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Deep Emotions
Across 104 poems, The Spine of My Soul traces a life through love, grief, illness, abuse, survival, and renewal. What led you to organize the collection into “The Good,” “The Bad,” and “The Ugly?”
I organized The Spine of My Soul into “The Good,” “The Bad,” and “The Ugly” because those sections reflect the different seasons and experiences that have shaped my life. My journey has included love, joy, and moments of beauty, but also grief, illness, abuse, fear, and the difficult realities I had to survive. Dividing the collection this way allowed me to honor each part of the journey honestly, without minimizing the painful experiences or overlooking the moments of strength, hope, and renewal.
The poem I wrote about my life stood out to me as a fitting prologue for the book. It introduces the experiences, emotions, and themes that unfold throughout the collection, giving readers a sense of where I have been and how those experiences have shaped who I am. Beginning with that poem felt natural because it offers an honest glimpse into my story before leading into “The Good,” “The Bad,” and “The Ugly.” Together, the sections represent the complexity of life—the beauty, the pain, and everything in between.
How did you approach writing about deeply personal experiences such as abuse, illness, grief, and caregiving while protecting both your emotional well-being and the integrity of the work?
Writing about my husband’s current cancer journey has been the most difficult for me. It brings up some of the hardest and most painful feelings—fear, uncertainty, sadness, and helplessness. Putting those emotions into words can be overwhelming, but writing also gives me a way to process what we’re going through and to honor his strength and our journey together.
I’ve already worked through and reprocessed most of my past traumas, so I can remember those experiences without feeling strongly emotionally attached to them anymore. They remain part of my story, but they no longer carry the same intensity. In contrast, my husband’s cancer journey is happening in the present, which makes the emotions immediate, raw, and much more difficult to write about.
I write to help myself process the deep emotions that can sometimes feel too overwhelming to express in any other way. Writing allows me to make sense of what I’m experiencing, release some of the pain, and find meaning in the difficult moments. I choose to publish my words in the hope that they might support others who are facing their own struggles and remind them that they are not alone. If sharing my journey through life can offer comfort, encouragement, or even a sense of connection to someone else, then opening my heart feels worthwhile.
The title poem describes the collection as an open door for people who believe they are fighting alone; when did you realize that reaching those readers was central to the book’s purpose?
I realized that reaching readers who feel alone was central to the book’s purpose when I reflected on the contrast between the different seasons of my life. During the “good times,” I had people all around me—celebrating with me, sharing my joy, and reminding me that I wasn’t alone. But during the “bad” and “ugly” times, I often felt isolated, as though no one else understood what I was experiencing or could see the depth of what I was carrying.
That contrast stayed with me. It made me understand how important it is for people to know that their pain does not make them isolated, even when it feels that way. The Spine of My Soul became more than a collection of my personal experiences; it became an open door—a way of saying, “You are welcome here. You are seen. You are not alone.” I never want anyone to feel alone in their journey again. By sharing the difficult truths alongside the moments of love, survival, and renewal, I hope the book helps readers recognize something of themselves in my words and find comfort, connection, and perhaps the strength to keep going.
Why did you choose “Unlearning the Script” as the final poem, and what does reclamation mean to you now that the collection is complete?
I chose “Unlearning the Script” as the final poem because it represents the ongoing process of releasing the beliefs, expectations, and survival patterns that were shaped by difficult experiences. Throughout the collection, I move through love, grief, illness, abuse, survival, and renewal. Ending with this poem felt right because it reflects the moment when I begin to understand that I am not limited to what happened to me or to the version of myself that adversity forced me to become.
Reclamation, to me, means finding myself again. It means reclaiming who I was meant to be before difficult circumstances reshaped me—before pain, fear, and survival taught me to hide parts of who I was. It is not about pretending those experiences never happened; it is about recognizing that they do not have the final say in my identity or my future. “Unlearning the Script” closes the collection with a sense of freedom and possibility. It acknowledges that healing is an ongoing process of questioning the stories I inherited, the labels placed upon me, and the narratives I created in order to survive. Now that the collection is complete, reclamation means choosing to write my own story—with honesty, compassion, and the courage to become the person I might have been had adversity not shaped me so profoundly.
Innocence and Sarcasm
How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company follows a man who, after a devastating accident, receives an experimental computer interface and accidentally downloads his Linux computer directly into his consciousness. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It’s the thing I would do. I have the photic sneeze effect that David has, and I thought, “Ok, what is the worst possible thing that could happen?” and then I made it happen. And before you ask me, yes, I would plug myself into my computer.
How do David’s extraordinary abilities change him as a person rather than simply making him more powerful?
At first, all he wanted was to rule the gaming world where he lives via his gaming console; then the upgrade/interfacing with Betsy allowed him to react with the outside world as they would with his games. Without worry of being made fun of due to his Asperger’s, giving him confidence through his newfound abilities.
Beneath its humor, the novel raises an enormous question: what would someone actually do if almost nothing were impossible for them? What interested you about exploring that idea?
Some would attempt to use the abilities for themselves and not for others, which is why I chose to explore the innocence and sarcasm of David’s life and help him create things to benefit others, which is his core persona.
The ending clearly leaves room for David, Betsy, Edith, and Harry to have more adventures. What possibilities excite you most about continuing their story?
Oh, the things they could do as a team. The Further Adventures of the Impossible 4 await, so get ready for more action and Impossible things. Albeit from the perspective of Edith and Harry.
Author Links: Barnes & Noble
What would you do if you could do anything? Talk to the animals maybe? Well I can become them. What about learning a new language or two? I download them into my brain. Or how about printing your own money? Me? I only borrowed $5,000 and went on a shopping spree and look where it landed me hey! Working for the president on above top secret missions that’s where! Now how is all this possible? Well, a single sneeze not only turned my world upside down, it turned me into a super hero. Able to gain WIFI access with a single thought, download operating manuals for any vehicle from land through sea to aircraft. all in a single thought. The possibilities are endless to me and Betsy. Who is Betsy, my other half (Literally the other half of me) my home supercomputer I ended up downloading into my skull. My name is David Vincent Gillespie, and this is a story of how I managed to bring down a multi billion dollar company with a single sneeze.
How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company
How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company by Nightdancer Slater is a fast-moving science fiction action comedy built around one wonderfully strange chain reaction. David Vincent Gillespie has a violent photic sneeze while driving, crashes into a freight train, suffers catastrophic spinal injuries, and eventually receives an experimental computer interface that helps restore his mobility. Things get considerably stranger when David plugs himself into his beloved Linux gaming computer, Betsy, and her operating system merges with his consciousness. From that point on, the novel treats the human body like editable computer hardware, giving David and Betsy an expanding collection of abilities that turn a medical experiment into a wild sci-fi adventure.
The biggest personality in the book is David himself. He narrates everything with sarcasm, wordplay, deliberate mispronunciations, inappropriate jokes, and a habit of talking directly to the reader as though he’s telling the whole story across a table. That makes this as much comic science fiction as it is an action story. Betsy is a great match for him because she gradually develops from David’s favorite computer into a genuine character and partner, capable of repairing his body, downloading skills, manipulating biological “data,” and eventually transforming living tissue into different species. The possibilities keep escalating, from night vision and instant martial arts knowledge to sonar, animal transformations, regeneration, and some extremely inventive uses of shapeshifting. The fun comes from watching David encounter each ridiculous new possibility and almost immediately find an even more ridiculous way to use it.
Once David’s abilities attract government attention, the book becomes an episodic science fiction action novel full of secret missions, criminals, terrorists, kidnappings, hidden compounds, shootouts, helicopters, underground bunkers, and increasingly bizarre escapes. His battles with Mr Bleach are especially entertaining because David approaches potentially deadly situations with the attitude of someone who’s more interested in annoying the villain than delivering a heroic speech. Later developments broaden the story considerably. Betsy gains an independent human body, David and Betsy marry, and their extraordinary twins Edith and Harry inherit abilities that make their parents look almost ordinary. By the closing chapters, the story has turned its central technological idea into an entire super-powered family dynamic, with the children downloading languages, solving seemingly impossible problems, transforming themselves, and joining their parents’ adventures.
What gives How a Sneeze Destroyed a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company its particular flavor is its refusal to keep its imagination on a leash. It’s a humorous science fiction novel, a superhero-style adventure, a technology fantasy, a crime caper, and eventually a family comedy, all filtered through David’s relentlessly mischievous narration. Ideas arrive quickly and tend to grow into bigger ones, so the story has the feel of someone enthusiastically asking, “What could happen next?” and then choosing the most chaotic answer available. Beneath all the transformations and jokes, there’s also a warm thread running through David’s relationships with Betsy, his mother, his children, and even people he meets through his missions. The ending deliberately leaves their strange family adventure open for more, closing with a promise that there’s more trouble, technology, transformation, and comic science fiction madness still to come.
Pages: 106 | ISBN : 9798260307014
Silence Was My First Language
Silence Was My First Language is a bruising and deeply personal memoir about a boy who learns silence as a survival instinct, then spends much of his adult life trying to unlearn it. Author Rich Dunning begins in the Bronx, in a childhood marked by poverty, neglect, violence, hunger, and the terror of a stepfather whose presence turns home into a place of watchfulness rather than refuge. The book follows him through displacement, homelessness, young love, ambition, marriage, fatherhood, addiction, relapse, treatment, and finally the humbling work of recovery. What emerges is not a simple story of overcoming, but a hard-earned account of how trauma travels through the body, through families, through choices, and how healing often begins long after a person appears to have escaped.
I found the book most powerful when it lingered on the small objects that carry enormous emotional weight. The roaches and rats in the Bronx basement, the fire escape that becomes a child’s watchtower, the blue Nike sneakers hidden in the shed, the sugarcane fields in the Dominican Republic, and the cold procedural dignity of AA all feel like more than scenes. They become markers of a soul trying to preserve itself. Dunning writes with an almost physical intensity, and at his best, his prose has the pressure of memory rather than mere recollection. The sentences often feel carved out of dread, shame, and longing. This is a book about a life in which danger rarely announced itself gently, so the language often arrives with the same force.
Dunning doesn’t let himself off easily, and that gives the book its moral weight. He understands that the abused child can grow into a wounded man who wounds others, and he writes into that terrible inheritance without hiding behind it. His relationship with Gina, his hunger for a father, his reverence for the people who offered him structure, especially Chris, and his painful awareness of what addiction cost his family give the later sections their complexity. I was moved by the way the book turns from fear toward accountability. The ideas in the book ask whether love can survive damage, whether discipline can become another mask, whether faith means surrender or defeat, and whether a person can rebuild a life without pretending the wreckage was useful.
The final chapters are raw, chastened, and quietly spiritual, grounded less in triumph than in surrender, repetition, and the courage to stay present. This is a painful book, but not a hopeless one. Its concluding strength lies in the author’s willingness to tell the truth about himself as fiercely as he tells the truth about what was done to him. I’d recommend it to readers drawn to candid memoirs of childhood trauma, addiction, family rupture, and recovery, especially those who value emotionally intense writing that wrestles with responsibility, faith, masculinity, and the long, uneven labor of becoming whole.
Pages: 388
In The Mountain
In the Mountain by Dottie Lee is a disaster-survival novel about a group of workers trapped inside a secretive mountain facility after tremors turn their workplace into a tomb of broken glass, dust, fire, and darkness. Paul, Trace, Pearl, April, Jason, Joseph, Frankie, and others must become a makeshift family as they search for water, food, light, courage, and eventually a way back to the world. What begins as workplace chatter and suspicion becomes a long ordeal of planning, praying, grieving, improvising, and refusing to be swallowed by the mountain.
I was most drawn to the book’s insistence that survival is not one grand heroic act but a hundred small, unglamorous decisions: sharing water, marking rocks, making lists, choosing who walks first, talking someone through panic. The novel has a practical, almost tactile imagination. It cares about bags, bottles, ladders, coats, fire, pain, cold, and the blunt arithmetic of supplies. That concreteness gives the story its grit; the mountain never feels symbolic only, it feels heavy, mineral, indifferent.
The emotional center, for me, is the group’s transformation from coworkers and near-strangers into what the book later calls a “Dislocated Family.” Some dialogue is emphatic, and the pacing sometimes lingers over logistics, but that same persistence creates a steady drumbeat of endurance. I admired how the book allows fear, faith, irritation, humor, and tenderness to coexist. Nobody becomes polished by catastrophe; they become more visibly themselves, which is better.
The target audience is readers who enjoy survival fiction, disaster fiction, adventure, found-family stories, and suspense. Readers who liked the problem-solving stamina of Andy Weir’s The Martian may appreciate this book’s focus on ingenuity under pressure, though Lee’s novel is warmer, more communal, and less sleekly scientific. A mountain collapses in this book, but what remains standing is the stubborn architecture of human care.
Pages: 225 | ASIN : B0GTBZTKFS
Moondust: A Collection of Poems
In Moondust, author Kahlani B. Steele gathers a wide-ranging collection of poems that move from nature’s intimate theatre to childhood memory, grief, love, mental anguish, self-reflection, and finally the strange tenderness of people and places. The book begins with trees, birds, weather, moonlight, and water, then slowly turns inward, letting the natural world become a language for loneliness, desire, inheritance, and survival. I felt the collection’s emotional center most strongly in pieces like “Photograph of Pop,” “Trigger,” “The House of Me,” and “Mabel,” where ordinary images, a fishing line, a daisy, a cracked body-as-house, a lipstick mark on a child’s cheek, carry more ache than any grand declaration could.
Steele notices the world with a patient, almost devotional eye: the old tackle box, the mud on gumboots, the willy wagtail singing before rain, the park bench left alone after the stars depart. The poems are often at their best when they trust those concrete details to do the emotional work. There’s a warmth in the childhood poems that stayed with me, especially the quiet companionship with Pop, because the restraint makes the love feel authentic. I also liked how the book keeps returning to nature without making nature merely pretty. It consoles, yes, but it also bites, drenches, burns, withholds, and witnesses.
Steele’s writing is lush, and sometimes the collection occasionally leans into ornate metaphor. Still, I found that excess part of the book’s sincerity. These poems don’t pretend to be cool or detached. They ache openly. The ideas are familiar in the deepest human sense: grief, memory, heartbreak, aging, disconnection, the need to return to something elemental, but Steele gives them a distinctly tactile shape. Pain becomes frostbite, the body becomes a damaged house, memory becomes a locked room, and loneliness sits like a bench under thinning light.
I finished Moondust feeling that I’d been walking beside someone who pays close attention because attention itself is a form of care. It’s an earnest, textured, emotionally generous collection. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy accessible contemporary poetry with a reflective heart, especially those drawn to nature writing, family memory, grief, and poems that speak plainly but still reach for beauty.
Pages: 110 | ASIN : B0GRHSKLK3
After the Storms: From Red Dirt to Redemption
After the Storms is a memoir of survival shaped by faith: an Oklahoma childhood marked by tornadoes, poverty, alcoholism, and a crowded, fiercely loving family gives way to military service, war, policing, grief, near-fatal injury, and, finally, a hard-won return to grace. What stayed with me most is the book’s sense that a life can be battered nearly beyond recognition and still remain, somehow, redeemable. The early pages are especially vivid. The green tornado sky over Lawton, the humiliating “free lunch” moment at school, the father’s ruinous drinking after Ronnie’s death, the family’s desperate drives to Fort Supply, all of it builds a world that feels raw, wind-burned, and painfully lived in. Later chapters widen the scope into Desert Storm, law enforcement, devastating personal loss, a spiritual collapse, and the eventual reorientation of the narrator’s life around faith rather than sheer endurance.
I admired the book’s emotional directness. Again and again, the memoir finds its deepest strength not in spectacle but in particularity: a teacher returning fifteen cents and, in a different scene, another teacher speaking a sentence of life into a shamed child; a nameless family in an RV turning up on a blistering Sunday like mercy made practical; a father walking into church once, dressed in his best, only to be crushed by the cruelty of people who should’ve known better. Those moments have real sting because they’re told with a survivor’s memory for texture and humiliation. I also found the family portraits unexpectedly moving. The siblings are drawn not as a blur of relatives but as distinct presences, half guardian angels and half co-authors of the narrator’s endurance. Even the memoir’s humor, the yellow spray-paint disaster, the BB gun revenge, the little absurdities of childhood, matters because it keeps the suffering from flattening the book into a single note.
At its best, the prose has a bruised lyricism that suits the material beautifully. The recurring language of storms, scouts, foundations, shields, and watchfulness gives the memoir a strong internal music, and there are passages where that rhetoric genuinely lands. I sometimes wanted fewer lines that explain the meaning of an event when the event itself has already done the work. The ideas in the book are also clear: faith is the throughline, Christ the unshakable foundation, redemption the final grammar of suffering. Readers who share that worldview will likely feel nourished by its certainty. I was moved by it because the conviction is plainly earned. The later turn, where military discipline, police work, grief, and fatherhood all get folded back into a Gospel-centered identity, isn’t subtle, but it is sincere, and sincerity counts for a lot in a memoir like this.
After the Storms is an undeniably heartfelt memoir. It reads like the testimony of someone who has spent a lifetime learning how pain gets handed down, how love interrupts that inheritance, and how faith, for him, became not an ornament but a structure strong enough to live inside. I’d recommend it especially to readers who are drawn to faith-based memoirs, stories of family endurance, military and law-enforcement life, and narratives of recovery that refuse cynicism without denying damage.
Whisper (Book One)
In Whisper (Book One), Britney grows up in a small cottage where her father’s rage rules the weather, and her mother’s only shield is a soft, urgent refrain, “Whisper.” Before Britney ever leaves home, she has a secret refuge in the woods, a hiding place where she keeps meeting the same sharp-eyed black-and-tan puppy, the first creature she feels at ease around. So when Ma finally pushes Britney onto the road with a parcel of food and one instruction, keep walking, the puppy feels like a thread she’s already been holding, tugging her toward the care of Grandma Ruby and her son Lucas, a village carpenter whose steadiness begins to re-teach Britney what safety even is.
What hit me first was the book’s emotional temperature: it starts cold, boots on floorboards, hunger, flinching, and then, page by page, it warms. I kept noticing how the author uses small domestic details (soup by the fire, a rocking chair, a gift left within reach) as proof-of-kindness rather than decoration. Britney’s limited early vocabulary isn’t a gimmick; it’s part of the story’s bruise-realism, and watching her language return as trust returns felt quietly triumphant, like seeing color seep back into a washed-out photograph.
My other big reaction was how central Whisper is, not as a magical fix, but as a vigilant, bodily presence: heartbeat, warmth, barking at the wrong person, standing guard when humans can’t. The dog becomes Britney’s external courage, the part of her that can snarl when she can’t. And when the past finally lumbers back into the village in a “pleasant” voice Britney recognizes anyway, the tension is the good kind, tight as twine, because the book refuses to pretend that fear evaporates just because years have passed.
Whisper is best for middle-grade readers who can handle heavy themes with a hopeful landing, especially kids drawn to middle-grade historical fiction, family drama, survival adventure, and animal companion stories. If your shelf has space for the tender grit of Kate DiCamillo, or the heart-healing dog-thread of Because of Winn-Dixie, this one belongs nearby. And when the book reaches its final turn toward chosen family and hard-won forgiveness, it earns it with work, not wishful thinking.
Pages: 75 | ASIN : B0D3LSF7MR
