Set in Antigua, Guatemala, this work is the story of Mikela, a fierce ten-year-old indigenous girl determined to save her pregnant, severely traumatized 12-year old sister, Natividad, and the child she carries.

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...

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 people respond to them.

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...

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...

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...

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...

SHIFTING BALANCE SHEETS: Women's Stories of Naturalized Citizenship & Cultural Attachment. A Wising Up Anthology. Editors: Heather Tosteson, Kerry Langan, Charles D. Brockett and Debra Gingerich. In this anthology, thirty-four women and girls from twenty countries, now living all across the U.S., reflect on their journeys to naturalized U.S. citizenship-journeys that invite all of us, native and foreign born, to consider what it means to choose to be an American. In Chinese Daughters: All-American Girls, American mothers whose Chinese daughters have become naturalized citizens through...

VIEW FROM THE BED: VIEW FROM THE BEDSIDE A Wising Up Anthology Editors: Heather Tosteson, Ph.D., Phyllis A. Langton, R.N., Ph.D., Charles D. Brockett, Ph.D. Who is the doctor or nurse who for better, or worse, you can't forget? The patient who changed your life? Thirty-eight contemporary writers explore with memoir, story, and poetry the different ways we talk about, to-and through-each other at the doctor's office, hospital, or sickbed. One surgeon celebrates his first surgical success; another grieves the death of a patient. A nurse finds her compassion exhausted by a suicidal patient;...

We invite you to listen with us as forty-six people from twenty-one countries on six continents thoughtfully explore through memoirs, essays, interviews, and poetry their complex relationships to U.S. citizenship, residency, and their individual sense of community and belonging-as birthright citizens with little direct acquaintance with the U.S., naturalized citizens, dual (or triple) citizens by birth or choice, serial citizens, asylees, diversity lottery winners, lifetime expats, U.S. or global families with differing citizenship statuses and cultural attachments, undocumented residents...