Thursday, February 29, 2024

Jade Ring Writing Competition opens March 1


ANNOUNCING THE KICK-OFF OF



CELEBRATING 75 YEARS IN 2024

Get ready, Get set …

Submit your best work beginning MARCH 1

Submissions close on JUNE 15

In honor of the Jade Ring Writing Contest’s 75th Anniversary, we will reinstate an elegant tradition when winners were announced and honored at the WWA Fall Conference.

Thus, the 2024 Jade Ring Award winners will be revealed on October 25 at a banquet in La Crosse held in conjunction with the conference.


Judges

Short Fiction - Christina Marrocco, author, editor and college instructor

Non-Fiction - Maggie Ginsberg, author and senior managing editor at Madison Magazine

Poetry - Max Garland, former Wisconsin poet laureate

Open
-  “What Wisconsin Means to Me” - Jerry Apps, author and UW emeritus instructor (new category in honor of the contest’s 75th anniversary)

Prizes
In addition to glory, cash, and a Jade Ring, first-place winners in each category will also receive a one-week residency at Write On, Door County.

Guidelines
Be sure to follow all entry requirements! Account at Duosuma required.

Dates to Note

March 1 – Submissions open.

June 15 – Submissions close.

August 15 (est.) – Paid critiques are returned.

August 15 – Winners in all categories will be notified of placing in the contest (exact placement will not be revealed until the Jade Ring Banquet).

October 25 – Winners are notified of their winning placement at the Jade Ring Banquet.

Learn more and enter at https://wiwrite.org/Jade-Ring-2024






  


Friday, January 19, 2024

New Memoir about hiking the Ice Age Trail

 


Squatter: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim her Spirit on the Ice Age Trail
Yolanda DeLoach
Memoir
Cornerstone Press, January 31, 2024, 288 pages
Print $28.95
Buy on Amazon 
Barnes and Noble 

About the Book

“I’m emotionally not in a good place.”

So begins Yolanda DeLoach’s raw and redemptive Squatter, a tale of trails, trekking, and overcoming trauma. Between heartache and the realization that a relationship was never as it seemed, DeLoach pushes herself toward Wisconsin’s historic Ice Age Trail, a place of friendship and, ultimately, forgiveness. But the forgiving starts from within, as she makes her way, section by section, along the trail’s storied footways. 

Honest, heartfelt, and told with a survivor’s grace, Squatter inspires, encourages, and listens, like a good friend on the trail.

My Review

DeLoach’s memoir about using time on Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail to work through an abusive relationship is a harrowing but restorative read. The author spends the first several chapters explaining her situation in gritty detail, inviting the reader into her chaotic and emotional life. She lays out her need for balance in order to get away from not only the personal torture of a relationship gone badly wrong, but also the trauma of the Sars-Covid 19 epidemic in the life of a nurse. The outdoors was a haven to many during this time.
The story seems both too short and yet deep as DeLoach shares her very recent journey to learn more about herself. The lessons are valuable for anyone struggling with problematic decision-making issues. Professional therapy and general support can only go so far to help people who have a deep-seated need to seek fulfillment in personally damaging ways. DeLoach takes her time showing us her angst and trauma; readers who are sensitive to psychological abuse should be cautious. By the time the author shares her adventures on the trail, we’re invested in her commitment to take control of her addictive behavior and to conquer the trail. After 800 miles, DeLoach finds her trail name, “Squatter,” when she invites herself to share the warmth of a fellow hiker’s heated tent instead of her own solo tent.
DeLoach replaces adrenalin highs of demanding people with physically and emotionally demanding elements of hiking all the trail segments she could between work and home life, through all seasons, over the course of a year. From making new trail buddy friends, to staying in friends’ garages while hiking sections, to campgrounds, to elegant homes, to monasteries, the author completes goals she sets for herself. “This time was different,” she says after completing the northern route. “This time, I had the trail. And the trail was magic.”
DeLoach is candid in admitting that she didn’t want her adult and teen children involved in her problems, but that she needed to work on being more open. I was relieved to read that, because she had teen daughters at home while practicing risky behavior and the mom in me had concerns. She listens to podcasts along the way to learn more about herself and toxic relationships and concludes, “The human spirit is resilient. Even when reduced to smoldering ash, the spirit is able to spark back to life with the right conditions. I found those conditions in nature’s touch and the hearts of others along Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail.”
I lived near and walked segments of the southeastern part of the trail during the years it was developed and worked on in the 1990s. I appreciated this in-depth journey of nature’s healing power. Readers of true adventure stories, nature hiking, and memoirs will find much to appreciate in Squatter: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim her Spirit on the Ice Age Trail.

About the Author

Yolanda DeLoach is an avid section hiker and outdoors advocate, having become a “1,000-miler” on the Ice Age Trail in 2021. She lives in Central Wisconsin, where she works as a palliative care/hospice registered nurse.

 


Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Epic high fantasy

 


The Mourning of Lost Magics
SW Strackbein

Sisyphus Triumphant Publishing, November 17, 2023, 400 pp.
Science Fiction Fantasy
Ebook $3.99
Print $16.99
Buy

About the Book:
Who are we if not for our memories?

Left for dead in a mysterious cave, Guilder Rayne awakens into a world of magic and monsters he has little knowledge of. With the help of some…complicated friends, Guilder begins to discover his own prowess for magic while uncovering the troublesome past of the alleged Butcher Prince. As his journeys take him into the dark recesses of his world, Guilder must hone his newfound abilities before an ancient power becomes bent on destroying magic itself. One reluctant sorcerer would sacrifice all to restore what once was. The other, willing to sacrifice himself to save what has become. Can Guilder and his friends stop this ancient power before it erases all magic as well as their very existence?

 My review:
Two sorcerers, both reluctant to use their developing powers for different reasons, have very different goals. In this dystopian picture of our world after a terrible decision by a delusional scientist, a prince learns of a power that could save his world from the madness of the immortal Lord Iks, the lone survivor of a former age, who is determined to return the world to its former state. Prince Guilder survives curse after curse while he seeks reclusive inhabitants for the help he and his friends need to overpower the insane Iks. The help comes at a horrific price, however, leaving Guilder to wonder at the future of the kingdom he is left to rule.

Strackbein’s world of magic is filled with those who control the elements, and creatures morphed into the marvelous and profane in a setting familiar but transformed. Guilder is a sympathetic and memorable hero in need of the personality transplant inflicted on him by a Memory Eater. The venom doesn’t last forever, and Guilder is deeply troubled by the state of warring kingdoms and the role his family has played in bringing about chaos. Fae folk, zombies, changelings, a touch of steam punk and magic keep this twisty tale ever moving. Betrayals lurk around every corner where one must be very careful about the exact wording of promises made and kept. Guilder surrounds himself with a quartet of friends who control different aspects of nature, air, water, metal, and fire. Together, they learn how powerful they can be as they unravel the terrible mystery of Luna and the secret of a prophecy that will either save or destroy the world they know. Told through multiple viewpoints in a fast-moving adventure, readers of high fantasy will enjoy The Mourning of Lost Magics.

About the Author
SW Strackbein has been writing fiction since 2006. A US Army veteran, he is currently a psychotherapist. Born and raised in rural Wisconsin, he appreciates the simplicity of the Midwest, Green Bay Packer’s football, and all four seasons. He and his wife Tanya live in a semi-rural town with their dogs Amber and Jax, both young-at-heart rescues. He loves to cook, travel, and dreams about retiring in Hawaii.


Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Addio Love Monster review Christina Marrocco


Addio, Love Monster

Chrstina Marrocco
Ovunque Siamo Press, 282pp
June, 2022
Literary collection of short entwined stories
 
Audio $5.99
Ebook $7.99
Print $16.99

Buy

About the Book
Addio, Love Monster is a novel told in linked stories spanning generations on the “regular” yet remarkable Singer Street of fictional midcentury Mulberry Park, just outside of Chicago. Marrocco transports you fully into this small world where Signora Giuseppa, the “iron fist” of Singer Street, does everything it takes to keep her grown children very near her, no matter what. Where Enrico the widower creeps in the night looking for a new wife in all the wrong places. Where Nicky the golden-gloves boxer wrestles with what he saw in the basement as a child—and Lena, his wife, also wrestles—with how to deal with Nicky’s violence. Each story follows one person, but together they are the story of the neighborhood, a neighborhood that faces life together, whether they like it or not. In these pages you will find humor and sorrow, resentment and adoration, and the churn and change of a neighborhood where everyone knows everyone both too much and too little as time marches on.

My Review
I adore beautifully drawn stories populated by memorable characters; stories that come around to reveal themselves layer by exquisite layer. I wasn’t sure what to make of Marrocco’s title, Addio, Love Monster, but the premise drew me in. The family, immigrants, first and second generation Sicilian Americans of the 1950 and 60s Midwest, are endearing, exasperating, and noble. The love monster of the title, Guiseppa Millefiore, loses her husband while raising seven of her eight children still at home. Determined to keep them close, she subtly weaves a web for her sons and daughters on Singer Street by buying up houses and lots and renting them out to her children.

Each of the twenty-one stories features a child, in-law, grandchild, other denizens of Singer Street, even the neighborhood itself, such as the tale of The Day Nothing Bad Happened. Guiseppa is the fulcrum of the tales, which slowly revolve through nearly a generation timespan, neatly tied with a death on both ends. Marrocco’s command of detail creates 3D pictures without overwhelming the senses. “Timing was everything” isn’t a cliché on Christmas Eve, when a most unusual role reversal occurs and we see tenderness beneath the trigger temper of Guiseppa’s son Nicky, who has little memory of his father. It is “sisters who help their brothers miss what they could not recall,” he thinks. Descriptions such as “Each letter looked like a little tombstone,” and Gramma’s blanket “was an itchy sort of thing, probably picked up on a clearance at Goldbatts’s by someone out shopping for something else entirely,” are amusing and poignant as they work to set the tone.

Guiseppa holds her family tight, a mother who defends her children and grandchildren under any and all circumstances and is held in the utmost esteem to her deathbed. She’s teacher, overseer, confidant, sly; the provider most of them don’t ever fully understand and appreciate. One of my favorite scenes is when Gramma counsels her young grandson John about his confession that he thought about everything and concluded there was no God. The fact that he even reluctantly told Guiseppa while believing he’d shock and mortify her, says so much about the power of her love. Guiseppa works to ensure all of her children stay true to the family, even if it means getting them brides or arranging for adoptions from Sicily. Family feuds, family secrets, family dreams all muddle together in a charming and thoroughly entertaining collection of generational stories wrapped sweet and sour, like pollo in agrodolce.

About the Author
Christina Marrocco works in memoir, short story, long fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Silverbirch Press, The Laurel Review, House Mountain Review, VIA, Ovunque Siamo, and Red Fern Press. She lives outside of Chicago where she teaches Creative Writing and other courses at Elgin Community College. 

Friday, November 17, 2023

Debut sci-fi detective tale from SW Strackbein

 


The Change Paradox

SW Strackbein
Time travel detective fiction
Sisyphus Triumphant Publishing

October 16, 2023
SW Strackbein
Ebook $3.99
Print $16.99

About the Book
How do you stop someone who could go back and kill you before you’d know who he was?

At age ten, Katheryn Sanders watched her brother die. Gunned down in a filthy alley by an unknown assailant for reasons that have yet to be determined. Nearly forty years later she’s a prominent detective for the Chicago PD. But for all her success, her most significant unsolved case continues to haunt her. She has yet to find her brother’s killer.

As Sanders delves into her latest case, she’s drawn back by connections to her own past. A futuristic bullet matching the one that killed her brother and a wealthy industrialist claiming he travels through time.

Add that to a trio of assassins alleged to be the same person and a college professor who can appear in two places at once and Detective Sanders has her work cut out for her. Only when she’s willing to consider the impossible will she uncover the truth behind her brother’s murder and stop a time-traveling sociopath bent on revenge before he destroys all time and space.

My review
The Change Paradox is a gritty futuristic hard-boiled detective adventure with plenty of deep-seated angst about the past and a desperate need to uncover the truth of the present while saving the future. Sanders is a detective with all the right gifts who knows all the right buttons to push to annoy the powers that be in her Chicago-based police district. Fortunately, despite her idiosyncrasies, she’s good at her job. The one unsolved crime that haunts her happened in front of her face during her childhood. It turns her into a determined hot mess and when her current case intersects with the past, and she throws herself into a pitched battle with time itself against a crazed inventor who’s beyond reason.

Told through the lens of multiple characters, some whose stories you believe and others are questionable, this twisty tale cracks new puzzles with each revelation. Sanders walks a big fat line of edgy, self-destruction as she works her cases which will either endear or turn off fans—sometimes at the same time. A great debut from an up-and-coming author, this story will hit a high note for fans of time-travel, and detective adventures.

About the Author
SW Strackbein has been writing fiction since 2006. A US Army veteran, he is currently a psychotherapist. Born and raised in rural Wisconsin, he appreciates the simplicity of the Midwest, Green Bay Packer’s football, and all four seasons. He and his wife Tanya live in a semi-rural town with their dogs Amber and Jax, both young-at-heart rescues. He loves to cook, travel, and dreams about retiring in Hawaii.

 


Monday, November 13, 2023

Food and Family Memoir with Recipes


Survival Food: North Woods Storiesby a Menominee Cook

Thomas Pecore Weso

About the Book: An intimate and engaging Native food memoir

In these coming-of-age tales set on the Menominee Indian Reservation of the 1980s and 1990s, Thomas Pecore Weso explores the interrelated nature of meals and memories. As he puts it, “I cannot separate foods from the moments in my life when I first tasted them.” Weso’s stories recall the foods that influenced his youth in northern Wisconsin: subsistence meals from hunted, fished, and gathered sources; the culinary traditions of the German, Polish, and Swedish settler descendants in the area; and the commodity foods distributed by the government—like canned pork, dried beans, and powdered eggs—that made up the bulk of his family’s pantry. His mom called this “survival food.”

These stories from the author’s teen and tween years—some serious, some laugh-out-loud funny—will take readers from Catholic schoolyards to Native foot trails to North Woods bowling alleys, while providing Weso’s perspective on the political currents of the era. The book also contains dozens of recipes, from turtle soup and gray squirrel stew to twice-baked cheesy potatoes. This follow-up to Weso’s Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir is a hybrid of modern foodways, Indigenous history, and creative nonfiction from a singular storyteller

Wisconsin Historical Society Press (October 10, 2023), 312pp
Ebook: $11.99
Print: $24.95
Buy:
Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

My Review:

I already experience of pang of wounded conscience reading Weso’s preface listing foods he grew up eating in the generation of change when food preparation sank to the bottom of the list of family activities. Allowing strangers to create shelf-stable quick-prep eat-and-run food marched us another step away from our identities. In twenty-one stories about life growing up Menominee, Weso attempts to redirect us toward our own family memories as well as encouraging us to forge new ones and pass them on to the next generation.

Weso lived mostly with his grandparents. “Grandma’s meals always followed the basic Menominee food pyramid….sweet, salt, meat and water.” Meal times were family times, stories and making plans, sharing news. The recipes that follow each story are full of pithy comments, such as the one in Venison Soup: “This is a relatively simple dish to make, after preparing the corn, and finding a deer, dispatching it, and dressing it.” Some of the recipes I’m excited to try, such as Winter Tamale Pie, many ingredients of which can be substituted with canned goods. “These also work during pandemic quarantines when trips to the grocery store are limited.” Other recipes…not so much. I do believe and accept that grasshoppers have lots of protein, but I’m not quite so anxious to make grasshopper tacos. Weso ate a grasshopper taco once in his “search for authenticity” as a college student in Madison.

Every story is an opportunity to share a life lesson or comment such as why Grandma encouraged them to drink coffee and tea, not alcohol. The stories are generous memories of tick bites, porcupine rescues, bear hunting, working on a road crew, felling trees, going to college, learning family lore such as the history behind Grandma and Grandpa’s house. All the way to the passing of Weso’s mother, Weso’s memories weave a loving and poignant, sometimes funny, and always thought-provoking tale of the importance of family and memory and how food is often the main ingredient of home.

About the Author: Thomas Pecore Weso (1953–2023) was an author, educator, artist, and enrolled member of the Menominee Indian Nation of Wisconsin. His book Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in 2016, was reviewed widely and won a national Gourmand Award. He also wrote many articles and personal essays, a biography of Langston Hughes with coauthor Denise Low, and the children’s book Native American Stories for Kids (Rockridge Press, 2022), which was named a 2023 Kansas Notable Book. Weso was an alumnus of Haskell Indian Nations University and the University of Kansas, where he earned a master’s degree in Indigenous studies. He died in Sonoma County, California, on July 14, 2023.

Monday, October 23, 2023

Epic Fantasy from David Scidmore continues

 
Aylun, book 2, Ever-Branching Tree series
$6.99 ebook, $30.99 paper, $39 hardcover
Epic, high fantasy romance
David Scidmore
Meerdon Publishing, Oct, 2023, 1,034 pp
 
buy on Amazon

About the book:
Megan was always good at solving puzzles. For years, she used that aptitude in the physics lab, where she worked as an assistant to her best friend, Jon, until an accident thrust them into a terrifying alternate world. Almost at once, she is abducted by the heartless tyrant Aylun, an ex-agent of the enigmatic home of all oracles, the Augury. Forced to confront an impossible prophecy that threatens her and her oldest friend, she undertakes a harrowing journey to a city lost centuries ago.

While she struggles to find answers, Jon and new friends Dellia, Garris, and Kayleen are drawn into a conflict with a dark and ancient menace that could obliterate everything and everyone they care about. As the puzzle deepens, the threats multiply, and their situation grows more desperate, Megan’s best hope to save them all and return her and Jon to their home world lies with the very tyrant who abducted her.

My review:
I have to admit, I was fascinated with the story line when I was approached for a review, and agreed, but became daunted by the hefty story. I got into the book and kept thinking my ebook version was wonky when it kept telling me how far along I wasn’t getting. Anyway, there’s definitely a mystery afoot at Delas Labs. Unfortunately, we don’t get to know more because our heroes, physicists Jon and Megan, who are experimenting with some kind of negative energy which works? or doesn’t work? by sucking them into an alternative world in which they’re either heroes or villains, depending on who finds them first. There’s a dragon, too: I love a good dragon! But it seems we get more dragon story in the first episode of the Ever-Branching Tree series called Dellia.

The adventure was definitely more intriguing from the time Jon and Megan find themselves on top of a pile of shiny treasure dragon hoard. This book, Aylun, tells Megan’s side after running from the cave and being kidnapped by a former Shou, Aylun, a protector of prophecy, who’s bent on sacrificing himself to the dragon after he’s failed a couple of missions. The story is also as much his as Megan’s.
These two young people eventually come to an understanding…and more, as they try to figure out the truth of the prophecy and what it means for their worlds.

Aylun is not as much sequel as it is companion piece, as this story unfolds during the course of Dellia, the first book, which is told from Jon’s and Dellia’s perspectives. It’s a daunting task to twine parallel stories like this, but Scidmore has created an engaging, entertaining, and lengthy romantic fantasy. Readers of stories that draw from other cultures like that of Bradley Beaulieu, would enjoy The Ever-Branching Tree series.

About the author:
Born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, David Scidmore has held many jobs over the years, from fast-food worker to musician to electrical engineer. He now lives in Verona, Wisconsin, with his wife, Brenda. In recent times, his lifelong passion for playing keyboards and composing music has turned into a fascination with crafting literary works. His enthusiasm for weaving complex stories that stir the emotions led to his first book, Dellia. With an obsession for expanding his ability as a storyteller, he continues that tale in Aylun, the second book in the Ever-Branching Tree series. Find out more at his website.