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

ILLNESS & GRACE, TERROR & TRANSFORMATION, Heather Tosteson and Charles D. Brockett, Editors, Wising Up Press. In this contemporary anthology of personal memoirs, stories, and poetry contemporary writers explore themes of illness and trauma and the wide variety of ways in which we respond to them. Authors ponder the impact of cancer, ALS, stroke, juvenile diabetes, dementia, chronic fatigue syndrome, anorexia, accidental death, schizophrenia, PTSD, domestic and sexual abuse on them, their families, friends. The collection will be of special interest to people who have experienced or are experiencing illness or trauma themselves or in those close to them and would like to explore the meaning of these life-challenging experiences further. The book is designed to be read by the general public, and also in reading groups, writing groups, and support groups. It includes an opening essay on how we as readers can listen faithfully to these stories and a closing one for people who would like to explore the ways writing can help us order and integrate powerful life-changing events.

Illness & Grace, Terror & Transformation

Contemporary

FAMILIES: THE FRONTLINE OF PLURALISM Heather Tosteson and Charles D. Brockett, Editors Wising Up Press The difficulties of living up close and personal with diversity-of sensibility, race, sexual orientation, culture, class, or religion-is the subject of the stories, memoirs, and poetry in this anthology. In these works by thirty-five contemporary writers we learn what it means to absorb the intimate implications of being of mixed race, to be raised by a parent who suffers from being on the wrong side of history, to carry the burden of immigrant parents' self-sacrifice. We learn what it means to fully live out choices to marry across religion or culture, to hear our children chatter happily in a language we can't speak, to feel our imagination try to find its way into a world completely alien to us, still raw with the wounds of civil war. We learn about the tension-and love-that develop between siblings when one is disabled; the violence that carries across marriages; what it means to create relationships with children after divorce, or to make a space in our own heart for the children of step-children. We learn how completely parenthood shifts our priorities, whether we are lesbian parents adopting children from Guatemala, a single mother expanding her family of two with another child from China, a lesbian mother shifting sexual orientation to create a stable family clan, a white poet fostering a black child from an inner-city ghetto.

Families: The Frontline of Pluralism

United States

Love After 70. Heather Tosteson, Nancy Pelletier, and Megan Krivchenia, Editors. Wising Up Press. What is love, in all its forms, like after 70? Over fifty accomplished writers share their experiences with us in this contemporary anthology of poetry, memoir and fiction. There is a generous sensuality in the work we find here, strong passions, and a sense of surprise at their persistence. If we didn't know most of our writers were over 70, we would not think so as we listen to their most personal of voices-which is part of the fun and the invitation of this anthology. Until we get there, we don't know what this age is really like. And until we ask, those who have been there may not volunteer their road maps. But we are the richer, wiser, and more lively for having them. . . For what we realize when we finish this collection is that life after 70 is, excuse us, hot. And tender, wise, biting, grieving, kind.

Love After 70

Parenting & Relationships

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

DOUBLE LIVES, REINVENTION, & THOSE WE LEAVE BEHIND A Wising Up Anthology We frown upon double lives, but laud reinvention as the perpetual rebirth of our best self. But are these two states so very different for us as we live them? Are these states so very different for the people who accompany us? The thirty talented authors gathered in this anthology explore these questions from many different perspectives through memoir, story, and poetry and raise some very specific and fascinating ones of their own: What does it mean to understand the numbers tattooed on your father's arm are not those of an old girlfriend? What does it mean to have the language and the customs of the home be incomprehensible to the larger world in which you are schooled? What does it mean, innocent and illegitimate, to be your mother's deepest secret? What does it mean to look back on your younger self, who did not cry at her father's death, or who walked out of her abusive mother's house without saying good-bye to her baby sister? What does it mean to be responsible for your brother's death? To discover your husband has a secret sexual life, your father has another son? What does it mean to be kidnapped and develop a second self to survive the ruptures of place, culture, language? To choose a marriage that defies our sexual conventions? To be so taken with a fictive identity that you no longer know yourself outside it? Through all this wonderful variety, another question rises and answers itself: this sharing is what it means to discover an integrity that doesn't narrow experience, rather lets it flow through us in all its truth and duplicity, verve and sorrow. CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS: Edward Beatty, Wendy Brown-Baéz, Shireen Campbell, Emilio DeGrazia, Meredith Devney, David Harris Ebenbach, Joan Fondell, Emilie George, Lynn Hesse, Eboni Hogan, Yolande House, Stefan Kiesbye, Kerry Langan, Phyllis A. Langton, Kathryn Howd Machan, Maria Nazos, Susan O'Doherty, Deirdre K. Razzaque, Carlos Reyes, Cassandra Robison, Mary Kay Rummel, Frank Salvidio, Nicholas Samaras, Alexandrina Sergio, Anna Steegmann, Don Thackrey, Sylvie Terespolski, Natalie Haney Tilghman, Heather Tosteson Judith Turner-Yamamoto, Devon Ward-Thommes, Christopher Willard

Double Lives, Reinvention & Those We Leave Behind

Kerry Langan's stories capture those fleeting moments when a child experiences a revelation about the adult world, often a disturbing portent. She is equally fascinated with childhood experiences that haunt adults and become more significant with the passing of time. Although her characters and settings are highly realistic and often humorous, Langan reveals how pain distorts one's world, how lives can be tenuously held together by secrets and memories. Her characters are not allowed to suffer delusions; they learn hard, undeniable truths about themselves. Where others would look away, Langan does not flinch.

Only Beautiful & Other Stories

Langan, Kerry

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

CONNECTED: What Remains As We All Change? A Wising Up Anthology Heather Tosteson and Charles D. Brockett, Editors We talk about the need to connect intimately, but do we recognize connection when it's here or only in retrospect? Is a feeling of connection something we can will into being-or something that, like grace, surprises us when we least expect it? Does it bear any relation to what we imagined it would be? What, if anything, does it have to do with love? With time's continuousness and mutability? With our own? In this anthology, thirty-two talented writers invite us to explore with them, through story, memoir, and poetry, what remains as we all change-within families, between friends, between lovers, through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, career change, gender change, marriage, parenthood, divorce, illness, disability, and death. The writing here is strikingly mature-and lively-whether the writer is nineteen or ninety. Join, among others, a father wryly observing his grown son, wondering what links them both to the child he will never be again; a man cherishing his tie with an institutionalized brother; a woman exploring the complex, formative cross-racial bond she had with a childhood caretaker; women, friends since childhood, exploring what connects them now that their paths have diverged so greatly; a man with a severely disabled son puzzling the bonds he still has with his ex-wife; a wife of fifty years warily contemplating the advisability of an eternal marriage. CONTRIBUTORS: Cassandra J. Angelo, Pamela Arlov, Annabelle Baptista-Baumann, Gabriella Brand, Mark Brazaitis, William Cass, Susan K Chernilo, Carol V. Davis, Maureen Tolman Flannery, Judith Gille, Annette Van Veen Gippe, Janet Lunder Hanafin, Stephanie Hart, Suzanne Herman, Paul Hostovsky, Margaret Karmazin, Mitch Kellaway, J.S. Kierland, Sharon Leder, Lori Levy, Jane Miller, Felicia Mitchell, Carlos Reyes, Blanche Rosloff, Andrea Ross, Frank Salvidio, Maxine Silverman, J.J. Steinfeld, Mark Tarallo, Milton Teichman, Hannah Thomassen, James Vescovi.

Connected: What Remains as We All Change

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