elizaPress Publications, eclectic anthologies, elizaBeth Benson-Udom as writressworder.com

New BeginningsNew Beginnings (book)

Print: $19.96

Download: $10.00

This second eclectic anthology in the launch year of elizaPress Publications features the writing of Lynn Veach Sadler, an interview with Lynn about her writing practice and experience, and the work of ten additional contributing writers including elizaBeth Benson-Udom, Aggie Burke, Carolee Gearhart, Floriana Hall, Debra J. Harmes Kurth, Juanita J. Martin, Martha Meltzer, Janice D. Rubin, Pallavi Sharma, PhD, & Richard Weingart. This compilation of work includes poetry, stories, plays, performance pieces, essays, blog-like entries, a couple of haiku, and a limerick. The writers demonstrate an astounding way with words and the rich relationship they each have with writing. Their words reveal painful truths, haunting longings, brave new starts of the most poignant kind. All in all, these offerings reach out to inspire readers to try their own hand at the page. This is an expressive anthology, a moving demonstration of new beginnings and the promises they bring.

HERSTORY: the Launch Anthology of elizaPress PublicationsHERSTORY: the Launch Anthology of elizaPress Publications (book)

Print: $19.95

Download: $10.00

This eclectic volume of “her” stories boasts a taste of 30 talented writers from across America. In it, there are grandma stories, moving tributes to women who sacrificed to make the present day possible, and stories that slice us open to the cruelties women have yet to totally overcome. This anthology is an assembly of diverse cultural & ethnic voices that share a heritage and an inheritance. There are 31,000+ words spread over 230 pages that recognize our collective debt to the women whose lives find meaning through our arrival on the planet. We carry them on with us through the stories we share, here, with you. All in all, this book is a joyful potluck, a community feast, with something yummy for everyone, glistening on the silent page.

HeArt's Desire: A Poetic Complement to the Adobe Art Gallery ExhibitionHeArt's Desire: A Poetic Complement to the Adobe Art Gallery Exhibition (book)

Print: $15.87

Download: $9.39

This book is a poetic complement to the Valentine’s Exhibit at The Adobe Gallery, in Castro Valley, California. The resulting collection, titled, like the exhibition, “HeArt’s Desire”, is full of the sultry, sexy stories of new beginnings, spurned lovers and the long smoldering of the married faithful. It celebrates the artistic with more than a few references to the power of revelation available to those who hold the brush and contemplate the painting. It invites us all, deeper, closer, to a world of our collaborative collage. The poems, stories, sayings and reflections recorded here are heartfelt and tender, searing and still. The assembled community of writers is an inspired and pedigreed one. We are each grateful for your kind eyeballs and response to our collected work.

the complete blog 2006: i can start againthe complete blog 2006: i can start again (book)

Print: $20.94

Download: $5.56

the complete blog is just that--the (almost) every day entries of a woman who encountered the death of her business, some of her most important friendships, and her father all in the same year she turned 40. this daily story is one of uplifting and courageous creativity and how just showing up at the empty (virtual) page is an act of humanity that celebrates the adventure of being alive and gives honor to the memory of what passes on. in these 600+ pages, readers are treated to the whole, unabridged, unedited, unproofed tome that gave rise to dozens of songs & poems, hundreds of photographs and entries, and a handful of books that offer inspiration and accompaniment for anyone facing human loss or the death of dreams. from these human wanderings in words, elizaBeth invites readers into a wider experience of their own creative expression and allows each the room, the permission and the encouragement to say what needs to be said, make what needs to be made, and offer what comes through to be offered.

Incomplete WorksIncomplete Works (book)

Print: $14.91

Download: $7.17

This collection of 64 poems represents (for me) a quiet tribute to the miracles my father made possible with each one of his short 64 years on this earth. This boy that became a man that became my Dad changed everything for me when he died earlier this year. From him, i learn not to wait. i learn to trust my instincts. i learn to take matters into my own hands. i learn to live outside the rules. i learn that life ends. i learn that there is no point putting anything that matters off until tomorrow. The poetry included in this collection reflects much of what i've learned--there are recollections of my father, words that helped me negotiate his dying and my grief, stories from the road about beautiful places we've visited on this extraordinary earth. Sewn throughout all of these is a kind of honor for the ordinary day, the regular joys particular to happily married mothers, a kind of suburban exaltation of home, and a profound gratitude to the divine for all of it.

i can start again: 25 blog picks from 2006i can start again: 25 blog picks from 2006 (book)

Print: $13.97

Download: $7.45

this taste of the first year blog by the same name, chronicles the author's journey through a year of hard endings. using the immediacy of the blog format, the author shares her stories of grief and longing, pain and possibility and, in essence, uses the form to write herself back alive. this book is an inspiration for others going through grief to try their hand at the page. the overarching story is one of a daughter's love for father, whom she will only get to know as a character in the fiction she writes about the man she loved, but never really knew.

Over a lifetime of making, one must choose: to keep it all to one's self, or to risk to share. This is the "stuff"--the books, the words, the musings, the ideas, the eclectic anthologies, the anecdotes, the antidotes that seem to have helped me. I've written words nearly every day--words strung into sentences, carved out of stillnesses and left on the waiting page. Here, in this simple way, i risk to share what i have to say. i wrote this to a writer i met on a BART who was weighing the input of many friends regarding the wild ideas that were coming to her about how she might sell her work: i have written many, many books, made many pieces of art, offered cookies and cupcakes to many children in lots of different realms. and have not figured out MY way to sell MY work. but i make it. i put it in the world where it is available to people. i invite people to know about it. i grow my book trees one blog entry at a time and harvest them every six months in blook form. i throw a party for myself. i invite people to it. sometimes they come. sometimes they buy or tell me they want to buy a book. what matters to ME is that i have written it. i put it in the world. now, it is there for my children to read when i die or for my friends to find or for someone i will never meet to trip into and find what they find in it. Thank you for tripping...