What is repair in relationships? It's not starting anew. It's not jumping ship. It's not settling, either. It takes as many forms as there are relationships. It's difficult. It matters. It takes both sides to do it-and we do it all the time, in large and small ways. So why don't we like to talk about it? Why do we tend to think of it as a failure rather than a source of resilience, like the constant re-equilibrations of balance that allow us to walk, dance, break bread and move mountains? In this intriguing anthology of poetry, memoir, and story, forty-four talented writers ages twenty to...

GERMS OF TRUTH A book about life, death, families of all ages, stages, and orientation-and sperm banks. In this engaging and thoughtful collection of short stories, we find people of all ages trying to make sense-poignant, often funny, sometimes wise-of the many, changing ways they intersect as parents, children, and families from conception to death. In the first section, We're All Donors Here, a woman muses, "I mean, when you go to a sperm bank, you have to realize that sperm is like money. It gets handled by a lot of people but is essentially impersonal. It's what you use it for that gives...

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 its 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 times continuousness and mutability? With our own?

In this anthology, thirty-two talented writers invite us to explore...

Cada lingua concebe outra eu, /every language conceives another I, / igualmente essencial, new, Heather Tosteson writes in Breathing in Portuguese, Living in English. Exploring through a new language and life in another hemisphere what it means to be in the third stage, terceira idade, of a well-lived life, the poet realizes that she has come here to live into the reality of my own mortality, a reality that holds powerful fulfillment as well as loss. In these poems she invites us to join her as she listens for unsung hymns ready to soar within single words that taste like mamao or sound like...

Creativity & Constraint, A Wising Up Anthology Heather Tosteson, Charles D. Brockett, Kerry Langan, Michele Markarian, Editors We often think of true creativity as unfettered liberty-but is creativity something that only takes root, flourishes, within bounds? What happens to our ideas if they must work their way through the material world-often being materially changed in the process? Why is it that we often feel more empowered, more intimately related within the artifice of a story, a song, a painting than we do in the world at large? What do we learn when we try to take that expansiveness...

SIBLINGS: Our First Macrocosm Our families, especially our siblings, provide our first macrocosm. How much of that experience do we carry out into the world as part of our deepest, inchoate expectations of the world or of ourselves? Is birth order destiny? How are we shaped by the constellation we're born into, whether dyad or nebula? What is the appropriate sentiment to have towards those with whom we may share only a preponderance of genes and, before we have any choices in the matter, propinquity? Towards those who knew us before we had a sense of self? Towards those who helped us define...