Being There is a collection of poems with subjects keenly observed by the author. Central themes concern personal reflections, which respect the aging of a human life, moments reliving the wonder of relationships that thrive or fade, the compassion needed for trials and confrontation, and the grace that blesses those who are wounded and wait patiently for healing in their special places. Illustrations completed by the author, maria keane.
See the Book Trailer for Being There on YouTube.
Being There
Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems
Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems, by Jean Murray Walker
Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems offers Walker's most recent poems as well as a "best of" collection of poems from each of her previous books. Poem after poem, Walker opens windows through which she and the reader may step into amazement, epiphany, revelation.
Jeanne Murray Walker has written eight volumes of poetry, including Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems, A Deed to the Light, and New Tracks, Night Falling. Her poetry and essays have appeared numerous journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Century, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Image and Best American Poetry. Her scripts, which have been performed in theaters across the United States and in London, are archived in North American Women's Drama, and are published by Dramatic Publishing Company. She teaches poetry and script writing workshops as well as courses in poetry, theater, and the English Renaissance on the graduate and undergraduate levels at the University of Delaware. She designed the University's early Study Abroad courses in London and taught in London for two decades. She mentors undergraduates in the student writing club, Write Out Loud and heads the Creative Writing Concentration at UD.
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A Deed to the Light
A Deed to the Light, by Jean Murray Walker
In "A Deed To the Light" Jeanne Murray Walker asks probing questions about the depth of grief, about letting go, and about the possibility of faith. Her poems have been described by John Taylor, writing in Poetry, as "splendid, subtly erudite, uplifting, and funny."
New Tracks, Night Falling
"Anyone who can get through a newspaper," Jeanne Murray Walker says, "will find this book a piece of cake." Indeed, the poems in this book are strong but unpretentious pieces rich in meaning and feeling. The poems in New Tracks, Night Falling acknowledge that we are people driven and divided by fear. They talk about racism, war, loss, greed, alienation, our disregard of the earth, and our disregard of each other. Sometimes we feel like night is falling in the bright light of day. Yet we get glimpses of hope, of what could be: / In this dark time I want to / make light bigger, / to toss it in the air like a pizza chef, / to stick my fists in, stretching it / till I can get both arms into radiance above the elbow / and spin it above us. . . . With a keen eye for both physical and emotional detail, Walker explores a journey that all of us are on, and she does so in a way that speaks to our deep fears and deeper joys, that engages and inspires. Tempering somber notes with more joyful ones, she reminds us of the good things, great and small, that are still possible in this world.
The Geography of Memory
The Geography of Memory, by Jean Murray Walker
Award-winning poet Jeanne Murray Walker tells an extraordinarily wise, witty, and quietly wrenching tale of her mother's long passage into dementia. This powerful story explores parental love, profound grief, and the unexpected consolation of memory. While Walker does not flinch from the horrors of "the ugly twins, aging and death," her eye for the apt image provides a window into unexpected joy and humor even during the darkest days.
This is a multi-layered narrative of generations, faith, and friendship. As Walker leans in to the task of caring for her mother, their relationship unexpectedly deepens and becomes life-giving. Her mother's memory, which more and more dwells in the distant past, illuminates Walker's own childhood. She rediscovers and begins to understand her own past, as well as to enter more fully into her mother's final years.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is not only a personal journey made public in the most engaging, funny, and revealing way possible, here is a story of redemption for anyone who is caring for or expecting to care for ill and aging parents-and for all the rest of us as well.
After Disasters: a novel in progress

Dinh's stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazine's, including Zoetrope: All-Story, Fence, Ninth Letter, Five Points, Threepenny Review, Greensboro Review and Epoch. His stories also have been in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 and A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, and he served as fiction editor for Gulf Coast and Night Train. He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2008 and was a Delaware Division of the Arts Established Artist Fellow in 2010. He is also a selectee for the 2014 Cape Henlopen Writer's Retreat.
Viet Dinh is calling his new novel After Disasters. According to a note in the DDA website by Christopher Yasiejko, Dinh "enjoys using individuals as vehicles for larger concerns and examining the effects of those experiences on people's identities. Those who choose to serve others, [Dinh] says, must come to terms with a massive loss of life, property and hope, but they must do so without succumbing to despair."
For an excerpt from this novel, see Yasiejko's note.

After Disasters: A Novel, (Little A, September 1, 2016) by Viet Dinh
New Tracks, Night Falling, by Jean Murray Walker
More Books 9
Fox Chase Review
"Liturgy for the Living," Poem by mariah keane in Fox Chase Review
Maria keane is a member of the National League of American Pen Women, which has awarded her for her sestinas. She received a Delaware Division of the Arts professional fellowship for works on paper in 1997, and in the same year a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her art, poetry, and prose are featured in the Pen Arts publication celebrating Lincoln. The Biggs Museum of Art published her ekphrasitc poetry (poems describing visual works of art) from 2005 to 2011. Her poems have appeared in The Fox Chase Review and she’s been a featured reader at The Fox Chase Review Reading Series and the 2nd Saturday Poets in Wilmington. Maria has attended the Cape Henlopen Writers’ Retreats in 2006 and 2010, and will be going again this year. Her artwork is featured in a profile by the Biggs Museum of American Art, and you can learn more about her at her webpage. Her most recent publication is Being There, a collection of her poems
The Boardwalk
A fortune-telling machine with a mind of its own, professional killers hanging out by the hotel pool, granny run amok in Funland… What’s happened to Rehoboth? Some very talented writers have created a book of great beach reads, that’s what!
The Boardwalk contains twenty-five never-been-published stories (each by a different author) that are all set in Rehoboth and fit the theme “The Boardwalk.” The stories mention many local streets, restaurants, hotels, and activities. Stories by Elizabeth Harner, Robert Hambling Davis, Tiffany A. Schultz, Margaret Farrell Kirby, Judy Shandler, Cathy Heller, Dennis Lawson. Jen .I. Eple, David Strauss, Heather Lynne Davis, Nancy Michelson, Chris Jacobsen, Joseph Crossen, Terri Clifton, Matthew Hastings, Renay Regardie, Robin Hill-Page Glanden, Bruce Krug, Sandy Donnelly, Mary Ann Glaser, Trish Bensigher Kocher, Emily Littleton, Keith Phillips, Russell Reece, and Kimberly Gray.
The Boardwalk: Rehoboth Beach Reads, Short Stories edited by Nancy Sanduski
“Ever run into any trouble?” - from “The Hitchhiker” You’ll find plenty of trouble in these dark and gripping stories. Set in the mid-sixties, in rural Michigan, three average people face what could be the defining moments of their lives. In “The Hitchhiker,” Jeff, a young sailor on the way to see his girlfriend, has just thumbed a ride with a very dangerous driver. In “Abracadabra,” Wallace, a religious fundamentalist who struggles with incidents from his past, develops a new relationship with God. And in “What She Wanted,” Loraine, a waitress at an all-night diner, needs to get out of town before her ex-boyfriend gets out of jail. Follow these memorable characters whose fates become inextricably linked in Russell Reece’s new collection, The Mud Lake Trilogy.
The Mud Lake Trilogy, by Russell Reece
Mud Lake Trilogy
The Stories We Tell
The Stories We Tell, by Irene Fick
Irene Fick’s first book has stolen my heart with its clear sweet lines, and lack of artifice. Here’s poetry that doesn’t need to persuade, for its presence in the world emerges from a genuine source with immediate connectivity. The title of the book is straightforward, yet it’s rare to create the right story in the right form with themes laid out in a unified vision. Fick is a writer of observation, but more, of felt life. Once you enter her currents of thought, there’s no going back or stopping. To be able to show hard glimpses of reality with beauty and truth is a gift many poets have not achieved. As for fear, age, dementia, illness and death, Fick turns them over to the angels of language where they belong—and they could not do better. I am permanently touched by this book.
—Grace Cavalieri
Irene Flick's Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild Page
Circle of Women
Circle of Women, by Drury Pifer
This 1970 novel by the late Drury Pifer is now hard to come by.
Playwright, novelist, composer, and author of numerous works of non-fiction Drury Pifer was born in Germiston, South Africa, of American parents. A U.S. Navy aviator, he was a founding member and artistic director of the Berkeley Stage Company in California and, later, of First Stage in Wilmington, DE. Pifer’s three dozen plays have been staged in New York, London, and diverse cities throughout the U.S. and Europe. His African Tourist was nominated for the Helen Hayes/Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play in 1992; his Strindberg in Hollywood, for Outstanding New Play in 1993. Several of Pifer’s plays were initially produced by City Theater Co. in Wilmington, DE before moving to diverse venues throughout the country.
His short fiction has appeared in various periodicals including Harper’s and Story magazine. Among Pifer’s various grants and awards were fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Delaware Division of the Arts. He served on the State Art Councils of Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania and taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Delaware.
Innocents in Africa
Innocents in Africa: An American Family's Story, by Drury Pifer
In 1932 Drury Pifer's parents, young, poor and ambitious, left the United States for the mines of South Africa because the country "promised an outside chance to marginal people." White, educated, English-speaking marginal people, that is.
They returned in 1945, when the author was 11 years old. During the intervening years this American family had been exposed to a strange colonial amalgam of privilege and austerity as Pifer Sr., a mining engineer, worked his way up within Sir Ernest Oppenheimer's awe-inspiring, ore-producing empire -- first in the gold mines of the Rand, then in the diamond mines in Oranjemund in the Namaqualand desert and finally in Kimberley.
From time to time Mr. Pifer, a playwright and former pilot, alludes to the adult brutalities of nationalism and economic disaster marching across the world in the course of his childhood. But "Innocents in Africa" is truly a child's-eye record of a small corner of that world -- unsophisticated and fascinating. From New York Times review by Ben Macintyre.
Hanging on the Moon
Hanging the Moon: the Rollins Rise to Riches, by Drury Pifer
Hanging the Moon follows the tumultuous career of John Rollins and his brother Wayne, offering the reader a close view of a great American entrepreneur and insight into how we, as a society, privilege business over all other institutions.
Pure
Fuse
Burn
The Pure Trilogy, by Julianna Baggott
In the bleak landscape of post-apocalyptic literature, Julianna Baggott’s vision stands out for its intense characters and jarring images. With BURN, she completes her Pure Trilogy, which began with FUSE and was followed up by PURE. Here, she takes readers back to life both inside and outside
of the Dome,a world where Pures andWretches, the fused and the Dusts, Mothers and programmed soldiers eke out a survival, and either work toward or seek to avoid the revolution that will change the world once again.
Like the first two novels in the trilogy, BURN gives readers the perspective of young people poised to radically challenge the world order created by a mastermind named Willux. After Detonations seared the landscape, polluted the world and devastated much of the human population, Willux created a sterile and supposedly idyllic society inside an enormous dome. While the “pures” inside the Dome enjoyed food, security, health and education, the “wretches” on the outside, often deformed by the Detonations and sometimes fused to the objects or people around them, starved, hid, fought and did their best to survive in an ashy and toxic world. Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman in Teenreads.
Lizzie Bordon in Love

Lizzie Borden in Love, a collection of poems by national bestselling author Julianna Baggott, offers poignant commentary in the voices of women as varied as Mary Todd Lincoln and Monica Lewinsky. The poems often focus on a particular moment in life: Katherine Hepburn discovers the dead body of her brother in an attic, or painter Mary Cassatt mourns the failure of her eyesight. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes ecstatic, the poems in this collection never fail the trust of the subjects of their intimate portrayals.

Julianna Baggot also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher (The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted) and N.E. Bode (The Anybodies) -- has published 17 books, including novels for adults, younger readers, and collections of poetry. See her website.

Lizzie Bordon in Love, by Julianna Baggott
Being There (Page Publishing, Inc., August 3, 2018) by maria keane
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