Operators and things: The inner life of a schizophrenic

Reissue of the 1958 classic true story of a woman's descent into schizophrenia and her journey back to sanity. "O'Brien has produced a work of brilliance and power, evoking a combination of Kafka and Joyce, with a touch of Orwell." Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times "An absorbing account of life in the dream world of a schizophrenic." Publishers Weekly "For six months she travels around the country on Greyhound buses, captive of the Operators, who push and pull, torment, confuse, and exhaust her. And at the end of her time of madness, she understands precisely what has been happening. Her insight is penetrating and irresistible. Her writing is delectable. She displays gut-wrenching humor and pungent metaphor with an eloquent, eminently readable style. This book is enthusiastically recommended." Coevolution Quarterly "Astonishing recollections." Punch "Striking autobiography." Phenomenological Sociology "Brilliantly reveals what the unconscious is like." Publishers Trade List Annual "...the author is contributing irreplaceably to our knowledge." Archives of General Psychiatry "A beautifully lucid autobiographical description of a psychotic episode that lasted six months whose healing motion is clear." R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience "With penetration and satisfying imagery, Miss O'Brien (a pseudonym) describes her psychosis, from which unaccountably and spontaneously she recovers." William F. Buckley, National Review

Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic

O'Brien, Barbara

Delegan, Colleen

Biographies & Memoirs

Silver Birch Press

Jezebel’s Got the Blues…And Other Works of Imagination is a series of performance pieces that puts a new spin on stories from the Old Testament. In Merrill Farnsworth’s inspired telling, Jezebel, Cain, Noah, Delilah, Lot’s wife, and other denizens of Bible history reveal themselves as people with very modern stories to share. Jezebel and her friends are true originals – taking readers (and audiences!) on a creative, thought-provoking, insightful ride. Author's Note: Jezebel’s Got the Blues…is a collection of stories and paintings created over a nine-month period. As an artist, I often go into the studio, take up a brush filled with paint and begin making marks on paper or canvas, letting the marks take shape and allowing shapes to emerge, as they will. One day in September, a face began forming, and I followed the inclination to form a woman’s face. In time, I saw the face of Jezebel staring out at me, and it occurred to me she looked frightened. I’d always imagined her as defiant. As a daughter of the South, I was warned about Jezebel and picked up on the notion she was a bad apple. I was told she wore too much rouge and knew she came to a bad end. Having gone through a period of life that didn’t end so well, I felt a certain compassion for Jezebel when she showed up that day in September. I began painting more and more layers of red on her cheeks, thinking that somehow more red would keep her from feeling so blue. As I painted, I began imagining a story about Jezebel, told from the point of view of the rouge on her cheeks – a voice that became a strange witness to her story. That is how a series of stories and paintings came to be called Jezebel’s Got the Blues…and Other Works of Imagination. After I finished the paintings and had written the stories, I called upon friends, all talented actors I’d performed with over the years. I asked if they’d join me to perform this series of monologues and dialogues. All said yes, as did Phil Madeira, who accompanied us with improvised blues on his guitar. It was a magical night for me. All my imagining became something real – to me, my friends, and to the audience gathered for the retelling of stories about a ragtag crew of characters who share a longing for grace to bend the notes of our blues towards love.

Jezebel's Got the Blues...And Other Works of Imagination: A Collection of Monologues and Dialogues Inspired by the Old Testament, Told with a Southern Voice and Tinged with the Blues.

Literature & Fiction

Farnsworth, Merrill

Dramas & Plays

A respectful, affectionate literary profile of novelist and poet Charles Bukowski (1920-1994). Awarding-winning writer Joan Jobe Smith -- a Pushcart Honoree -- shares up-close, personal recollections of her mentor and friend, Charles Bukowski. Charles Bukowski Epic Glottis also includes remembrances and comments from the women in Bukowski's life -- including Frances Dean Smith (francEyE), Ann Menebroker, Linda King, and Pamela Miller Wood (aka Cupcakes). "Joan Jobe Smith's book is a joy! A terrific, sweet, loving book--the interviews, everyone's reminiscences, the poems &amp; Fred Voss's, the First Bukowski Festival--a moving, endearing Love Song, the kind of thing that happens at funerals when people stand and spontaneously tell stories filled with their love &amp; memories. A book full of heart, Joan's own love for Bukowski's girlfriends, her own large spirit makes her the perfect hostess for this festival &amp; whenever she speaks of herself it's with self-effacing &amp; humorous humility. Her sweetness &amp; goodness permeates the whole book. I'm moved on every page." STEVE KOWIT, author of The First Noble Truth(University of Tampa Press, 2007)

Charles Bukowski Epic Glottis: His Art & His Women (& me)

Smith, Joan Jobe

Arts & Literature

"For all its brilliance on a micro scale, it’s easy to lose sight of the anthology’s vastness...It weighs in at a hefty 240 pages, and features no fewer than 62 different contributors…One outcome is that I’ll be following many of the names this anthology has brought to my attention, their work blazing a silver trail that I urge you to explore with as much curiosity as I will be."  RORY O'SULLIVAN, Sabotage Reviews, sabotagereviews.com The Silver Birch Press Silver Anthology is a collection of poetry, essays, short stories, novel excerpts, and stage play scenes from 62 accomplished and up-and-coming authors in the United States and United Kingdom. The writing ranges in style and subject matter -- but all the work touches on "silver" in a variety of creative, original, and compelling ways. Contributors include: Barbara Alfaro / Jena Ardell / Melissa Berry / Jane Buel Bradley / John Brantingham / Rachel Carey / Chiwan Choi / Billy Cook / Barbara Dahl / Walter de la Mare / Colleen Delegan / Gillian Eaton / Barbara Eknoian  / Merrill Farnsworth / Syed Afzal Haider / Joe Hakim / Andrew Hilbert / Donna Hilbert / Gaia Holmes / Zack Hunter  / Diane Eagle Kataoka / Ruth Moon Kempher / Linda King / Thom Kudla / Moriah LaChapell / LeeAnne McIlroy Langton / Vickie Lester / Ellaraine Lockie / Gerald Locklin / Amy Lowell / Sandylee Maccoby / Tamara Madison / Clint Margrave / Daniel McGinn / Marcia Meara  / Ann Menebroker / Jack Micheline / Ben Myers / Jax NTP  / Hank Perritt / Meghan Pinson / Jackie Pledger-Skwerski / Kathy Dahms Rogers / Conrad Romo / Luke Salazar / Joan Jobe Smith / Clifton Snider / Dale Sprowl / Kendall Steinle / Adelle Stripe / Paul Kareem Tayyar / Kati Thomson / Jeri Thompson / Winston Tong / Margaret Towner / Mary Umans / Dirk Velvet / Melanie Villines / Fred Voss / Mark Weber / Tim Wells / Steve Williams / Pamela Miller Wood

Silver: An Eclectic Anthology of Poetry & Prose

Press, Silver Birch

Literary

Poetry, short stories, novel excerpts, essays, and memoirs that revolve around the many and varied connotations of the word "green" -- nature, luck, money, envy, young love, new life, the environment, food, trees, seasons, water, eden, and much more -- from over 70 authors in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Europe, and Africa. Contributors include: Barbara Alfaro / Jena Ardell / L. Frank Baum / William Blake / Al Basile / Jane Buel Bradley / John Brantingham / Jessica Brown / Rachel Carey / Chris Davidson / Colleen Delegan / Philip K. Dick / Barbara Eknoian / Dan Fante / Merrill Farnsworth / Syed Afzal Haider / Joe Hakim / Henry VIII / Donna Hilbert / Gaia Holmes / Gerard Manley Hopkins / Zack Hunter / Rodger Jacobs / James Joyce / Michael C. Keith / Erle Kelly / Ruth Moon Kempher / Thom Kudla / Steve Kuhn / Moriah LaChapell / LeeAnne McIlroy Langton / Ellaraine Lockie / Gerald Locklin / Amy Lowell / Sandylee Maccoby / Tamara Madison / Marc Malandra / Karen Margolis / Clint Margrave / Andrew Marvell / Daniel McGinn / Lori McGinn / Marcia Meara / Jack Micheline / Benjamin Myers / Brooke Nia / Jax NTP  / Ivon Prefontaine / Jonne Rhodes / Conrad Romo / Luke Salazar / Tere Sievers / Joan Jobe Smith / Clifton Snider / Dale Sprowl / Kendall Steinle / Tate Swindell / Paul Kareem Tayyar / G. Murray Thomas / Jeri Thompson / Margaret Towner / Mary Umans / Dirk Velvet / Philip Vermaas / Melanie Villines / Kurt Vonnegut / Fred Voss / Bruce Weigl / Tim Wells / Pamela Miller Wood / Eddie Woods

Green: An Eclectic Anthology of Poetry & Prose (Silver Birch Press Anthologies)

Spanning a 40-year timeframe, 1967-2007, GERALD LOCKLIN: New and Selected Poems features many of this esteemed poet's most iconic and memorable poems.

Gerald Locklin: New and Selected Poems: (1967-2007)

Locklin, Gerald

Poetry

The Silver Birch Press SUMMER ANTHOLOGY is a collection of summer-related poetry, prose poems, short stories, essays, and memoirs from over 70 established and up-and-coming in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Africa. Contributors include: Jeffrey C. Alfier / William Blake / John Brantingham / Julie Cadawallader-Staub / Anton Chekhov / Virginie Colline / Colleen Delegan / Kirsten Dierking / David Dondero / Paul Laurence Dunbar / Barbara Eknoian / Merrill Farnsworth / Paul Fericano / Chris Forhan / Susie Sweetland Garay / Jeffrey Graessley / Syed Afzal Haider / win harms / Donna Hilbert / Rodger Jacobs / Diane Eagle Kataoka / Michael C. Keith / Ruth Moon Kempher / Linda King / Ted Kooser / Thomas Kudla / Moriah LaChapell / Ellaraine Lockie / Gerald Locklin / Tamara Madison / Karen Margolis / Clint Margrave / Catfish McDaris / Daniel McGinn / Lori McGinn / Marcia Meara / Edna St. Vincent Millay / Carolyn Miller / Paul Nebenzahl / Gerald Nicosia / Jax NTP / Jason Parker / bart plantenga / Jackie Pledger-Skwerski / Stanley Plumly / Ivon Prefontaine / Conrad Romo / Daniel Romo / Carl Sandburg / William Shakespeare / Raymond King Shurtz / Tere Sievers / Joan Jobe Smith / Rick Smith / Clifton Snider / Dale Sprowl / Kendall Steinle / Caitlin Stern / Robert Louis Stevenson / Tate Swindell / Larry D. Thomas / Thomas R. Thomas / Jeri Thompson / Mary Umans / Dirk Velvet / Philip Vermaas / Melanie Villines / Diane Wakoski / Bruce Weigl / Edith Wharton / Heathcote Williams / Eddie Woods / Joanie Hieger Fritz Zosike

Summer: An Eclectic Anthology of Poetry & Prose (Silver Birch Press Anthologies)

Jeffrey Alfier acquired a keen poetic vision from years of living and traveling throughout the Southwest. Composed mainly in syllabic verse, The Wolf Yearling exhibits strict attention to tightly controlled language that renders, in rich imagism, American deserts and mountains, the plains of the Trans-Pecos, border towns, and the sandy soils of east Texas. Man and beast transit borders blurred in heat-shimmer, the air “so candent even a kiss could warp.” There is a splendor to what survives the desert’s beleaguering high-noon sun that “owns the graves of water;” or, in its twilight descent, trawls “a final swath over the saltpan of dead ocean.” The Southwest flora and fauna that Alfier celebrates is wide-ranging. Readers will come to know the desert as Alfier does, seeking to join him down “forgotten dirt trails / impassable to anything with wheels” amid the sublime or fading beauty of towns and landscapes. Strangers, wanderers and residents alike populate his verse as they thrive in austere wildness where the world endures in canyons where “iridescent crows…glimmer through dust motes graining the light,” out among the “igneous giants of petrified time,” the ever-lurking coyote a “dark movement breaking a highway’s mirage,” while someone watches a puma laying bare the “sudden bloody ribcage” of a palomino. Thus an elegiac thread runs throughout The Wolf Yearling. We find an aged father being returned to his boyhood home in the California desert where “dust devils churn birds to air” when he recalls “names of friends lost in Rommel’s Africa.” Alfier also locates among harsh settings the simple, quiet idyll of nightfall on a bajada, where yucca flowers are “clustered like monks at vespers.” Where there is elegy there is healing and pastoral beauty. We find this throughout, in the nourishing darkness of the mesas, alive with “verdant windrows of remnant springs;” in witnessing “trails written by storms” that come seasonally to the desert, offering temporal rivers a man and his grandson skip stones, while a romantic couple splashes in the storm-swollen Gila River, the red waves of the woman’s hair “singing with light. Alfier is an alert and attentive witness of the American Southwest, and the vision of The Wolf Yearling is both precise and significant.  "Alfier’s sharp lyrics come upon you like a door slammed by a hot desert wind might wake a lonely man into a new life. They are demotic, lived, and, without being sentimental, hopeful that our little span of being human matters after all." DOUG ANDERSON, Poet-in-Residence at Ft. Juniper, Amherst, Massachusetts, instructor in poetry at Emerson and Smith Colleges  "If the forbidding and starkly beautiful American Southwest were condensed to the nuances of language, Alfier would be its quintessential oracle. He writes forcefully not only of the flora and fauna eking out existence in its sunlight and its shadows but also of the existential loneliness so piquantly characteristic of its human inhabitants. Even more striking, however, than the engaging and powerfully rendered subjects of his poems is his mastery of language. I know of no poet writing today who handles the demanding form of syllabics (while consistently maintaining line integrity) with the consummate artistry of Alfier. Without any hesitation whatsoever, I give this fine collection of poems my highest recommendation." LARRY D. THOMAS, Member, Texas Institute of Letters, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate  "Each poem is a testament to Alfier's unflinching observations and hard-fought love of the Southwest. This is a rich portrait of a stunning landscape...The Wolf Yearling is a gift." KEITH EKISS, author of Puma Road Notebook, Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University

The Wolf Yearling: Poems

Alfier, Jeffrey C.

The poems in ROMANCING GRAVITY navigate through worlds (and words) nestled in nostalgia, rooted in the uncanny, and prime with pain. Striking language and rich images frame gangbangers, classrooms, and family, while trying to carry the burdens that come with being alive. These are poems of baseball and breathing, of heaven and healing. The speakers of the poems wander from one world and into the next, looking down to find their footing, and looking up for proof that they exist. "In ROMANCING GRAVITY Daniel Romo has written a memoir in poetry. It is the poetry of growing up in Southern California, of childhood games and fear, of adolescent dreams and braggadocio, and a young man’s coming into his own as a man and a poet. There are echoes of popular culture and the poems dance to the beat of an urban pulse. There are hallucinatory prose poems and sometimes the speaker sounds like an Old Testament prophet disguised as a homeless man, calling down curses on our decadent world. Lost children wave to us from the floor of the ocean. Do they wave in greeting or are they taking their leave? Either way, the reader waves back, the reader wants to dance or say 'Yes!' to these marvelous poems." Richard Garcia, author of The Persistence of Objects "Daniel Romo’s ROMANCING GRAVITY is a terrific collection—at once edgy, comical, and big-hearted. I was immediately drawn to his streetwise grit, his luminous vision of urban America. These are poems that swagger, that 'boom boom sound' and leave your ears ringing." David Hernandez, author of Hoodwinked "Daniel Romo finds surprising lyricism in school classrooms, TV shows, and yard sales in his southern California neighborhoods. Celebratory, irreverent, and deeply personal, the poems in ROMANCING GRAVITY capture the quotidian in stunning ways and reveal what keeps us earthbound." Molly Bendall, author of Under the Quick

Romancing Gravity: Poems

Romo, Daniel

"This powerful memoir immediately establishes itself as the work of a highly talented young writer. In a voice that is strong, unsparing, never judgmental, Mayall traces her years-long journey as a young woman to find escape out of the entrapping mean streets of Los Angeles, a separated world invisible to all but its denizens. She does this with unflinching honesty and authenticity. She knows what it's like to wake up into the harsh sunlight in a Venice Beach parking lot, cramped in an old car with other outcasts. She conveys the urgency for chemical surcease that leads her into dangerous streets, dark alleys; surcease no matter if bought by a sordid paid encounter. A punishing dawn at times finds her still searching for that illusive escape. Through all this, Mayall is able to find poignancy and humor. She finds it in the drug recovery meetings she haunts in search of vagrant camaraderie. She finds it—and introduces the reader to a cast of memorable fellow exiles--in a rigidly ruled rehabilitation institution. This is a memorable book--beautifully and even lyrically written. At times it is melancholy, at times hopeful, at times shocking, but it is always moving. At times it is even exuberant with the sense of a life lived determined to survive." John Rechy, author of CITY OF NIGHT "…This is a real, a serious, no kidding writer…With this fierce memoir, Phoenix, Philippa Mayall comes roaring into the literary world; her sharp and angry Manchester, England, voice barges into the pale and tidy tea room of L.A. literature like a Harley with Drone power.” Jill Robinson, HUFFINGTON POST Set in Manchester, UK, Los Angeles, and the center of the narrator’s mind, PHOENIX is a compelling memoir that takes the reader through an odyssey of escape. The writing is as raw as the emotions of the narrator named Flip, and the story as gritty as the northern UK city where she was raised. The book begins with a tragic night when a house fire destroys her life as she knows it. Flip flees the scene, devoured by guilt and drowning in self-loathing. She leaps into a synthetic existence of mind-altering drugs and alcohol, but before long her pain starts to bleed into her psyche once again. Her desperate urge to escape takes her six thousand miles from home to L.A. Flip is distraught to discover her feelings came with her, and she soothes them with even more potent drugs offered to her by a new friend. This becomes the axis of self-destruction and self-discovery. She ends up homeless, living in a car with two other people and two cats, and a new flame is ignited within her. After a violent confrontation with her friends, Flip is forced to enter a drug rehab so she isn't sleeping on the streets. This is the beginning of her real and most courageous escape.

Phoenix: A Memoir

Mayall, Philippa

Community & Culture

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