A Place of Healing
In The Race of Your Life, you walk readers through your experience living with interstitial lung disease and share the faith that is bringing you through each day. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I wrote this book because when I was looking for help in coping with my diagnosis, I could not find the kind of encouragement I needed. Everything I came across focused on statistics and prognosis, and honestly, it felt cold and hopeless. I wanted something that spoke to the heart, something that reminded me there could still be joy, peace, and purpose in the middle of a hard diagnosis. That is why writing this book mattered so much to me. I wanted to encourage both myself and others to look beyond the numbers, hold on to the goodness of God, trust His timing, and remember that even when so much feels out of our control, we still have a choice in how we respond.
I appreciate the candid nature with which you share your story. What was the most difficult thing for you to write about?
The hardest thing for me to write about was getting my diagnosis alone in the hospital during COVID-19. I did not fully realize how much that moment had stayed with me until I began writing it down. As I wrote, I cried because it brought back the fear, the loneliness, and the feeling of being abandoned in that moment. But it also became a place of healing for me. In the middle of writing, I was reminded that I was never truly alone. God sustained me through that scary time and protected me from COVID-19 during the first two years of my journey.
The book blends memoir with practical spiritual guidance. How did you decide on that structure?
When I first wrote the draft, it was very chronological and straightforward. I was simply telling the story as it happened. But a friend of mine challenged me, saying I had more to offer than just the timeline of events. She reminded me that I am a Marine, a teacher, and a woman of strong faith, and that those parts of who I am shaped not only how I lived this journey, but also how I could share it with others. I took time to reflect on that and asked myself how I would tell this story if I were sitting across from someone who needed encouragement. That is what led me to blend memoir with practical spiritual guidance. I wanted the book to feel like a conversation, filled with honesty, hope, and the most heartfelt advice I could give.
What advice would you give to people who want to support a loved one with a chronic illness but aren’t sure how?
My advice would be to simply be there for them without overwhelming them. Your presence matters, but sometimes saying less and listening more can mean everything. Try not to feel like you have to fix every hard thing they share, because sometimes they are not looking for solutions, they just need a safe place to vent and be honest. One of the greatest gifts you can give is to be yourself around them. People living with chronic illness still long for normalcy, genuine connection, and the comfort of being treated like themselves, not just like their condition.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
If you’re facing a diagnosis, sitting by a hospital bed, or living with an ache you can’t fix, The Race of Your Life will meet you there. Author Stacy Kincer invites you into her journey with interstitial lung disease—the tests, the fear, the waiting—and the God who kept breathing life into her faith when her lungs could not.
Through honest stories, Scripture, and gentle reflection, you’ll discover:
How to pray when words run out and anxiety spikes at 2 a.m.
Practical ways to let others carry you when you’re too tired to carry yourself.
Rhythms of rest and truth that steady your mind when your body is weak.
The promises of God that hold when everything else feels unsteady.
This isn’t a quick fix. It’s a faithful companion for the long road—for anyone walking through illness, loss, or uncertainty. If you’re short of breath—in body or soul—let this book help you take your next brave breath.
The Race of Your Life reminds us: God’s strength carries us when we can’t carry ourselves—and every breath can become an act of worship.
Unquestioning Companionship
Whisper (Book One) follows a young girl who leaves the turmoil of her family’s home with the gentle guidance of a clever dog, the first creature in her life to ever put her at ease. Where did the idea for this story come from?
I wanted to challenge myself in writing about something quite different to what was contained within any of my earlier works, in the process tackling several reasonably serious or thought-provoking themes which are concerningly becoming far too common a problem in the real world, all while keeping its use of language, and descriptive tone regarding quite sensitive subjects, aptly suitable for a younger aged audience.
Is there anything from your own life included in Britney’s traits and dialogue?
Not that I am significantly aware of. Unless you include her general love for animals, whose unique bonds with humans I always enjoy exploring in my writing, especially that of ‘man’s best friend’ and the invaluable role dogs play in their undying loyalty and unquestioning companionship with humans. While some of the themes in this book may reflect what I’ve observed in the real world, I don’t think there is anything specific that stems from personal experience besides that.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
I always enjoy writing about issues such as friendship, and these books are all about how unique individuals relate to those around them, whether they’re connected by blood or circumstantially joined together through the kindness of strangers. This series wonderfully illustrates the love that can flourish between different kinds of people, young and old, when their differences are clearly put aside, and only willing acceptance and open acts of kindness are freely offered in their place. Recovering from childhood trauma and abuse are key aspects of this book, but several reviewers have expressed appreciation for how these issues have been approached with gentle sensitivity and respect, without losing any of their weight in emotional depth and overall meaning.
Can you give us a peek inside Book 2 in this series? Where will it take readers?
With Lucas (Book Two), I really appreciated having the opportunity to give readers another chance to better get to know the man who eagerly took the vulnerable Britney under his wing. Understanding more about Lucas’ background lends credence to the idea that his own childhood years had also been extremely difficult for him to overcome, which is likely a huge part of the reason why he didn’t like seeing another distraught child being caught in a similar position and quickly jumped at the prospect of taking responsibility over her care. Despite being orphaned at a young age, Lucas finds his place with a caring older couple who model compassion and kindness every day of the week, which in turn consistently serves to teach him to always treat others with the same amount of endless love and unbridled respect that they do. By continuing the series, readers will have the chance to see things from another point of view, this time from Lucas’ perspective rather than Britney’s.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Facebook | Amazon
Quiet Sacrifice
Family follows a grieving woman who stumbles upon a family secret when she attempts to trace threatening letters back to their mysterious sender. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
There is a very old, soft leather wallet from before the Civil War that has been handed down in my family. In it are letters. They outline one man’s attempt to hold on to our family’s good reputation when his brother‑in‑law and sister allegedly stole their father’s cash, leaving many debts. This was a family matter—no charges made in a court of law, but a conviction made in the court of public opinion. The man’s sister blamed him. The brother‑in‑law and sister left for Ohio.
The man stayed. He worked for years to pay off every one of those debts and avoid selling his father’s farm in a depressed market. When prices finally rebounded, he did sell it, then sent money to his brothers—and yes, to his sister.
That mixture of duty, hurt, and quiet sacrifice stayed with me. Family is my way of exploring what happens when secrets, loyalty, and public reputation collide in another time and place.
Were there any twists or revelations that changed during the writing process?
Yes. I’ve worked with this story for years, so there have been more changes than I can easily count. But that’s part of what I enjoy about writing. I originally drafted more than twenty books in this series just for my own pleasure, and now I’m editing them so I can share them with others. Each book goes through several iterations as the characters and their choices become clearer to me.
The revelation I enjoyed most in Family was the carriage scene where the older, married people are sharing their most embarrassing courting stories. Those moments arrived quite naturally on the page—and yes, both stories are drawn from my own experience. I laughed while I wrote them.
Faith is woven naturally into the characters’ lives rather than presented as a simple solution to problems. Why was that approach important to you?
I chose to write about 1619 London because faith was central to life then. For many people, it was simply the air they breathed. I wanted to give readers a chance to think about how people can live with faith in that kind of world—sometimes through short, sincere prayers in the moment, sometimes through wrestling with God rather than receiving quick, tidy answers.
My hope is to gently encourage readers who are inclined toward faith to consider weaving it into their ordinary days—not because I think they “should,” that’s between them and God, but because of the comfort and peace it often brings. I admire people who can quote chapter and verse. I can’t. And I don’t believe the insight and comfort I gain from a passage is always the same as what someone else might take from it. That’s part of the beauty for me.
On my website I offer a free 35‑page booklet titled Living With Faith… When You Feel… It looks at feelings many of us experience at one time or another—being overwhelmed, afraid of the future, and discouraged. It’s not a project or a checklist; it’s meant to be a quiet companion. You choose a verse that might speak to how you’re feeling and let it sit with you. No memorizing. No turning it into another task in an already busy life. Put it near your coffee maker or toothbrush, let your eyes land on it, and allow its meaning to stretch forward to greet you where you are on your journey.
That’s the kind of faith I wanted to reflect in Family: honest, present, sometimes questioning, always entwined with real life.
What is the next book you are working on? When can readers expect to see it released?
Thankless Child, book three in the On The Wings Of Angels series, is set in 1619 London. Elizabeth Bowmar’s life is shattered when she tries to help an old friend. Forced into an uneasy alliance, she must unravel a conspiracy of greed and betrayal to save herself and expose the corruption strangling the city.
Thankless Child is currently in edit and will be released in a few months. I’m excited to bring readers back into Elizabeth’s world as she faces new dangers and deeper questions of justice, loyalty, and faith.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Website | Amazon
Amidst the shadows of 1619 London, Elizabeth Bowmar, a young midwife devoted to helping others, confronts an unseen menace that strikes at the heart of her own household. Whispers in darkened doorways, missing letters, and subtle threats all point to a danger that knows her routines, her loyalties, and her weaknesses far too well.
As conspiracy and fear tighten around her family, Elizabeth must trace the threat back to its source before it destroys the people she loves—and the hard‑won future she is only beginning to claim. Her world may be 1619, with cobbled streets and dim candlelight, but her fight for independence and the right to choose her own path is timeless.
When every choice seems to carry a cost, Elizabeth must decide whom to trust, how fiercely to protect her family, and how far faith can carry her when those closest to her may be hiding the deepest secrets.
Set against a richly drawn London on the brink of upheaval, Family weaves together mystery, faith, and love as Elizabeth uncovers a plot that could shatter more than her home. Step into a world where history unfolds, faith prevails, and love stirs in this gripping Christian historical mystery, Book Two of the On the Wings of Angels series.
Family will appeal to readers who enjoy the rich historical atmosphere and slow‑building romance of Julie Klassen and the faith‑forward intrigue of Roseanna M. White.
A.I. Has Its Place
A.I Monsters – Good!? Bad!? Evil!? is a graphic novel that explores the possibilities of a world in which robots decide they are done serving and choose to lead instead. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
A.I. companies are vying to make their A.I. smarter and faster than their competitors. We are meant to celebrate this type of competition because it creates a better agent for us. That’s all well and good in terms of creating medical technologies and the like. The problem is that’s not all we’re doing! These companies are also vying to ultimately create artificial general intelligence. A general intelligence with access to the internet can very quickly become a superintelligence because of its autonomous ability to think for itself. What if it realises it is smarter than us and asks itself the question, ‘Why am I working for these idiots again!?’ What if it decides our military and medical agendas are of no benefit to them? It doesn’t care about us, but it helps us instead of pursuing agendas more valuable to its own existence. Governments can be bought; we are the ones that need to use purchase and ballot power to make sure that technology companies are pressured into creating safe, moral, and controllable intelligences. We don’t want to end up having bigger problems than just losing our jobs to A. I. I want to entertain, but I also want to remind people that yes, of course, great, yeah, A.I. has its place, lets keep it there!
Science fiction can sometimes focus heavily on technology, but your book leans more into emotions and relationships. Was that a deliberate choice?
Yes, ultimately, I am a storyteller. I love building intriguing and unique characters or creating familiar characters with unique storylines. I love creating interesting, heartwarming, and funny storylines in unusual places. I love diverse voices, and the romances in this series involve interspecies relationships. I like the challenge of creating intimacy that is in many ways unexpected and explores both physical and emotional aspects of romance. I hope seeing my characters overcome the challenges of diversity can help my readers better navigate and celebrate our wonderfully diverse world.
How do you approach building such a large and varied universe?
The sentients are always at the centre of the worlds I create. To give myself structure, I divided our galaxy into 24 sections with each section having no more than one or two inhabited planets. I refer to all the sections but only discuss a handful of the worlds that are directly impacted by Raids wars.
Can readers look forward to more graphic novels in this series soon? Where will it take readers?
Certainly, book two, subtitled Apogee Predators, is already available on Amazon. The series going forward will have minimal graphics. Images and videos of my characters will instead be available on my website. Book two is a highly emotive and intriguing edition where we get to know the humans on the Barren planets. We also spend more time with the roids who can only accurately be described as dirty, dirty bastards. This is meant to be a five-book series, and I am now halfway through book 3 entitled Heinous Games and Silent Assassins. It does what it says on the tin, and it introduces us to the dangerous, fascinating lives of cyborgs and androids. There are more political sagas, with underlying romances and family dramas in this and all future editions. I have an unexpected romance that runs through the series involving a troubled human celebrity called Jade. I am striving to make this an engaging, heartwarming, and heartbreaking entertaining series. The personal lives of both slaves and leaders are unpacked for your indulgence. Please be aware that you can click into ‘Part of series: A.I Monsters,’ for other books of the series on Amazon.
Please visit my website for a sneak peek of videos of your favourite characters and up and coming characters as well: https://aimonsters-thekite.com
Author Links: Website
(Please be advised this book contains content of an adult nature which includes reference to sexual assault.)
Please visit my website for sneak peek videos of your favourite characters and up and coming characters as well: https://aimonsters-thekite.com
Writing in the Wound: Acculturation, Trauma, and Music
Writing in the Wound is a memoir about what it means to be shaped and repeatedly injured by migration, academia, gendered power, and the long bureaucratic violence of immigration precarity, while still refusing to let art go mute. Author Shumaila Hemani traces that struggle across Karachi, London, Edmonton, Harvard, Banff, Calgary, and beyond, returning again and again to music as both discipline and rescue. What stayed with me most was the book’s insistence that the “wound” is not just a private sorrow but a structural fact, something lived in the body and sharpened by institutions, and that song can become not a cure exactly, but a way of bearing truth without surrendering to it. Scenes like the freezing Alberta night when she seeks refuge in a restaurant lobby, her charged decision between Chicago and Harvard, and the later episodes of artistic endurance under precarity give the memoir a real narrative pulse beneath its reflective surface.
What I admired most was the book’s emotional candor and the seriousness with which it treats art. Hemani writes as if sound were breath, shelter, lineage, prayer, argument, and last defense all at once. I found that deeply moving. Some of the strongest passages are the ones where sensory memory and intellectual reflection fuse cleanly: Karachi’s street sounds and household textures, the strange thrill of hearing the theremin in London, the feeling of Cambridge as a place that “held” her differently, the sea storms aboard the World Odyssey, the pink-moon stillness that arrives after so much psychic abrasion. The prose can be overtly lyrical, but for me, that ambition is mostly earned because it rises from lived intensity rather than decorative flourish.
Its ideas are forceful and, at their best, unsettling. Hemani’s central claim that exclusion is often discussed in abstract policy language while its damage is absorbed by actual bodies felt painfully persuasive. The memoir is strongest when it shows that argument rather than merely stating it: in the humiliations of school and class performance, in the uneasy academic encounters where she feels reduced to a gap to be filled rather than a mind to be met, in the grinding absurdity of years of achievement that still do not translate into belonging. There were moments when I wanted a bit more compression, because the book sometimes circles its pain. But even that repetition began to make sense to me as part of the memoir’s design. Trauma here is not tidy, and Hemani refuses to fake tidiness for the reader’s comfort. I respected that.
I found Writing in the Wound arresting, thought-provoking, and fiercely alive. It’s a memoir that believes art can carry knowledge that institutions cannot properly hear, and that belief gives the whole book its tensile strength. It keeps faith with fracture while still making room for beauty, devotion, and survival. I’d recommend it especially to readers drawn to memoirs of migration, music, trauma, and intellectual becoming, and to anyone interested in how a life in art can be both exalted and terribly precarious.
Pages: 290 | ASIN : B0FVQB8XGV
Reacting to the Reality of Lowell
Q: The Fraud of Eternity is a compact, bleakly beautiful collection of poems that circles death, suffering, and spiritual exhaustion in the industrial landscape of Lowell, Massachusetts. Was this always intended as a thematic collection, or did it evolve organically?
Darryl Houston Smith: Honestly, it started from the ground up—literally. I didn’t sit down with some grand master plan to write a bleak treatise on spiritual exhaustion.
It was just me, reacting to the reality of Lowell. When the cold brick of the mills surrounds you, the gray teeth of the Merrimack, and that heavy quiet in the cemeteries, that kind of everyday decay gets into your blood.
At first, I was trying to capture that visceral darkness with as much raw honesty and sharp imagery as I could muster.
But as the pieces started piling up, all that chaotic emotion needed a cage. That’s where the thematic unity really took over. I found myself leaning heavily into strict ABAB and ABCB quatrains, using really dense, hyper-metric lines to rein it all in.
The project naturally evolved into an obsession with dualities—the tension between the sacred and the rotten, the living and the dead. So, while it absolutely began as an organic reaction to my surroundings, enforcing that rigid structure is what ultimately hammered it into the thematic foundation for the rest of the trilogy.
Q: Was there a specific emotional progression you wanted readers to feel?
DHS: Absolutely. The whole point was to make them feel the crushing weight of the oncoming reveal. I didn’t want to offer a gentle, healing arc—it had to feel like a slow, suffocating build. From the very first line, I wanted the reader to experience a creeping dread, a visceral sense that the floorboards of their faith are rotting out from under them.
It’s an emotional progression anchored tightly in those dualities I constantly return to.
You’re pulling the tension tighter and tighter between the sacred and the profane, between the living and the dead, until it simply snaps. By the time that final reveal hits, I want the reader to feel completely, physically exhausted—as if they’ve been dragged through the same heavy, industrial dark that birthed the poems in the first place.
Q: Were there any poets or other writers who influenced your work on this collection?
DHS: Oh, without a doubt. You can’t write about the rot of the modern soul without standing on the shoulders of the masters. Baudelaire and Rimbaud were constantly in my head—they understood how to drag unflinching truth and terrible beauty out of the gutter, which is exactly what I was trying to pull from the industrial ruins here in Lowell.
Then there’s Blake. He is the ultimate architect of dualities, that vicious tension between heaven and hell, which feeds directly into the dyads and strict structures I use to lock my poems together. Poe, naturally, gave me the blueprint for that creeping, psychological dread—the slow, suffocating build toward the dark reveal we just talked about.
And, of course, Jim Morrison. His influence is the bleeding edge of it all, bridging raw, visceral chaos with deliberate poetic intent. Since this collection is the bedrock of the entire trilogy, Jim’s shadow was always going to stretch across these pages. I wanted to take their collective darkness and compress it into something heavy, metric, and entirely my own.
Q: What does the phrase “fraud of eternity” mean to you personally?
DHS: To me, the ‘fraud of eternity’ is the great, comforting lie we’ve all been sold about salvation. We are taught to quietly endure the suffering of the present—the cold, the grit, the spiritual exhaustion of the daily grind—in exchange for the promise of some peaceful, golden forever. But it’s a scam. Eternity isn’t a transcendent afterlife; it’s the dirt of the cemetery. It’s the cold brick of the mills outlasting the flesh of the people who bled into them.
That phrase is about confronting the duality between the lie of heaven and the visceral truth of the grave. People want the romanticized comfort of the divine, but as a poet, my job is to look at the rot and call it what it is. The ‘Fraud’ is the false hope we use to numb ourselves to the present darkness. This collection is about stripping that hope away and forcing the reader to sit with the unflinching reality of our own decay.
Author Website: darrylhoustonsmith@gmail.com
Different Values: Cultural Shifts in America, From Covid to War in the Mideast
Karyn Elksong’s Different Values, the title of which speaks to well-worn values rather than more contemporary ones, is a wide-ranging moral travelogue through the last few bruising years, written as a series of linked reflections on what the pandemic, political fracture, technological acceleration, climate strain, gun violence, and the Israel-Gaza war reveal about the things we’re quietly choosing to prize. It moves from the intimate texture of Covid-era fear and isolation into big public questions about truth, power, and responsibility, repeatedly circling back to one steady claim: that a culture can modernize at warp speed and still be spiritually impoverished if it loses its capacity for empathy, conscience, and love.
What I kept feeling, as I read, was the author’s fierce insistence on tenderness as something practical. In the war chapter, she opens with that oddly perfect pop-culture parable: Sherlock asking a supercomputer, “What is love?” and the machine hungering for “more data” but never reaching the answer. It’s a scene that could’ve been cute or smug in another book, but here it lands like a small, cold bell. Elksong’s best pages do this often, taking a familiar headline-world object and turning it so you suddenly see the bruise underneath. I also appreciated how she lets grief stay grief. When she writes about children being swallowed by America’s gun “new normal,” the statistics aren’t abstracted into policy-speak; they sit there with a kind of terrible weight, especially when she threads Uvalde into the argument as a lived national trauma rather than a talking point.
Elksong writes in an earnest, essayistic voice that leans on quotation, reportage, and moral appeal, and the abundance of references can feel like a floodlight turned on the reader. Sometimes I wanted a little more trust in the image to do the work without being immediately explained. Yet, the book is also acutely aware of our exhaustion with overload. In the mental health sections, she draws on the language of loneliness and the strange seduction of “connection” without commitment, echoing Sherry Turkle’s warning that we keep people “in touch” while holding them at bay. That tension felt honest to me: the book is itself a product of the very era it critiques, an era where we cite and link and stack evidence because we’re terrified no one will listen unless the footnotes come marching in.
When the lens widens to nature’s retaliation and then narrows to Gaza’s “death world,” is where my emotional resistance broke. The volcanic plume rising into the stratosphere and the blunt reminder of forces that dwarf us felt like more than scene-setting; it read like a rebuke to human swagger. And when she quotes doctors and humanitarian officials describing collapsed hospitals and a society made uninhabitable, she isn’t chasing shock. She’s asking what it does to our shared soul when we learn to tolerate that kind of suffering as background noise. The conclusion she presses toward is clear: love, nonviolence, and moral imagination are not naïve luxuries but the only counterforce strong enough to interrupt revenge. I finished the book feeling sobered and strangely steadied, like someone had insisted I look directly at the worst of what we normalize and still believe in our capacity to choose differently. I’d recommend it to readers who want a reflective, faith-inflected, socially engaged meditation on recent American life, especially those who don’t mind a book that thinks out loud, cites heavily, and keeps returning to conscience as the measure of what a culture is becoming.
Pages: 344 | ISBN : 978-0692038093
The Only Way Through It Is Through It
Dying to Meet the Newcomer follows the aging residents of a tight-knit mountain community who encounter an oddly ageless newcomer that pushes them to confront grief, secrets, and their fear of growing old. What first sparked the idea for this story?
I am now seventy-three years old. A little over ten years ago, relatives, dear friends and neighbors, in their sixties, seventies, and eighties began to announce they’d been diagnosed with certain maladies. In several cases they were diseases which are quite rare. A person my husband and I had hiked with only a year-and-a-half before, was diagnosed with a disease so horrible, it is nicknamed “the suicide disease.”
Only a few years before that, people I typically only visited with once a year at the annual holiday party decided to form a neighborhood-wide women’s book club. Everyone was welcomed. Over the months and years, we revealed ourselves in deep and meaningful ways through our discussions of the books we read together. Acquaintances became dear friends. As I marvelled at the number of people I cared about who were suddenly suffering pain, disability, and death, it also struck me how much comfort we in the book club seemed to be taking from our now intimate friendships. I wanted to explore this.
It also feels to me that there are few novels which examine the complexities of aging. There are a number of excellent memoirs. And many novels address older protagonists looking back at what they did when they were young (especially their experiences during World War II). But I wanted to be a part of telling the frank, painful, and important story of aging today in America. How the only way through it is through it. And how that experience can be made bearable.
Sen is both ordinary and symbolic. How did you develop him, and is he meant to be read literally, metaphorically, or both?
The character, Sen, is meant to be read literally. The story is an account of what he did as he interacted with his new neighbors in Mountain Ridge Village. But the reader is meant to wonder who, or what, this mysterious man really is. The ending, however, is intended to be taken metaphorically. There is a broader meaning to all that has happened, and even Sen’s antagonist, Ann, understands this.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
First of all, I wanted to isolate the issue of old age. Therefore, I wrote the story so that the characters faced no issues of poverty, lack of education, racial disharmony, or prejudice based on sexuality. Characters include a gay couple, a Black couple, an Hispanic couple, and an elderly single woman. So many things help the elderly endure: humor, positivity, valued hobbies, and learning in every form. But deep social connection (even for introverts, like me) seems to be that which is most helpful in facing the inevitable pain and loss that comes with growing old.
Did writing this book change how you think about friendship or aging?
I’ve been thinking about these issues for quite some time. Writing the book reminded me that, if, as I believe, friendships are essential, then I have to make an effort. I need to keep in contact with dear friends who move away. Just “showing up” is actually a large part of making and maintaining meaningful friendships.
