When a group of creative people comes together - bursting with ideas and exuberance - they feed off one another, challenging each other to defy gravity and reach for the sky. Maybe it's nothing more spectacular than some great instructors and some gifted students feeding off each other like sharks with blood in the water. Whatever the source, WSC has plenty of poetry worth celebrating. And that's what Words Like Rain is all about.

Words Like Rain

Multiple

WSC Press

This book attempts to summarize and explain some basic approaches to literature, some traditional and some modern. It is designed for beginning students of literature and introduces them to different ways of reading and interpreting literature.

Approaches to Literature: A Practical Handbook for Beginners

Gilbert Vaughan

This book attempts to illustrate, with words and paintings, some of the connections that can be made between cultures even as they strive to keep their identities intact. Standing Bear said it best; "My hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain." But there can be joy also, if the connections promote friendship, respect and understanding. Poetry by Nebraska State Poet, William Kloefkorn. Pastel Paintings by Carlos Frey.

Still Life Moving

William Kloefkorn

Literature & Fiction

Connecticut Shade

Timothy Black

Tim Black's Connecticut Shade is a 21st Century meta-Howl. Written as an antidote for writer's block, it unleashes an interior satirical rampage through the drug-afflicted, sex-crazed American Dream gone sour. An assault on hollow materialism, it is also an attempted re-unification of the schizoid American psyche. Like William Carlos Williams' Paterson, this book is about the microcosm of the disillusioned, disassociated individual as well as the macrocosm of our fragmenting culture of vanity and greed. It is a funny and deadly serious quest for a path of unflinching honesty that can lead to deeper values. Black holds nothing back. If you're a fan of political correctness, then stop and back away from the text. otherwise, fasten your seat belts, buckle your chin straps, and get ready for a ride you'll not easily forget. --Jim Peterson, Author of Paper Crown.

AE Stueve s novel, The ABCs of Dinkology, isn t a novel at all. It is a tour de forceof creativity: a combination of comic book, character biographies, scholarly footnotes collection, sound track extraordinaire and laugh-out-loud-sit-down-and-crydamn good story. Combining his writing talents with Chris Smith s considerable artistic talents is sure to produce a classic. Save your first edition copy, it is bound to be a collectible. -Karen Gettert Shoemaker, author of Night Sounds and Other Stories With his debut, AE Stueve reinvents the novel and re-imagines the comic book in a mashup of David Foster Wallace s post-modernism and Stan Lee s hyper-real kerrang to create a coming-of-age story that is fresh, original, and surprisingly heartwarming. -Mark Haskell Smith, author of Moist, Delicious, Salty, and Baked

The ABCs of Dinkology

AE Stueve

Amy Plettner, like Whitman, is a poet of the body as well as the soul. Her poems smell of loam and sage, of trees and rivers. Her lines are organic and muscular, moving with the rhythms of the breath and the seasons. Her poems about family are not out of Rockwell or Hallmark. Hers deal with a genetic cord that s a jump rope hissing like Grandmother s geese. Her family values include fast feet, a mind of one s own, and a good left hook. In a poem entitled Kissing Cousins, in which cousins do some serious kissing, she notes her family Bible was lost by her great-great uncle on Deal Beach, where the scripture was scattered like spilled semen/among the dead. Of her beloved home turf, a Nebraska nature sanctuary, she notes, Grass drapes entrance of badger hole/ hoarfrost gathers elegant lace. Hot inhalation,/ so much breathing between my toes. -William Trowbridge, author of Ship of Fool Deep-rooted in the visceral and spiritual, Amy Plettner s poems possess an understanding of our hunger for physical contact with the natural world and with each other. Along with the corporeal is a tension between emotional fulfillment and insatiableness that reminds us how primal we are at heart. -Teri Youmans Grimm, author of Dirt Eaters

Undoing Orion's Belt

Amy Plettner

From the Back Cover One part Walter Mitty, one part Lord Jim, one part Bartleby, and three parts us. Marion Monaghan dreams of being an existential hero out of the Hemingway novels he used to teach before retreating into a railroad shack on the edge of Lodgepole, a town "right in the bellybutton of the country" and a former hunting ground of "The Band That Don't Eat Dog." Caught between feeling "the stuff that touchdowns are made of and the urge toward utter surrender, he joins the Lodgepole Volunteer Fire Department & Rescue Squad to escape defeat by what Randy Newman calls "the chuckholes down memory lane." With a poet's eye, a stand-up's wit, and a gifted storyteller's power to keep us engaged, Duggin narrates Marion's struggles to make a treaty between the opposing sides of himself in a novel as enchanting as the protagonist's magical music box. -- William Trowbridge author of Ship of Fool and The Complete Book of Kong In Marion Monaghan, Richard Duggin has created a singular eccentric--English Lit professor, East Coast transplant to the "bellybutton of the country," aspiring volunteer fire department member, and connoisseur. Marion is the chronicler of memory, imagination, and the heart's quixotic and soul-forging desires. The Music Box Treaty is a delightful read, a treat for anyone who enjoys flights of fancy, modest everyday heroism, salt-of-the-earth characters, and a darn good sentence or two. -- Amy Hassinger author of Nina:Adolescence and The Priest's Madonna About the Author Richard Duggin was born and raised in New England and now lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where he has taught fiction writing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha for more than forty-five years. His published work includes two recently published books of fiction, The Music Box Treaty (2011) and Why Won't You Talk To Me?:Selected Stories (2011), as well as short stories which have appeared in such periodicals as American Literary Journal, Beloit Fiction Journal, Laurel Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Sun, Playboy, and elsewhere. His work has been cited by Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Playboy Magazine Best Fiction. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Merit Awards.Duggin is founder of the UNO Writer's Workshop, offering an undergraduate BFA degree in creative writing, and of the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing, a low-residency two-year graduate degree program.

The Music Box Treaty

Richard Duggin

Saving Singletrees

Leo Dangel

From the publisher: The poet Charles Simic has a notion on the order of whatever pops into your head is thought materializing. David Wyatt s poems, though not experimental, rely on autobiography, collage, non sequitur, dialogue, dream, and a joke now and then, to get nearer perceived experience; they appreciate the chance encounter that may become lightning. . .near the porch, (that) raised the ground from nothing. Wyatt's poems are a mix of sardonic humor, cynicism, sly jokes, cryptic asides--like notes found later at the scene, in an abandoned tweed sports jacket, scratched out in a 3 X 5 vest pocket notebook, maybe by a man trapped in a certain vague world governed by rules he was trying to figure out, but couldn't quite understand, but who had an inkling, or more accurately, an open wound, that bled out each day into that notebook, and dried into the poems you find here. When you read these poems you will come away with the unsettling feeling that you were just at the scene of an accident that you have witnessed all day, every day of your life, but never realized until now that you were trapped in the steel jaws of the moment, when it's too late to do anything. -Greg Kosmicki Rich Wyatt gives the small houses of his poems surprisingly good furniture, and he does it again and again. Visit him, and he will invite you in, making even the slightest of things knowable and inviting. This book is a very good household of secrets simply astounding. And, as he says, "everyday more complicated." His very first poem lets good gathering begin. -Don Welch

Gathering Place

David Wyatt

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Books by WSC Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the WSC Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Words Like Rain

Approaches to Literature: A Practical Handbook for Beginners

Still Life Moving

Connecticut Shade

Connecticut Shade

The ABCs of Dinkology

Undoing Orion's Belt

The Music Box Treaty

Saving Singletrees

Gathering Place