#8 Ten Books By Ten Friends
Hello. You may have noticed that there was no newsletter last week. That was due to a brief cold and me trying to catch up on writing about Tacoma homicides over at http://tacomastories.com.
I’m thinking I may start putting these newsletters out every other week rather than weekly after the new year. If you have a strong opinion about that, let me know.
I thought this week I’d help you out if you’re looking for gift ideas. If things had all gone according to plan this year, I would be telling you all to buy my novel. But since my publisher and I parted ways, I don’t have a book to sell.
So instead, this week I’m going to tell you about ten books written by ten of my friends. I feel lucky to have such talented friends. They continually challenge and inspire me with their incredible work.
I have more than ten friends with books, but I didn’t want this to get ridiculously long. So expect Part 2 next Sunday. And if you’re a friend who is reading this and you have a book I don’t mention here, reply to this newsletter and let me know.
Buy these for yourself or for the book lover in your family. Or buy them for yourself.
Also, while I’ll be sharing links to amazon.com, if you’re able to purchase these books in your local book store, please do so.
I met Lance working for Mail Boxes Etc. over twenty years ago. We didn’t keep in touch, but after I read his first published story in Glimmer Train Press, I kept my eye out for his novel. It took over a decade, but it was well worth the wait and we have since reconnected.
His debut novel, Wilderness is an immersive experience. It follows a Civil War veteran named Abel Truman who lives in a makeshift hut in the northwestern Washington territory. He embarks on a journey with his dog. I don’t really want to say more about the plot, but what really grabbed me about Lance’s book is his descriptions. He puts the reader right there with Abel in a way that is difficult to escape. This is a Western with a vivid depth that transcends the genre.
Last of the Pascagoula by Rebecca Meredith
Rebecca Meredith is a member of my cohort at Goddard. This means we both started our MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard at the same time. She was born exactly twenty years before me. Upon meeting her I knew she was Southern as soon as she started talking. There is a comfort and familiarity to friendly folks from the South that can’t be matched by anyone from anywhere else. Rebecca’s writing has that same comfort to it.
Her book, The Last of the Pascagoula follows Kate and her sister, Martha who grew up in Pascagoula, Mississippi and are called back there and the adventure begins. There is talk of it becoming a movie one day. And the sequel, Look Up From The Water, was just published.
Thistle and Brilliant by Wren Tuatha
Wren is another member of my Goddard cohort. She’s from California and was a victim of the wildfires a couple years back. Conversations with Wren tend to be deeper than you might expect and so it may not be surprising that she is a poet. I’m fond of saying that poets are such good writers that they don’t need as many words as the rest of us writers.
Her book, Thistle and Brilliant is a short collection of her poetry about relationships, but don’t mistake them for love poems. This is more about the interpersonal mess we tend to make of our lives in our struggle to find harmony with one another.
I’ve known Christina Stoddard for over twenty-five years. Back then she was a teenage Mormon girl growing up in Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood. These days she lives in Kentucky. She’s been a writer since before we met. Many years ago when I had quit writing she insisted I start again and wrote me constantly knowing I was ‘too polite not to write back’.
Hive is a collection of Christina’s poems that were immediately familiar to me because she’s writing about growing up in Tacoma’s Hilltop in the early 1990s as a young Mormon girl and what that was like for her. The poems are sharp, brutal, and beautiful. She has a way of cutting to the core with just a word or two.
Alec is someone I met at a monthly Tacoma gathering called Creative Colloquy. He’s a generous man and a prolific writer. He surprised me at the gathering by occasionally having professional actors read his work rather than reading it himself. At first this seemed strange, but it works surprisingly well.
Tupelo is a very personal novel. His main character is an identical twin who grew up in the 1950s in Tupelo, Mississippi in a place of privilege who soon discovers that those who are not white live far different lives. This description also fits Alec himself. As the Civil Rights movement gets going and his protagonist falls for a person of color, things get more complicated.
The Stranger From The Sea by Victor Lana
I’ve never met Victor Lana in person. I met him online over at Zoetrope All-Story. His writing style at the time reminded me of myself if I had grown up a Catholic in Brooklyn. He and I haven’t talked in a while, but he just sent me an email telling me that he has released a new book, The Stranger From The Sea.
I know nothing about it, so I’m going to let Victor tell you about it:
”Joanna is a lonely woman living near the ocean in Montauk, New York, in the house she grew up in. One day she finds a naked man lying in the surf, and she takes him home to help him. She gradually falls in love with Anderson, but he has no papers or anyone to contact. Her sister is suspicious of him, and a mysterious ship is found washed up on the beach, causing a government investigation. Joanna begins to believe that Anderson may be from a place that is not just beyond the sea but out of this world.”
The Cat Who Pawed the Cultist: Sanctum Guardians Book 1 by Robert Hazelton
I met Rob back in high school in a creative writing class. He and I both took our writing very seriously. Probably too seriously. But we got over that. He’s been publishing paranormal fiction for a while now and he’s just started a new series.
If you’re looking for a book that is more fantasy than hard boiled and more cats than dogs, then The Cat Who Pawed the Cultist is a good choice. It’s about a young woman who knows magic but doesn’t have much ambition to do anything with it and an orange cat who needs a sidekick defending the universe.
C is for Collection by Christian Carvajal
I met Carv through Creative Colloquy. He’s one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met and is probably a good deal smarter than me. He’s a natural born storyteller and I tend to like his writing better than I like mine.
His latest book is a collection of short stories called C Is For Collection. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I can tell you already that there will be laugh out loud moments and moments that will make your eyes moist. He has a way of making the reader care right off that bat that simply works.
Tacoma Pill Junkies by Joshua Swainston
I first encountered Joshua Swainston when I saw a poster for this book. I’m a big fan of Tacoma and I love crime novels. So I had to get a copy. I later met him at Creative Colloquy and found that he’s as good of a person as he is a writer.
Tacoma Pill Junkies follows some hard luck cases who are all too familiar to me as a life long Tacoman. He captures the criminal element in an incredibly human way that allows for empathy heroes and the villains, not that many of them adhere to such labels.
King of Methelhem by Mark Lindquist
Most people in Tacoma who know Mark Lindquist’s name know him as the former Pierce County Prosecutor. I know him as a fellow writer who writes crime fiction about Tacoma. We’ve become friends over the years and though I know he’s busy with his law practice, I wish he’d come out with a new book.
King of Methlehem follows a police detective as he traverses the criminal world of the streets of Tacoma and the legal world of law enforcement and the courts. Heavily informed by his years of experience fighting crime as Tacoma’s head prosecutor, King of Methlehem is a solid addition to the increasing shelf of Tacoma crime fiction.
And that’s it for this week.
- Jack Cameron