SOL Books

We will announce the winning selection shortly, but in the meantime, here are the finalists, in no particular order.

• Helping Hand for Ethan by Daniel Lance Wright
• Into the Wilderness by Chris Helvey
• The Lost Language by Marianne Villuenva
• Triple Jeopardy by David Hoof
• Heartaches Are Going to the Inside by Jennifer Barton
• All the Roads that Lead From Home by Anne Leigh Parrish
• South Side Miracles by Birute Putius Serota
• Sidewalk Dancing by Letitia Moffitt
• Love and All the Things We Didn’t Say by Victoria Kelly
• Too Many Moons, Too Many Miles by Christopher Helvey
• My Secret War by Thomas Balazs
• The Caravan Passes On by Molly Power
• Oppositions by Carolyn Osborn
• Shades of God by Will Ryan
• The Town of Watered Down Whiskey by James Geiwitz
• Love on the Big Screen by Bill Torgerson
• Years of Light and Gangrene by Thomas Livingston
• Places Where Judas Lost His Boots by Barbara Delacuesta
• Sunlight of a Suggestion by Michael Milburn
• Real Job by Alan Catlin

Thanks to all who submitted.

May 12th, 2010 | Category: Prose Series | Leave a comment

While Frank F. Carden’s book, The Prostitutes of Post Office Street, did not win the grand prize for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, it was the winning selection for the General Fiction Category.

Here’s what the judges had to say:

“This book gives voice to what is usually shrouded in silence. Author Carden opens a small window on the lives of prostitutes, of strippers, of the “lost” girls who serve some unacknowledged need of men, as they have for centuries. Perhaps they provide love. Certainly love is a central theme of the book, even if only wounded or furtive. The painful story of a married man struggling with his increasing sexual desire for other men in this McCarthy-era setting feels furtive. So does the love between the black “madam” of the house and her white boyfriend. Galveston, Texas society does not have tolerance for either one, the man or the couple. It only pretends to disapprove of the houses. Perhaps that is what makes this such a compelling read. For love will not be denied, even the girls know that. The author shows without saying and the effect is stunning.”

May 7th, 2010 | Category: Prostitutes of Post Office Street, Reviews | Comments (1)

A big congrats goes out to Frank F Carden, author of The Prostitutes of Post Office Street. His debut novel was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award.

May 3rd, 2010 | Category: Prostitutes of Post Office Street | Comments (2)

For the last day of National Poetry Month, I’m going to be self-indulgent and post a few poems from my Daily Cinquain Twitter feed that I’ve been discussing in my “Technology and Writing” articles.

On Cold Mornings
I speak
judiciously
so that my words, captured
as white puffs of thought, will linger
with you.

The First Sip of Coffee
Hot and
sugary and
creamy, somewhat like a
first kiss — too much to consume with
one sip.

What Sarah Palin Wrote on Her Palm
An off-
color limerick
because she was confused
by the syllable count used in
cinquains.

The First Time Making Love
is al-
ways a bit clum-
sy, feet tangled in the
cuffs of our pants as we fall in-
to bed.

April 30th, 2010 | Category: General | Comments (1)

The off-key clarinetist will never hit the high C
in ”Tequila,” but she keeps on blowing
and the marching band keeps on enlarging
its column right corners in the final rehearsal
before school begins. All August

a school daze has been approaching
like a glow-worm. The fifth-year senior
has tattooed his forearm with a naked woman.
In the parking lot he is flexing and flexing
until his veins pop up like autumn sedum.

He drains down a beer he bought with fake ID
from Maine. He guns his truck engine.
In a month he will drop out
for hunting season, bag a buck and honk
past the school displaying the antlers.

A refugee from the sailing team picks up
a class schedule and admires the wiry lines
of the girl who’s hanging on to the school’s
smoothest drug dealer. Her fingers
are getting high and still higher up his thighs.

Tomorrow the ringing bells will summon ghosts
of former students, dead in Iraq. The words
new students are learning will challenge the books
where they live where they murmur where they
memorize graffiti and undress their syllables.

April 25th, 2010 | Category: Gigs | Leave a comment

Two trains are racing as two trains
are wont to do, one at 50 mph
from Memphis, engineer chewing
on a blues tune, flicking it around
his tongue like a toothpick.

The other train is hustling up from Albuquerque
at 70 mph, engineer longing for his darling,
singing an empty-saddle song, tipping his hat.
Which train will arrive at Tulsa first?
Memphis is on Central Time,

Albuquerque on Mountain Time, and between them,
heading west, a tornado is expected
though it’s guesswork which train track
will be ripped up, and besides,
heading east is a fleecy green sedan

blasting rap, windows down, bass thumping
while prairie dogs, terrified,
hump it back to their holes. In my eighth grade
Rate times Time equals Distance problems,
it was always two honest trains chug chugging,

no railroad company wanting a government bailout
or union concession. We never had prairie dogs
or tornados. And there were never any
rapper wannabes distracting the engineer
as you know that engineers are wont

to be distracted down the track at some
railroad crossing in some town where some
baseball player who can’t hit a pig’s ass
with a banjo, bears down at batting practice
in a semipro league and smashes

a slider over right field into the window
of an oncoming train. And which train?
And what’s the rap distraction?
And why do trains want to race to Tulsa in the first place?
We never asked why the trains were racing.

So, between the blues in my backyard someday train,
the darlin darlin my stallion’s named Marvin train
and the rapper wannabe Yo homie don’t smoke my sedan,
America’s children are solving the story problems
of tomorrow. Call them the M generation:

children IM and TM in the AM and PM and listen
to their FMs, or is it their iPods? Their problems
are Greenland and Antarctica melting, raising
the world’s waterline by twenty feet. Which Philippine island
will flood first? And how will children resolve the music

of Muslims and Jews? They will create clichés,
find that the good old days are still good, and still
old, find that fewer people ride trains when they
could be burning up fuel and fooling themselves
most of all of the time as people are wont to do.

April 21st, 2010 | Category: Gigs | Comments (2)

I saw my father standing
outside the bus station

with his life jumbled
and knotted in nylon duffel

bags; I pass him thinking
how he was similar

to the wind flicking rain
from its hands; after

he passes from my sight,
I search for the figurative

father, giving council
unprejudiced by nature

or other concerns,
a father I observe

kneading out his dreams’
kinks, using the skill

of his cunning to graft
them toward fruition.

April 17th, 2010 | Category: My Father's Gloves | Comments (1)

This week, the Reading Minnesota blog is featuring Connie Colwell Miller. Read a poem from her collection, Bodywearers, below.

I-94 Westbound through Minnesota

On a roundbale, a red-tailed hawk,
and farther down, fields of corn,
waxy eartips bent earthward
in breeze. Behind me, a swayback
barn and a silo with glint on its head.
Later, milk cows, their flanks still
and hocked, and then the lakes —
sun-side in shimmer, set-side in oil.

So, after a lengthy season of snow-sunk
cars and frozen knees and every window
cleanly frosted over, I come to this: one
perfect July evening in northern Minnesota.
And with it, the beginnings of something
like understanding. Tired Norwegian
immigrants pushing north and north
on the hottest summer days, dirtsweat
trickling down the folds in their thick
skin, and still they keep on northward.
Until suddenly — a day like this.

April 13th, 2010 | Category: Bodywearers | Comments (1)

At night, I see the dead
in my dreams. Rotting,
stinking, they become
the stuff of root and earth.

By day, I see the dead
on the roads. Raccoons,
housecats, chunks of deer,
bloated or stiff with rigor mortis.

One day, these corpses remind me,
your mother will die. One day,
too, your father. You must burn
their lovely bodies — the skulls and palms,

even the uterus that held you.
So I pose my parents near the window,
snap their pictures, hoping
to capture their souls,

just in case some mighty god does not.

April 9th, 2010 | Category: Bodywearers | Comments (1)