Visible Signs, set in Antigua, Guatemala, tells the story of Mikela, a fierce ten-year old indigenous girl determined to save her pregnant severely traumatized twelve-year old sister, Natividad, and the child she carries. Mikela draws together an unlikely assortment of American women to help her. What will happen to Mikela, Natividad and the baby becomes the central question of the novel. Their situation resonates with the private conflicts of each of the women drawn into this circle of care: Lourdes, an artist, who has taken a traveling fellowship to distance herself from her new marriage and a step-daughter angrily mourning the death of her own mother; Ginny, a priest, who needs to find a new God to worship, one that can celebrate her sexuality rather than deny it; Rosemary, who must face the reality of death with the illness of her friend Ginger; and Wilma, Rosemary's Guatemalan housekeeper, who has lost her own son in the recent civil war and is a reluctant host to many restless spirits of that conflict. The story unfolds in a God-raddled, spirit-ridden country with a bloody history, where religious traditions old and new, passionate spirits living and dead, and profound personal and cultural wounds combine and recombine to create a solution to their dilemma that is compelling, difficult, and mysteriously hopeful.

Visible Signs

Literature & Fiction

Tosteson, Heather

Literary

Wising Up Press

A mother tries to make sense of the horrifying reality that all three of her sons may die of AIDS. A young woman whose manic depressive mother has died and whose father has remarried welcomes her own unborn child and recognizes the complicated source of her own maternity. A young woman faces the loss of her husband to kidney disease after he has donated a kidney to her own brother. A family and a surgeon respond to the challenges of heart surgery on a young child. A nineteen-year-old girl comes of age dealing with a rare cancer. A menopausal scientist seeks a kundalini experience that never comes. A woman, after a visionary experience, believes she has the power to heal. The spirits¿and voices¿of the characters in these twelve stories are fierce, raging, funny, loving and surprisingly generous as they struggle to discover what can illumine and sustain them and those they love.

Hearts as Big as Fists & Other Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

Based on over one hundred interviews with people across all faith traditions, this is, first of all, a book of stories, each fascinating and unique. We are invited to read these stories with the express intention of feeling what we have in common with the people whose life stories we find here, whether they are conservative Christian housewives or liberal young Muslim immigrants, Buddhist musicians, or Harley-riding shamans. What does the world look like, sound like, taste like, feel like from that person's point of view? How have they experienced life's formidable mystery? When? Where? What language is their true language of faith? What theology has their life given birth to? What pain and what generosity does their story need to contain? The core theme of this book is what happens to us, as well as others, when we hold their spiritual stories in our imagination as if they could be our own. We may find our understanding of our own spiritual journey shifts, that our own life, in all its twists and turns, is highly resonant with those of out neighbors, whatever their faith. After reading these stories, we may end up feeling securely in the midst whatever our own spiritual journey has consisted of, wherever we find ourselves now-comfortably expanding into the religion of our childhood, deepening our understanding of a new one, or feeling ready to leave, reluctant to join, mute, lifted in song, lost, decisively found. "This is a marvelous read for all interested in the spiritual journeys of others as well as their own. Over 100 interviews with diverse persons from various faith traditions are woven into a narrative that will deepen the reader's own faith as it broadens their understanding of the faith of others." Dr. Ralph W. Hood Jr., Professor of Social Psychology, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga "Heather Tosteson knows how to listen past the surface where differences are so evident to the depths where common hopes and dreams are found. What's more--and this is rare--she knows how to describe what she has heard. This book is a model for genuine and generous conversation." Dr. Guy Sayles, Pastor, First Baptist Church of Asheville, NC "God Speaks My Language: Can You? is a valuable and fascinating collection of almost one hundred stories of faith. . . .Tosteson is an astute observer, a courageous and empathetic interviewer, and a splendid writer. She offers her own interpretation of these varied accounts, constructing a plausible typology and suggesting that beneath our commitments to disparate practices and doctrines are personal stories offering glimpses of common religious experiences. This fine book is an invitation to join the conversation about affirming difference in an ever increasing religious pluralism." Dr. John Shelley, Professor of Religion, Furman University Revised Edition

God Speaks My Language, Can You?

Religion & Spirituality

Religious Studies

This powerful collection of poems spans the major stages of a woman's life-adolescence, early marriage and divorce, single motherhood, family life and its dissolution, late love, encroaching mortality, and the mysterious, obsessive, and ultimately healing returns of early trauma-and does so with an equally tenacious sense of the sanctity of this moment, and this one alone, in all its redeeming particulars. "We want to know," writes the poet, "what is pushing us, what is drawing us, and what is letting us, time and time, and time again, go. . ." There can be no other poet like Heather Tosteson, no other who strives so genuinely to take so much into account. She sees "every one of us in this world holding/. . .an enormous universe of feeling," and her lines do not describe this universe but mesh with it. She does not witness the world, she bears it. Hers is the grandest and most honorable ambition, to render without violation "life's silky, staining patina." What an immense revelation The Sanctity of the Moment is! How admirable the revealer! -Fred Chappell, Shadow Box, Backsass, Family Gathering, Midquest, winner of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, T.S. Eliot Prize, and Aiken Taylor Award. The Sanctity of the Moment presents the haunting chronicle of a woman/ mother/daughter/lover confronting both the terrible and the beautiful. Dense, intense, and exquisitely formed, these poems, crafted by a brave and unflinching intelligence, teach us much about struggle, compassion and affirmation. There are hard truths contained within these pages-hard truths and unforgettable writing. -Kat Meads, Quizzing the Dead Heather Tosteson's poems elicit gasps of thankful recognition: I too have struggled with that anger, experienced that joy, felt that despair, known that sadness. Ms. Tosteson's poetic deconstruction of what it means to see the face of God is fearless. In the instant I finished reading The Sanctity of the Moment, I believed my life had meaning. -Toni Press-Coffman, playwright, Touch, Stand, We're Here to Help HEATHER TOSTESON is the author of Visible Signs, God Speaks My Language, Can You? and Hearts as Big as Fists. She has published poetry extensively in literary magazines, received the Nation/Discovery prize in poetry and fellowships for poetry, fiction, and photography from MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA and Hambidge. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (UNC-Greensboro) and Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing(Ohio University).

The Sanctity of the Moment

“Cada língua concebe outra eu,/every language conceives another I,/ igualmente essencial, new,” Heather Tosteson writes in Breathing in Portuguese, Living in English. Exploring through a new language and life in another hemisphere what it means to be in the third stage, terceira idade, of a well-lived life, the poet realizes that she has “come here to live into the reality of my own mortality,” a reality that holds powerful fulfillment as well as loss. In these poems she invites us to join her as she listens for unsung hymns ready to soar―within single words that taste like mamão or sound like “happy do”; the ravishing howl of a man striding down the street, lost inside o seu som; the o puro barulho, pure hubbub of Brazilian streets; the isolation of the traveler; the restless silence of a distant, dying father; the rush of waves bringing her o lixo, trash, and o tesouro inestimável, priceless treasure. "The inventive interplay of the two languages in Breathing in Portuguese, Living in English reminds me of the lively bi-tonal musical compositions of Prokofiev or Darius Milhaud. Every thought contains its counterpart, spoken or unspoken; every memory―even the most painful―has another side. Anger shapes some of the poems “as want shapes waste,” but love is ever present, “dizzy with glee and grief.” Dazzling!" Fred Chappell, author of Midquest and Spring Garden: New and Selected Poems, recipient of the T.S. Eliot, Bollingen, and Aiken Taylor Prizes; North Carolina Poet Laureate "Heather Tosteson's openness to experience is reflected in the openness, range, and breadth of her poems, which want to take in A.R.Ammons' 'nothing less than everything.' She is an instinctive poet. She is bold, direct, subversive and original in the explosive ways in which she confronts the limits of human possibility through those made possible through language. Don't miss this." Mark Rudman, author of The Rider Quintet, for which he received The National Book Critics Circle Award

Breathing in Portuguese, Living in English

Poetry

GERMS OF TRUTH A book about life, death, families of all ages, stages, and orientation-and sperm banks. In this engaging and thoughtful collection of short stories, we find people of all ages trying to make sense-poignant, often funny, sometimes wise-of the many, changing ways they intersect as parents, children, and families from conception to death. In the first section, We're All Donors Here, a woman muses, "I mean, when you go to a sperm bank, you have to realize that sperm is like money. It gets handled by a lot of people but is essentially impersonal. It's what you use it for that gives it meaning." An exasperated mother straight talks her disconsolate, perfectionist daughter who has transposed a number on her sperm order, "All this picking and choosing, all this getting it 'right' is a delusion. Always has been." What lies beyond right is what these donors and recipients of sperm banks explore: A young woman applies her creative writing skills to donor profiles, a high school senior indifferent to meeting her sperm donor seeks out her second mother instead, and a doting first time father tries to get his mind around the reality that sixty-seven other children have as much in common with him genetically as this infant he knows as unique and priceless. In the second section, Whose Life Is It Anyway, an artist asks her second husband and their assembled adult children, "Do you ever feel you are living out someone else's story?" With the help of those they live with and love more or less well, and of their ghosts, living and dead, hungry and nurturing, the tellers of these ten stories seek to get their lives back, and, surprisingly, do-mysteriously renewed. A psychologist understands the impact of a childhood spent caring for a dying father; a reluctant father-to-be grieves the death of his younger sister twenty years before. A man turning forty muses on the recent deaths of a father who never knew him and a beloved analyst who did as he delivers gourmet food to the homeless; an immigrant father, on his own since he was twelve, discovers his own life is the best advice he can give his son. A woman in her eighties, a budding writer, asserts her independence from a well-meaning daughter eager to revive the farm she has yearned for years to escape. "In these 20 stories, Heather Tosteson presents a contemporary chorus of characters trying to navigate this thing called life and doing so as best they can. The diverse Germs of Truth cast-from sperm donors to pedicab drivers/artists to grandmothers who find their soul mates via Facebook-spring from families traditional and evolving, harbor deep suspicions about the validity of emotional ties and yet still yearn 'to kiss love on both cheeks.' To a lucky few, Tosteson grants true connection and, yes, even love." - Kat Meads, author of For You, Madam Lenin "Heather Tosteson is a brave and empathetic storyteller, creating honest and credible protagonists who are all, in their own driven and very human way, seekers of truth. Germs of Truth burns brightly with originality and compassion, and Tosteson's skillful way of bringing the inner lives of her characters to light gives her readers a bravery and empathy we only thought we possessed." - Michele Markarian, playwright, The Dedoption, The Real Family

Germs of Truth

Sharing the Burden of Repair: Reentry After Mass Incarceration describes a six-year listening project on reentry that took place at the crest of an unusual wave of bipartisan criminal justice reform in Georgia, one of our most punishing states. Its primary intended audience is common citizens, like us, concerned about the reality of mass incarceration but unsure how to engage. Its aim is to expand, individual story by individual story, our understanding of the importance of successful reentry after an age of mass incarceration and help us take on those difficult questions: Where and how do wefit in? What can wechange? 
We listened to over 200 people: formerly incarcerated men and women, families, defense lawyers, activists, employers, chaplains, juvenile courts and justice officials, diversion courts, prosecutors, judges, community supervision officers, commissioners of corrections and community corrections, and legislators involved with criminal justice reform. We heard stories people within our adversarial criminal justice system rarely share directly with one another, each with a wisdom to it that we all need. 
By bringing them together here, we hope that new stories--more complex, compassionate, inclusive ones--can come into being, stories that acknowledge the lasting harms of both mass incarceration and crime andour capacities for remorse and change as individuals and as a society.

Sharing the Burden of Repair: Reentry After Mass Incarceration

Politics & Social Sciences

Brockett, Charles D.

Social Sciences

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