, With You, is now out, recorded by narrator Louise Porter. If you have an Audible subscription, this book is definitely worth one of your credits. If not, you’ll get about 12 hours of entertainment for $24.95—cheaper than a movie, and you can listen while you walk, drive, do the dishes, or fold the laundry.

On the print side, our cover design for Where the Light Is Brighter by C.C. Griffin (and co-written by Tom) is nearly complete, and we’ve just written the copy for the back. Here is the book’s description:

Where the Light Is Brighter is the touching, bittersweet story of life in a long-term care facility, told mostly through the sharp eyes of 98-year-old Edith, who has an opinion on everything—and everyone—and a lifetime of memories that are slowly slipping away. She enters River’s Edge reluctantly, just before New Year’s, at the insistence of her son, William, but she plans to be back home in time to put chubby Cupid on her mantel, then swap him out in March for her madly grinning leprechaun. As we accompany Edith through her first year of living in this “never place,” the place on the hill where no one wants to be, we meet a cast of characters in various stages of aging. But despite her dread of the darkness within—a fear we all share about our elderly futures—brightness breaks through at every turn. The story is structured around holidays and the decorations with which the River’s Edge residents mark time, and as Edith settles in, surrenders to a self-appointed “welcoming committee,” and reluctantly makes friends, she begins to feel more and more at home. Written by a woman who works in the field, Where the Light Is Brighter shatters stereotypes and preconceived notions about the proverbial “old folks home” as we meet the forever young-at-heart folks who challenge our beliefs by greeting their final years with grace, enlarging our hearts as they enliven River’s Edge.

What we’re looking for…

Solid stories. Fiction or non-fiction. Captivating openings. Endings that take your breath away. Tales that take us places we never imagined going. If you know of any writers looking for a publisher or just some advice, please send them our way.

What we’re reading…

We’ve been doing more writing than reading these past two weeks, and Tom has ordered two books to help him with his memoir: Eloise in Moscow by Kay Thompson (a favorite from his childhood) and The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian author, based on a recommendation from The New York Times.

Julia is constantly reading poetry but found the time to write a marvelous birthday poem for a dear friend.

What we’re listening to…

Having finished Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch, and determined to read more Joseph Conrad (including a short novel titled The Shadow Line about the threshold between youth and manhood), Tom is looking forward to listening to the episode of On Being featuring poet Mary Oliver. Julia is still enjoying A Light so Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of a Wrinkle in Time.

What we’re cooking up…

We’re still planning our first pop-up Zoom workshop for late April, when we may be able to conduct it from the porch (weather permitting).

As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Onward and upward in 2022 and beyond!

Subscribe to our updates on Substack.

Some Thoughts on Writing Memoir

In the famous Monty Python skit, the Ministry of Silly Walks elevates expressing and, in the process, embarrassing oneself in public to an art form encouraged by the British government, much as our NEA and NEH provide support and legitimacy for more traditional creativity. Writing a memoir is partly an exercise in taking a silly walk, as the trip back through time demands doing a jig here and dodging a jam-up there, sidestepping un-repaired potholes and perilous pitfalls and pitiless, bottomless pits of self pity, and keeping your feet out of the pungent piles of shit into which it is so startlingly easy to place them. It’s a stutter step walk, like the thing impatient people in Manhattan (an oxymoron if there ever was one) do when they’re walking too close to the person in front of them. And yet, writing a memoir is also a measured marathon, a race to keep pace with the run of memories, thudding one foot in front of the other to maintain forward motion as the mind races back to reclaim a scene, a scent, the schematic of a an experience, a name, a place, a particular word or phrase, a passage of poetry, then sprints ahead to catch up with the story, which has already reached the next mile marker.

The process is both exhilarating and infuriating, and you eventually hit the wall of forget, which like love in the e e cummings poem, “is more thinner than recall/more seldom than a wave is wet/more frequent than to fail.” You can’t just push through it. You have to step over it, and before that, dis- and reassemble it, tearing it down on one side and rebuilding it on the other, brick by brick—or in the case of what few have the courage to call the magic of invented memory—trick by trick. Factual recall is inevitably impaired by time, and the battle between veracity and verisimilitude rages until you discover these twisted twins are not true opponents, but close, if cautious, friends, that will both serve your cause loyally.

At the top of the wall stands Jack Nicholson, from “A Few Good Men,” shouting to Tom Cruise, “You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall,” warning Cruise that he can’t handle the truth, claiming he is doing the distasteful but indispensable duty of defending what’s right from the onslaught of what’s true. But Jack’s Colonel Jessup, who was disposable in the film, is demanded by the writer, who is rebuilding and re-mortaring the wall, rearranging the bricks by revealing their patterns, the nicked edges that fit neatly together, the striations and discolorations that indicate which ones sat side by side while time wrought its sublimely destructive work, even occasionally fashioning entirely new bricks—facsimiles of those that were smashed or lost or have decayed beyond recognition. This is the architecture or more accurately the engineering, the masonry of memoir.

Within the memoirist’s Ministry of Silly Walks is the Bureau of Reclamation, which, as an agency of the United States government within the Department of the Interior (where, of course, all memoir lives before it is written), is the nation’s largest wholesaler of water and second largest hydroelectric power producer. This organization’s operations—harnessing the raging rivers, impeding with dams the water’s inexorable flow, containing a river’s energy, collecting and distributing its juice, slowing an endless rush to a manageable and meaningful trickle—this is exactly how the memoir writer reclaims his or her story—a story that, like a dry riverbed, is brought to life with a raindrop of recollection, a story whose path was never lost but needs to be re-found, re-mapped, re-channeled, and sometimes even reversed before its convoluted and meandering course makes any sense at all.

Every river has both a source and a mouth, and every writer does, too, the source being his heart and the mouth being her voice. In Robert Lowell’s poem, “Man and Wife,” he writes: “you were in your twenties, and I,/once hand on glass/and heart in mouth/outdrank the Rahvs in the heat/of Greenwich Village, fainting at/your feet—“

Have you ever had your heart in your mouth? Try writing a memoir.

Christmas Lake Communiqué

With the onset of daylight savings time, we’re springing forward into sunnier days, while also for Tom, as he works on his memoir, circling back and finding brightness in the winter years of his childhood that followed his father’s death.

You can read an excerpt here.

That final trip to Far Horizons, which afterward (for reasons more emotional than financial) slipped forever out of reach, was marked, or maybe marred—if the lack of something can make a mark—by absence. Not just my father’s physical absence but the absence of all the things we’d done with him.

I probably ate banana pancakes at a dimpled glass, metal-rimmed table by the long pool ringed with red pavers, but they didn’t taste the same… [read more]

Last week’s flash fiction workshop was great fun, as our troupe penned passages on what lurks in the hearts of men and explored a character whose love language is fear. One writer ran with a prompt about marriage and divorce, creating a curmudgeon who had just split from his tenth spouse. We still have space for one or two more writers in this lively collective. Come join us. The humor bites, but we don’t.

The view from Christmas Lake Creative

Our work with Julia Cameron’s classic, The Artist’s Way continues, and Tom credits it with helping to unlock the flow of his memoir. After purchasing what he’d intended to be a dream journal, he’s now using the leather-bound book for morning musings that have morphed into (some might say mad) memoir-writing sessions. Julia didn’t need her namesake, Ms. Cameron, to teach her the value of writing when you wake. She’s been doing it for years to prime the pump for her creative day. Of course, not every day here is totally creative. Laundry gets done, meals get made, and errands get run. And some days—for both our clients’ projects and our own—are better than others. There is ebb, but (gratefully) there is also flow.

What we’re working on…

In the last edition, we talked about reading out loud as a way to gauge and improve one’s writing. The past two weeks have been all about oral pleasures (no, not that kind), as we’ve been focused on finishing the audio edition of  The Big One, engineered to perfection by Morrison Ellis, to which Julia is now adding co-author Mike Krysiuk's original songs.

The audio version of Greg Lawrence’s techno-thriller, With You, is coming soon, as the files, recorded by narrator Louise Porter, have now been uploaded to Amazon’s ACX service and are awaiting approval for distribution on Audible.

You can listen to a sample here.

What we’re looking for…

Along with memoir and creative self-help, we’re expanding into business books that tell a good story. If you know of any writers looking for a publisher or just some advice, please send them our way.

What we’re reading…

Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World continues to deliver insights to Tom. The section on omniscience offers a practical and eye-opening guide to the narrator who knows all. Here is an example:

The omniscient narrator’s responsibility is not to present the reader with any universal or undeniable truths, but with statements that will be proved true in the world the story creates.

We could write a world of words about creating worlds, but if you’d like to learn more about this essential foundation of storytelling, join our weekly workshop or contact us for a consultation.

This little globe sat on my father’s desk in his law office and rests here on his (now my) copy of A Conrad Argosy.

Books of poetry, such as Poems from the Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke, always provide Julia with light as well as inspiration for her own work. She is also reading Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay and Old Monarch by Courtney Marie Andrews.

From Old Monarch:

ONCE IN A LIFETIME

There is a one-in-four-trillion chance
that you exist at all.
If you have any love letters—send them now.

What we’re listening to…

With about an hour left of Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch, Tom is still absorbing history lessons on Belgian abuses of the Congo Free State, British imperialism, the Panama Canal, and Joseph Conrad’s unlikely life as a writer. Julia continues to brighten her day with A Light so Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of a Wrinkle in Time.

What we’re cooking up…

We’re putting the finishing touches on our first pop-up Zoom workshop, coming in April. Short duration, short notice, short fiction. Look for an email in your inbox.

As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Onward and upward in 2022 and beyond!

Subscribe to our updates on Substack.

Excerpted from "You Have to Start Somewhere" a memoir by Thomas G. Fiffer

Horizons far and near

That final trip to Far Horizons, which afterward (for reasons more emotional than financial) slipped forever out of reach, was marked, or maybe marred—if the lack of something can make a mark—by absence. Not just my father’s physical absence but the absence of all the things we’d done with him. 

I probably ate banana pancakes at a dimpled glass, metal-rimmed table by the long pool ringed with red pavers, but they didn’t taste the same (like the ginger ale in the hospital waiting room on the day he’d left us), even with extra whipped cream. I might have played shuffleboard on the adjacent courts, slipping the discs listlessly along the concrete, uninterested in where they landed, and I don’t remember who with, as my board had been shuffled in a way I had not yet begun to fully fathom. We did not make our traditional drive to The Buccaneer restaurant, where just over the little arched bridge a jaunty, costumed pirate stood guard over a huge toy chest, offering an “Ahoy” and a toy to each excited and delighted child. Nor the longer journey to The Moors, a seafood shack that may have been on stilts, with better food but lacking the Buccaneer’s festive atmosphere. There was no trip to the Ringling Circus Museum, or St. Armand’s Circle on nearby Lido Key (we were on Longboat), where my father always purchased at least one print or painting from the Lebwohl gallery and my mother shopped for summer clothing and anything we’d forgotten, while I spent the day bored, hanging in the afternoon heat on her skirt hem, waiting patiently for the dreaded excursion to end. There was, however, a shell store on St. Armand’s, and I would always marvel, in the blissful cool of the air conditioning, at the perfect specimens of olives, conchs, augers, and coquinas, and other shells whose names I once knew from long beach walks with my shell-obsessed mother and the little book that she—with her poor eyes—had me consult for her after we laid our finds out on the kitchen counter in our cottage. And there were no backgammon games with my father, who would unclasp and flip open the black leather briefcase that expanded into a board and teach me strategy, as he had already done with chess. 

There was, still, dinner in the resort’s elegant and excellent dining room, but on our first night there, the effusive, suave, Desi Arnaz-look-alike Maître d’, Jesus (pronounced ‘Hey Seuss’), whose name I surely didn’t realize was Jesus, noticed my father’s absence and inquired, “And where is Mr. Fiffer?” “He’s no longer with us,” my mother said somberly, and like my then best friend, Roger, who crumpled into my mother’s arms at my father’s funeral, or the audience that cried with me when I told the story of my father’s last day on earth, Jesus placed a slender, brown, manicured hand on the white tablecloth to steady himself as he started sobbing. This fresh and powerful expression of grief no doubt inflamed my still gaping wound, and yet I recall only the immensity of his sadness in that moment instead of my own. I had already cried, unlike my middle brother, Jim, who after flying back from Yale, where he was a senior, and arriving at my uncle’s house where we were all gathered in shock and disbelief—my uncle sitting in the green chaise in the corner of their shag-carpeted sunroom with windows facing the pool and the enormous console television set I later learned had been my (other) grandmother’s, shaking his head, repeating over and over, “I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it” (who could?)—my brother, who, as he took my uncle’s place on the chaise broke into tears and heard me ask, with all the naive insensitivity of a nine-year-old, “Why are you crying?” and said, ignoring my ignorance, “Because I couldn’t cry on the plane.”

It occurs to me now, somewhat cynically perhaps, that Jesus’s reaction may have been due, in some part, to my father’s legendary and well-deserved reputation as the last of the big tippers (and spenders). But I have no doubt that the weeping man, who had served me kiddie cocktails for the past five years, felt the loss much more deeply in his heart than in his pocket.

When tragedy strikes, your horizon shifts. A horror that, if you ever thought about it (like the sun no longer coming up), seemed millions of years away and impossible to ever actually encounter, is suddenly right there, and not just close up, in your face, but on top of you and moving through you, crushing and gutting you as it utterly overtakes you. Your world has turned, not on schedule in its mundane, diurnal circle, but upside down and sideways, thrown off its axis and careering off course, wobbling through space and time as it enters uncharted stretches of universe, where the word diurnal splits into die and urn, where every word having anything to do with death or even sounding like it suddenly stings, where a previously unremarkable commercial for a car or a refrigerator or a bar of soap with a dad in it induces instant, uncontrollable emotional upheaval—an ever-expanding universe of loss closing in on you, where the laws of physics break down not at the unimaginable extremes but in the unimagined and now unavoidable center, and you come to understand, as you struggle each day to lift your head just high enough to regain your bearings, to spot a North Star, or any star, in the endless darkness, the infinite gravity of grief.

At the same time, your universe bursts open, the black void suddenly clustered with a stellar association (a real term in astronomy) of well-meaning people, friends of the family, friends of friends, bodies who were always orbiting but now cast their living light on your death-occasioned darkness and through their stories and memories and words of comfort and consolation manage to preserve your father’s flame even though his once brightly burning star has been extinguished. The solace you receive restores your sense of gravity, not as a crushing force but a healthy pressure that keeps things—especially your grief—in their place. It firms up your falling firmament and reminds you, as you float through each day’s depressing dirge of re-realization, that there is still music to be heard—albeit a requiem—in the spheres.

On the plane ride to Far Horizons that year, the empty seat next to my mother and me (the seat that would have been my father’s) was occupied by a young boy, perhaps 10 or 11, traveling to Orlando by himself. His name was Carmi, short for Carmine, and he was scared of flying and also extremely nervous and fidgety, even more so than I. My mother gave him gum for the pressure, tissues for his runny nose, root beer or butterscotch or Pep-o-mint Lifesavers—from her endless store—and assured him that the plane was not going to crash-land in the Everglades or the Okefenokee Swamp. Neither the absence of my father nor his death could have possibly come up, for if it had, I doubt that Carmi could have remained so unselfconsciously self-absorbed. He took immense pride in making the flight by himself (his grandparents would be meeting him in Orlando, where we were probably changing planes for a puddle jump to Tampa or Bradenton), and he insisted that when we disembarked, we act as if we had never met him. While we waited dutifully for the aisle to clear, he scampered off the plane ahead of us, without a goodbye or even a thank you, and as we caught up with him approaching grandma and grandpa (a retired mobster, for sure), I instinctively started to say, “Hi Carmi” but managed to suppress his name before it left my lips. The resulting “Hi,” accompanied by a half-wave like the half-hand-raise one makes as a student unsure of the answer, drew an odd look from his grandparents, but I was confident it had stayed within the probability of a forward kid (which I was not) saying hi to another. Now that I think about it, those grandparents surely knew he’d sought assistance on the flight, just as my father knew I had lied to him about the drill. 

My father’s absence from Far Horizons that final year also caused my mother and me to spend some time with a family we knew from home who were vacationing at the same time at the next resort down the beach, The Colony, to which I could walk (and had to walk as my mother hadn’t rented a car). I played, as happily as I could, with their son Carl (about my age) and his little brother, Jon, on their beach and swam in their pool. For a few hours each day, I almost forgot my problems. I felt, in an uncomfortable yet comfortable way, part of their family, even though I barely knew them. Sitting at dinner with an intact and as yet undamaged clan, I was both unaware (consciously) and aware (subconsciously) of the extent of my deprivation. Why else would I have chosen, despite my mother’s oft-administered admonishment to order frugally as a guest, the surf and turf special, more expensive by half than anything else on the menu? If an apology for my lack of manners was made, I surely didn’t make it, as I abhorred phone calls and would rather have died of shame than suffered the embarrassment of dialing their number.

My mother’s solo status also meant that when she went out to dinner with Anita, a long-time family friend, I was left alone in our little cottage on the beach—at least I remember feeling desperately and terrifyingly alone, though in all likelihood there was a sitter. As the evening progressed I panicked. I suppose it was a panic attack, though no one would have called it that then. Interestingly, the term first surfaced in mental health circles that very year, 1975, and made its way into the DSM in 1980. I began calling, or had the sitter call, Anita’s apartment repeatedly, only to have the phone ring endlessly, since unbeknownst to me, the two of them were at a restaurant. My vision narrowed and my palms and forehead poured sweat as I pictured my mother dying in a gruesome car crash with a cackling, curly-haired, sharp-faced Anita hovering over the wheel. I already felt responsible for my father’s death (a lie my mother helped me unravel), fearing that my dirty fingernails (something he hated) might have caused his heart to stop or that if I had just pushed my way out of the Mersa-deez sooner and gotten to my aunt and uncle’s door faster when I frantically screamed, “Aunt Ruthie, Uncle Buddy, come quick, something’s happened,” then repeated my mother’s mysterious words, “Call the inhalator!”, that if I had just not been so slow and careless the paramedics just might have saved him. How I could be responsible for Anita carelessly killing my mother I wasn’t sure, but I knew it had to be my fault, perhaps for allowing my mother to go out that night (though I didn’t have a choice) or for not chopping down the tree into which Anita’s car slammed at full speed. Either way, the carelessness of losing both parents, as opposed to the mere misfortune of losing one (Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest), was surely all mine. I had always worried too much about things that didn’t happen, but this time I hadn’t worried enough. The sense of relief when my mother returned safely was like the soothing sound of the ocean caressing the sand just a few feet from our cottage door, or the marvel of the sun coming up over the horizon, piercing the dawn darkness with its promise of daylight. It took a long time for me to forgive her.

After the trip, there were other markers: my first fatherless birthday in April, my father’s birthdayless birthday that October (when we first began donating books to our local library in his memory), Hanukkah (we lit the candles, my mother never smoked again) and Christmas, and of course, the first anniversary of my father’s death. That February 9th, and on each one after as long as she remained our neighbor, my friend Roger’s buxom, beehive blonde, bombshell mother, Judie, left a single red rose on my mother’s doorstep. I continued the tradition, eventually transitioning to simple bouquets or tabletop rose bushes when Hlavacek Florist stopped offering the option of sending a single flower. “Fifteen years,” my mother would say when she called to thank me. “Twenty years.” Followed by 25, 30, 35, and finally 40. After that, she didn’t say it anymore. She couldn’t. Because she, too, had slipped over the horizon—the far one and the near one—into the great beyond.

Christmas Lake Communiqué

The magic of creativity consists of forging something new from something old, engaging in the alchemy of turning words into story; composing notes into sound; shaping line and color into form. As spring surges and shoots become buds that unfold into blossoms, we’re celebrating the power of creative transformation.

In our weekly flash fiction workshop, which we resumed last Wednesday night, writers began with a blank page and a brief prompt and ended 20 minutes later with flashes of brilliance—worlds they hadn’t seen before suddenly illuminated by a burst of lightning. A woman and her dog unnerved by the possible presence of a mysterious stranger in the garden; an aging pianist sustained by musical memories when her arthritic fingers fail her; a voice that leaves listeners “tugged by the tails of our souls”; a middle-aged man mired in mediocrity reliving his football fame at a high school reunion. At 7:30 pm last Wednesday none of these stories existed, and by 7:50, they had all come to life. A creative efflorescence.

We’ve also started a journey, with a small group of friends, through Julia Cameron’s classic, The Artist’s Way There’s nothing like writing your morning pages to energize the day’s creative output and give yourself the freedom to express thoughts that may only make sense to yourself. This writing is a kind of disgorging, allowing words to break through the dam of conscious consideration and rush headlong into the stream of the unintentional. We’d share excerpts, except that we are explicitly not supposed to. All the more reason to pick up the book and start writing your own.

What we’re working on…

Editing continues on our three novels in progress with a strong focus on voice.

Questions to ask yourself as a writer when struggling with voice include:

What is your character’s nature? Is he cynical or unassuming? Is she petty or open-hearted? These character traits inform how your character acts and speaks.

What feeling does your character inspire? Does he make people feel uncomfortable? Does she convey trust and authority? The impression your character creates differs from his or her character traits, as this result may—or may not—flow from genuine intent. In other words, your character could be a fraud or a liar, or an insecure person putting on an act of bravado.

What actor or actress would you picture playing your character on screen? It’s a bit counterintuitive, but this visual exercise can help you nail not only your character’s speech patterns but also gestures, mannerisms, and physical reactions.

The author of our collegiate coming-of-age novel says he hears the music, the rhythm of the narrative, so much so that while a compelling detail might add color to a scene, if it strikes a discordant lyrical note, he knows it doesn’t belong.

Reading your work out loud, either to yourself or a trusted listener, or having it read to you by someone else, is an essential part of the editing process.

We’re also extremely pleased with how the cover for our nursing home novel, Where the Light is Brighter, is progressing. Cover designer Nicole Hower sent over a number of concepts, and we’ve settled on the one below (with some adjustments to come). It captures the sense and spirit of the book, which tempers the bleakness of aging, loss, and displacement with the brightness of finding home in unexpected places.

Work on the audio edition of The Big One, engineered by Morrison Ellis, is now complete except for the musical introduction that Julia—who always takes things to the next level—will soon be recording featuring co-author Mike Krysiuk on guitar, herself on violin, and friend Christian Otten on piano. Mike is a talented song writer, and one of the ways he recovered dexterity after his accident was relearning the guitar. Last week’s spirited rehearsal in our living room was a treat. We’re also expecting the audio edition of With You later this month.

What we’re looking for…

With three novels coming this year, we're keenly interested in acquiring some memoirs—or creative non-fiction—to round out the list. In addition, self-help that is not formulaic or prescriptive but narrative based on the author’s experience would be welcome.

What we’re reading…

Our reading adventures over the past two weeks have been peripatetic. No, we haven’t been reading while walking (too dangerous, unless it’s an audio book), but rather dipping in and out of various titles for entertainment, education, and inspiration. The books on Julia’s nightstand are always interesting and ever-shifting. Tom finally got a good ways into Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World, in which the author analyzes literary masterworks to reveal what distinguishes good from great. Here’s a quote that sums up the premise:

This is the key thing to understand: in literary works, secrets function to the extent that their revelation creates an equal portion of mystery.

Confusion or Convergence?

A trip to one of our favorite bookstores, The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, NH, offered up some lovely books for Julia—How to Love by the late Thich Nhat Hanh and Poems from the Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke. She is always working on a poem. Tom’s finds included an unread classic—Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham—a first edition of Monsieur by Lawrence Durrell (a favorite author of Tom’s father’s)—and Erin Lee Carr’s memoir All That You Leave Behind, which opens with a nod to the perfect imperfection of memory:

When I think back to my early childhood home in Minneapolis, my brain conjures up a dim outline of a blue house on Pillsbury Avenue. While it is hard to remember the exact details of the house, the memories of its inhabitants come quite easily.

The gift book shelf had something for everyone, including a Greenlights journal for Julia’s son Jacob, but was missing Tom’s The Alphabet of Love, perhaps because it won’t be out until the first of May.

What we’re listening to…

Maya Jasanoff continues to entrance Tom in The Dawn Watch through her skillful intertwining of Joseph Conrad’s life with his art, while Julia revisits one of her favorite writers in A Light so Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of a Wrinkle in Time.

What we’re cooking up…

There’s still space in our two-day (consecutive Saturdays) workshop, The Art of the Opening, which starts on March 19. Along with planning some other spring classes, we’re considering popping in with some pop-up sessions (inspired by Tom’s new favorite food provider, Popup Bagels). These would be short-notice (24 hours at most), short duration (one-hour) workshops on a whimsical theme. If you’re interested in being notified, sign up for this newsletter, and we’ll let you know when something’s popping.

By the time you’re reading our next edition, spring will officially be here. As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Onward and upward in 2022 and beyond!

Subscribe to our updates on Substack.

You Can Never Go Back . . . or Can You?

Bates, whose first name remains unknown (though it definitely isn’t Norman), appeared once again in last night’s Flash Fiction Workshop, where one of our prompts was: As Bates entered the room, all eyes were upon him.

---

Bates was back. At least, he thought he was. Felt it in his gut, which, though it had swelled (from the swill he’d been drinking) to twice its normal size, was still rock hard, reminding him of his football days, when he was unstoppable on the field with the guys—and off the field (which he played quite expertly) with the girls.

As he entered the crowded room, 80s music thumped from a pair of giant speakers on either side of the live band—a motley crew of aging hippies with either too much hair or too little or hair where it wasn’t supposed to be, clinging to their instruments as they clung hopelessly to their youth, swaying in the way that only middle-aged white men can sway.

The banner over the double oak doors that led into the carpeted ballroom (worn carpet, he noticed—a beigey, blue colorless color, at least as far as color-blind Bates could tell, with evidence of spills in numerous places and badly frayed where the door frame met the floor) read:

40th Reunion—Brookview (East) High School—Go Wildcats!!!

Under his size 48 black sharkskin blazer, Bates wore his old football jersey, well, not the actual one he’d worn in the games, but a replica he’d purchased online for the event, with profits going to support the school’s sister institution in Guatemala—or was it Honduras? The green nylon with gold letters glowed under the flickering light of the disco ball rotating from a pole up in the ceiling. His classmates and their significant others (he hated that phrase, but what else could one use—lover, partner, special friend, or God forbid, friend with benefits) were clustered and clumped, chatting and chomping, chugging and glugging, singing (out of tune) and swaying (out of step), and saying God knows what about so and so—or maybe even about him, since, when he strode into the room, bald and bold, all glittering green and gold, and (he hoped) not too old, all eyes were upon him.

It was just like the freshman Monster Mash, when he’d gone as Frankenstein with a giant green mask and everyone had recognized him, or Senior Prom, when sweet—sweet corn sweet—Norma Jean had bought him a green and gold boutonniere and pinned it on his too tight tuxedo jacket. Now, as then, he was the indisputable center of attention. But Norma Jean was dead (car accident) and only about half the members of the team he captained were there, drinking posh imported beer out of glass mugs (Bates was a Bud man through and through) and reminiscing about the games and wives and lives they’d lost and won.

Suddenly Bates felt sick—sick to his oversized stomach pushing his jersey out over the top of his belt. He’d been a hero to these people—and now…who was he? What was he? Why was he even here, pretending to be somebody when he lived alone on a lake, the loons his only companions, swam naked, and often ate Campbell’s soup straight from the can?

What on earth had happened? How did he get sacked so many times behind the line of scrimmage? And who moved those damn goalposts out of reach?

He picked up a frosted mug full of Overbotherbeck, or whatever it was called, smashed it on the floor, wiggled his knees in a familiar little dance, and yelled, “Touchdown!”

© 2022 Thomas G. Fiffer

Christmas Lake Communiqué

On Saturday, a sudden snow squall turned the sky white as a blank page, forcing a moment of reckoning with the forces beyond our control. All one could do was surrender, marvel, and appreciate. So it is when the muse enters the room and takes the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the oxygen—leaving us breathless as we wake from our trance.

After the skies cleared, we headed out for hibachi with one of our favorite clients—also a dear friend—whose long short story has morphed into a novella—and as he reminisced about his childhood in the 1940s, we encouraged him to start his memoir. Here’s what he has to say about working with us.

Although I have written and published nonfiction, the skills required for fiction are distinctly different. Tom and Julia’s collective experience in fiction writing has been essential to my ability to write a first novel. — Brooks Colburn, PhD

Last night, there was coconut curry cooking in the crock pot as we prepared for another week of helping writers bring their stories to life.

Work on the audio edition of The Big One, which Julia co-wrote with Mike Krysiuk, is nearly done, guided by our brilliant British audio engineer, Morrison Ellis. Morrison was live on Instagram last weekend demonstrating his skills on a section of the book, after which he hosted a Clubhouse discussion in which Julia was featured.

Our newest title, With You by Greg Lawrence, is also in audio production and continues to receive rave reviews on Amazon.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. A generational saga with vivid story telling, well researched details and history , great concept and unexpected twists and turns. Well worth your time for the read. — Lizz M.

What we’re working on…

Cover artist Nicole Hower is cranking out concepts for Where the Light Is Brighter, the bittersweet story of 98-year-old Edith Sharp’s finding friendship, joy, and ultimately home in the fictional River’s Edge long-term care facility—the “never place” she never wanted to be. And we’re about to start serious line editing on both our historically accurate Native American thriller and our madcap adventure of an Ivy League baseball star whose life—both on and off campus—is turned upside down, inside out, and every which way but loose when his troubled past collides with his plan to land a job on Wall Street. If you want to become a master of the universe, you have to master your demons first.

Finally, Tom’s little book of essays, The Alphabet of Love, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

A thoughtful contemplation of the modern day struggles and triumphs of love.
— Abigail Bates

What we’re looking for…

Unlike many hybrid publishers, we continue to be interested in literary fiction (as well as memoir and non-fiction that educates and inspires). Books with strong voices that push the boundaries of genre and form are welcome, as a good story always transcends its container.

What we’re reading…

Reading and rereading our authors’ manuscripts occupied most of our time during the past two weeks, but Tom did get a little ways into Joseph Conrad’s story, “Youth,” the tale of a cursed ship carrying coal from London to Bangkok (which apparently was cost-effective in the late 1880s). Julia is enjoying Fulfilled by Anna Yusim, a friend and award-winning psychiatrist and executive coach, whose compelling book explores the premise that “our lingering feeling of dissatisfaction coincides with spiritual neglect.” The rest of our ever-growing reading list will have to wait.

What we’re listening to…

Tom logged another hour or so of Maya Jasaloff’s biography of Joseph Conrad—The Dawn Watch—while Julia continued to absorb A Light so Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of a Wrinkle in Time. She’s also started Chrissie Hynde’s memoir, Reckless: My Life as a Pretender.

Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast continues to be a source of inspiration for Tom, who encountered this quote from Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg that echoes the message of his book on love.

The word love is so loaded, And our fear of course is that it means something very passive, complacent, and I’m going to let people hurt me, and I’m going to let them oppress other people, and I’m going to be a doormat. It’s very hard to see love as a force, as a power rather than as a weakness, But that is its reality. — Sharon Salzberg

What we’re cooking up…

Our Flash Fiction Workshop, back by popular demand, starts up again on March 2nd. Come join us as we use free writing to generate a piece of flash fiction in just 20 minutes. Starting with a prompt to stimulate your imagination, you’ll find yourself setting scenes, creating characters, forming a narrative, and mastering the flash fiction story arc. After writing, we’ll read our pieces and discuss with the group. And, you’ll have finished stories you can submit to contests and possibly stitch into a longer narrative.

Here’s the opening of a piece created in the workshop.

Wilson opened the pages of his wife’s journal, looking for answers. She had always been a woman of mystery—tall, slim, disarmingly attractive with that sly smile of hers and those saucer-like blue eyes—and a ten-year chunk of her past that was—even to him—unaccounted for and never spoken of. She called it her “hiatus from life,” and Wilson—who was well aware that he had married several notches up on the rating scale—wasn’t one to pry…until now.

Read more

We’re also offering an exciting new two-session course, The Art of the Opening—Scene, Stakes, Structure, and Spirit. You’ll learn exactly what makes an opening great, master a simple process you can use to craft your first lines and following paragraphs, and sharpen the tools you need to start your book with a bang.

Aside from co-leading our classes, Julia will be devoting the entire month of March to work on the screenplay for her own independent feature film.

That’s all for this edition; stay tuned for the next. As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Onward and upward in 2022 and beyond!

Subscribe to our updates on Substack.

Christmas Lake Communiqué

We love strong women at Christmas Lake Press. So in this edition of the communiqué, we’re celebrating the strong female characters in our recent titles, as well as our co-founder, Julia Bobkoff, whose innumerable strengths include beating back a most definitely not mild case of COVID after 25 days in quarantine. Julia is back now in full force, applying her talents to guide books from concept to completion as Christmas Lake Press Editor-in-Chief.

The Big One, which Julia co-wrote with Mike Krysiuk, tells the story of Mike’s remarkable recovery from a life-altering (and nearly life-ending) accident. Mike’s mother, Anne, was a formidable force in his recovery, ever-present, ever-patient, ever-praying, and ever-ready with Mike’s favorite root beer popsicles. His older sister, Mary Ann, was also an integral member of “Team Krysiuk,” along with Mike’s father, as the family rallied to bring Mike back from the brink. We’re working to bring you the audio book, which Mike—who had to learn how to speak again after his accident—narrated beautifully himself.

In Greg Lawrence’s debut novel, With You, three generations of strong women form the backbone of the Rain family, passing down determination, perseverance, and an independent spirit from matriarch to mother to a daughter devoting her life to her dreams. Greg dedicated the book to the women in his life, noting that “strong women are made by strong mothers.” He also just settled on a narrator for the audio version, coming in March, whose voice exudes feminine strength with every word. With You continues to garner 5-star reviews, including this one just in: “I laughed and I cried and I celebrated this new author. Waiting for the story to continue....”

What we’re working on…

Looking forward, two of our upcoming releases introduce women—one old and one young—overcoming monumental challenges as each is forced to accept and ultimately embrace a new stage of life. We’re popping with excitement about both of these titles, the first (which we’ve already mentioned) featuring 98-year-old Edith Sharp as she transitions to the River’s Edge long-term care facility and meets a cast of characters unlike any she knew when she lived in her comfortable cape with the white picket fence; the second a historical fiction thriller set in eastern North America approximately 1000 years ago. It’s author David Long’s first book, and he thoroughly researched native American culture and customs to bring to life a people and a time period on which little has been written. David’s book is in the final stages of editing, and you’ll be hearing more about it in future communiqués.

Line editing work is also about to start on our comical, cynical, at times criminal, and captivating coming-of-age novel that alternates between the mental pressure-cooker of an Ivy League school and the low-pressure storm system of a mental institution.

In addition, Tom’s little book of essays on love is moving forward.

Part of what we do at Christmas Lake Creative (the parent organization of Christmas Lake Press) is help writers achieve their goals. To that end, we’ve been busy coaching a science fiction and fantasy author with one book recently published and another almost done to help him set and meet weekly objectives for not only output but also professional advancement and building his marketing machine. Another coaching client has returned to his novel (after his wife’s tragic and untimely passing)—the first book in a trilogy that challenges us to explore what healthy masculinity might actually look like.

What we’re looking for…

We continue to lean towards books that ignite a discussion on the challenges we face as technology advances faster than our culture can process and absorb it, as well as memoirs that—through the slice of life they examine—cut deeply into our assumptions about what it means to be human. This may sound heavy—and of course we always love a light, entertaining read—but our focus is on books that stimulate the mind and spark the imagination.

What we’re reading…

We didn’t get very far into Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, partly due to time pressures and partly because it didn’t grab us, but we’re still going to give it a chance. Likewise, we only spent a bit of time in Stephen King’s On Writing and James Woods’s How Fiction Works. We were, however, captivated by Hisham Matar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, The Return (enough to order another of his books), which we’re reading aloud at dinner chapter by chapter. And in the queue are yet another book on writing, The Half-Known World by Robert Boswell, and a spiritual philosophy volume—The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich.

What we’re listening to…

Tom’s current audio adventure is a fascinating biography of his father’s favorite author, Joseph Conrad—The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasaloff—while Julia (never satisfied with one title at a time) is listening to Lost in Ghost Town: A Memoir of Addiction, Redemption, and Hope in Unlikely Places by Carder Stout, Let Love Rule by Lenny Kravitz, and A Light so Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of a Wrinkle in Time. Tom did finish listening to Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (in only one week), a sobering assessment of how much time we’re given here and how we can stop misusing it.

What we’re cooking up…

This past week Tom was interviewed for two podcasts: Happily Ever After Is Just The Beginning! with marriage expert Lesli Doares, and What Are We Talking About—an exploration of all things communication—with Tammy Palazzo and Louis Sacco. Both recordings will be going up in the next week or two. Julia—who works independently as a screenwriter and film producer—continued her work on several solo and collaborative projects.

On the company front, we’ve joined the Independent Book Publishers Association, Writers & Publishers Network, and the Connecticut Press Club, and we’ve applied for membership in Small Press United to expand our reach into bookstores.

Last but not least, in the idea basket Tom has a quirky concept for a cookbook on relationships, and he and Julia are starting to map out plans for co-writing a four-book series.

That’s all for this edition—stay tuned for the next. As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Onward and upward in 2022 and beyond!

Subscribe to our updates on Substack.

Christmas Lake Communiqué

Introducing the Christmas Lake Communiqué

A lot has been happening over the last six months at Christmas Lake Creative, and in this new, biweekly (once every two weeks) update, we’ll be sharing our goings-on with you. To keep it snappy, we’ve come up with five topics: What we’re working on—a summary of projects in process; What we’re looking for—calls for submissions; What we’re reading—from our nightstand to yours; What we’re listening to—the audiobooks filling the space between our ears; and What we’re cooking up—new programs and packages we’re planning to offer. We’ll still be using the Christmas Lake Chronicle to post news of new releases, author reviews, events, and excerpts we hope you’ll enjoy. As we work to spread the word, we’d appreciate your doing the same by recommending us to a friend.

What we’re working on…

Two exciting new debut novels are in our editing queue. The first is a touching, bittersweet story of life in a long-term care facility, told mostly through the eyes of 98-year-old Edith Sharp, who has an opinion on everything—and everyone—and a lifetime of memories that are slowly slipping away. The book takes us through the first year of Edith’s “confinement” in River’s Edge, the place on the hill where no one wants to be. But despite her (and our collective) dread of the darkness within, brightness breaks through at every turn. The book is structured around the holidays (and their familiar decorations) that residents use to mark time, and as Edith settles in and reluctantly makes friends, she begins to feel more and more at home. Written by a woman who works in the field, this book shatters stereotypes and preconceived notions about the proverbial “old folks home” as we meet the forever young-at-heart folks who enliven River’s Edge.

The second book is a modern, coming-of-age story with echoes of The Catcher in the Rye; Bright Lights, Big City; and Hillbilly Elegy. The protagonist is an anti-hero extraordinaire: brilliant yet woefully uneducated; the star of his college baseball team (when he’s not benched with self-inflicted injuries); a magnet for women and a horrible boyfriend; part dreamer, part stunning realist; and his own worst enemy. We follow him from freshman year through his approaching graduation, and the saying “never a dull moment” does not do this story justice. The book leaves you breathless.

What we’re looking for…

Good stories. It’s that simple. Whether fiction, non-fiction, or memoir, we are committed to publishing books that educate, entertain, enlighten, and inspire. We work intensively with our authors not only to help them put their best book forward, but also to help them grow as artists and professionals.

While we are always open to new work in our areas of focus, we are currently interested in non-formulaic novels that cover new ground and memoirs that center on personal and spiritual growth.

Writers can use our convenient submission form or send us an email at info@christmaslakecreative.com for more information.

What we’re reading…

Besides the books we’re editing, we’re about to start Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge for a dive into the mysteries of the artist’s psyche. At some point this year, we’ll take a busman’s holiday and reread Stephen King’s indispensable classic, On Writing, and finish James Wood’s equally illuminating How Fiction Works.

Let us know what you’re reading—because inquiring minds want to know.

What we’re listening to…

We’re great lovers of audiobooks here and often have a few going at the same time. Our current listen is Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, a spectacular blend of the historical and the inventive. Up next (or as a break from fiction) is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. He was a guest on Krista Tippett’s amazing podcast, On Being, a soul-soothing, soul-sparking forum that never disappoints.

What we’re cooking up…

Besides continuing with our coaching and creative collaboration programs, we’re looking to start up some virtual classes and potentially our own podcast later this year. We’ve also set up as a vendor on B&N Press, enabling us to create editions of our books for sale through Barnes & Noble’s platform, and we’ve joined the Independent Book Publishers Association so we can stay in the loop and take advantage of specialized marketing opportunities for our authors.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for the next edition. As always, we are grateful to our authors, clients, friends, and supporters. Here’s to doing fantastic things in 2022!

P.S. Subscribe to our updates on Substack.

Read Stories by the Winners of the Rising Stars Flash Fiction Contest

Here are stories by two of the prize winners of the Rising Stars Flash Fiction Contest.

The first, winner of the $250 Contest Prize in our prompt category, is by Abigail Bates, a 2020 graduate of UMass Boston living in Sandwich, Massachusetts. This is Abby’s first contest win.

***

Roger Harmon took a seat on the ground, digging his wing-tipped shoes into the warm sand to settle himself. The hems of his grey trousers were flecked with salty droplets. The cuffs of his coat sleeves bore dark rings where the sea had taken hold of them. The last feathered wisps of his hair swayed in a gentle sea-breeze. In his shaky fingers, he clutched a green clump of sea glass. The smooth glass was all that felt familiar in what had been a very strange day for Roger.

Read more

***

The second story, winner of a special $100 Judges’ Prize we created to recognize the runner-up in our freeform category, is by Esme Noelle DeVault, an attorney and poet living in Rhode Island with her husband, son, and dog Charlie. She was previously an English teacher and an academic reference librarian. She’s had poems published in Motherscope, Jonah Magazine, The Big Windows Review, and forthcoming in Inkling Literary Magazine and Kissing Dynamite: A Journal of Poetry.

The first time that jaundiced Count Olaf from the pretentiously abstract painting hanging in the foyer spoke to Miranda, she wasn’t all that surprised. She’d been getting a peculiar vibe from some of her household objects lately, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Not that anything else had spoken to her yet, but she could have sworn that one of her ceramic gargoyles had winked at her last week. Another time, when she was climbing the stairs after having binged an entire Netflix series one weekend alone, with too much Ben and Jerry’s and tequila, again, she thought she saw one of the plants wave at her. Tricks of the eye, she thought.

Read more

***

We are awaiting permission to publish the third story, “Library of Lives,” winner of the $250 Contest Prize in our freeform category, by Chris Watson.

The Rising Stars Flash Fiction Contest was co-sponsored by Christmas Lake Creative and Dale Thomas Vaughn.

An Open(ed) Book

Wilson opened the pages of his wife’s journal, looking for answers. She had always been a woman of mystery—tall, slim, disarmingly attractive with that sly smile of hers and those saucer-like blue eyes—and a ten-year chunk of her past that was—even to him—unaccounted for and never spoken of. She called it her “hiatus from life,” and Wilson—who was well aware that he had married several notches up on the rating scale—wasn’t one to pry…until now.

But why now?

Well, there was the small matter of her disappearance—gone three days now—with no communication whatsoever. While this had happened before for stretches of a few hours—and once an entire day—there had never been three full days of complete radio silence. The odd thing was, he didn’t really miss her. He and Jenny—if that was indeed her real name—weren’t that close. They did live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, sleep with each other fairly regularly—with three children to prove it—but their relationship lacked the kind of real intimacy—the sharing of gossip, the pillow talk, the ability to finish one another’s sentences, and of course, the sexual chemistry, that some of his friends clearly enjoyed with their (he had to say) much less attractive wives. So Wilson was both lucky and unlucky—and while his friends, colleagues, and the world at large looked at him as if he’d won the trophy, he felt the sting of loneliness more than anyone could have known.

On the first day, he looked at the journal—which she had forbidden him to touch—and did nothing. His conscience wouldn’t let him raise his hand to where it sat on her office bookshelf, wedged between a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

On the second day, he touched the blue leather-bound volume, even took it from the shelf and moved it from hand to hand, but he didn’t open it. After all, he’d made a promise—as important to her, she’d said, as their vows.

On the third day, after two scotch and sodas and a hemp gummy from the new store in town, he lost his resolve—or rather found it—and, feeling something give deep in his center, opened the book.

The first line blew him away.

I am not who you think I am.

Then who was she? A spy? That’s what he’d always suspected. But he did not receive confirmation. What he learned instead shocked him to his core. Jenny was not her real name. It was…Svetlana. She was Russian—born in an orphanage—and rescued at age 3 by the parents who had raised her in Dallas and later moved east to Pittsburgh where he had met her at Carnegie Mellon. Her entire life story—what she’d learned, extracted really, from her parents, to whom she bore a remarkable resemblance for an adopted child, what she’d researched from publicly available sources, and what she’d forced out of government officials using her considerable charm—was there in the journal. Her biological parents had been Russian dissidents—freedom fighters, rebels, resisters—and they had given her up so she could have a life of freedom in the west. It was a stunning sacrifice. And…they were both still alive! She had contacted them and was, as Wilson now surmised, in Russia RIGHT NOW.

He thought of the English paper he’d written in eighth grade on Shakespeare’s Richard III—and his theme: outer appearance and inner reality rarely coincide. He’d gotten an A, but the lesson apparently hadn’t stuck. If it had, how could he have missed EVERYTHING?

You know, LOVE is also a four letter word — by Trevi Holland

You know, LOVE is also a four letter word. But so is FEAR. Many people fear love because it makes them WEAK. It only leaves them wanting MORE. Four. That’s how many letters it takes to spell the word that is used to qualify an amount of murders only beat by blaming it on God.

HATE. There is a thin line between love and hate and many people straddle that line. 

LIFE is only what you make of it, but how can you MAKE anything without the four letters it takes to create the word? The life that is made when a baby is born is sentenced to playing a mandatory GAME with love as the prize. GIFT. That is what everybody claims life is: a gift meant to be treasured. But if life is a gift, how can it also be a game in which we are all forced to play? 

PLAY. That’s what we do in order to start something that’s been put on pause, we press play. Or we get played. If our lives are put on pause because we allowed ourselves to get played, then it is also up to us to be the ones to press play once again.

KNOW. Not the opposite of yes, but the act of having knowledge. If we know that life is not just a highway, as Rascal Flatts once told us, but both a gift and game, then what we do with that knowledge is the key to unlocking our full potential, and living our best lives.

HOPE is what we have. We hope that the people we trust won’t let us down.

CARE. We care for them in efforts to convince them to do the same.

DARK. We let them lead us out of the dark and into a lighter and brighter future.

BEST. If we have love we are allowing ourselves to not only trust those we love to be there for us, but also allow ourselves to remain calm knowing that they have our best interests at heart. 

LOVE. The cause of death if messed with, but the reason for living if treasured.

Trevi Holland is a voracious reader, fluent in Spanish, and a lover of travel. She is currently working on her first novel.