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Places of Origin
Rebecca Elegant’s Places of Origin is a thoughtful and personal poetry collection about the experiences that shape us, the people who leave their marks on our lives, and the unexpected ways we find our footing in an uncertain world. Drawing from family relationships, friendships, motherhood, nature, and the upheaval of the pandemic, Elegant explores what it means to keep growing through change. In her introduction, she describes how her father’s habit of sitting quietly with his thoughts each morning became her own ritual, eventually giving rise to these poems. That sense of quiet reflection runs throughout the collection. Many of the poems grow out of seemingly ordinary experiences, whether it’s a morning run, a conversation with a friend, or an observation about the natural world. Elegant has a gift for recognizing the emotional significance of these moments and connecting them to larger questions about love, loss, resilience, and belonging. There’s a genuine curiosity behind her writing, a desire to understand how we become the people we are and how our connections to others help us along the way.
Nature plays a central role in Places of Origin, providing both beautiful imagery and a way of making sense of human experience. Trees, flowers, birds, oceans, and changing seasons appear throughout the collection, often reflecting the emotional lives of the people Elegant writes about. In “A Credo,” she considers how giant sequoia seeds need intense heat to open, using that natural process to explore transformation and the possibility of growth through hardship. “Unlikely Places” similarly examines how life persists in unexpected circumstances, connecting plants growing in difficult environments with the experiences of families navigating the pandemic. These connections feel especially meaningful because Elegant grounds them in recognizable details. Her observations about the natural world carry a sense of wonder, and her recurring attention to cycles of growth, destruction, and renewal gives the collection a reassuring continuity. The photographs by Laila Rezai, whose collaboration helped inspire the book, also contribute to its relationship with the physical world.
Some of the collection’s most affecting poems focus on relationships and the complicated emotions that accompany loving other people. Elegant writes about her children, husband, mother, sister, and friends with an openness that makes these poems feel like conversations we’ve been invited to overhear. “Family Photo” captures the distance between what a family photograph shows and the complicated reality of the people gathered within it. “Annotation” uses the experience of reading and the image of a daughter swimming farther from her mother to explore the changing relationship between generations. There’s tenderness in these pieces, along with an awareness that loving someone often involves accepting change. Elegant also brings a welcome touch of humor to her observations. In “Slave To Stuff,” a family camping trip becomes an amusing examination of how much we carry with us, both physically and emotionally. These lighter moments complement the collection’s more contemplative passages and give the writing a distinctly human quality.
What makes Places of Origin especially engaging is Elegant’s ability to move between intimate personal experiences and shared concerns without losing her conversational voice. Poems addressing wildfires, gun violence, isolation, and collective grief sit alongside celebrations of dancing, friendship, laughter, and everyday beauty. Her language is generally accessible, and her frequent use of questions invites readers to consider their own experiences alongside hers. At times, she states a poem’s central idea quite explicitly, giving certain pieces the feeling of a personal meditation or a heartfelt conversation. That directness is an important part of the collection’s character. These are poems written by someone who pays attention to the world and wants to share what she’s discovered. Throughout the book, Elegant returns to the idea that our lives are constantly changing, shaped by the places we inhabit, the people we love, and the experiences we carry forward. Places of Origin is a warm, compassionate collection that encourages readers to notice the extraordinary emotional richness of ordinary life and appreciate the connections that help us find our place in it.
Pages: 84 | ASIN : B0HM5C2PQR
Identities and Experiences
I Was, Am, Will Be is a collection of poetry, prose, dramatic pieces, letters, and visual art that reflects on identity, loss, love, race, mental health, family, and the meaning of creative expression. Your work draws from Black literary traditions, hip-hop, pop culture, teaching, and personal experience. How do these influences interact in your creative voice?
Imagine a nice-looking sponge, absorbing every nutrient and vitamin from each food morsel touched. The influences gained throughout the human experience are similar in that we absorb the influences from the world on a daily basis. In my case, I grew up in Oakland, and I don’t leave that voice at the door when I write. Langston Hughes is a major influence, especially the way he brings music into language. Then there’s Too Short, Keak da Sneak, E-40, and the cadence and humor of Bay Area hip-hop. Albert Camus gets me thinking about purpose, and what we do with the life we’ve been given. I like letting all of that sit together, even when it seems like an odd combination.
Spoken-Word, or performance poetry, helped me figure out what that mixture sounded like out loud. I was on the poetry slam team at Cal State Long Beach and later spent a lot of time competing around the Bay. You learn a lot about a line when you have to stand in front of strangers and say it. I brought that attention to sound into Broken Pencils, even though it’s a novel. Studying in Greece with George Crane also taught me to cut words I didn’t need. I still get attached to a line that probably needs to go.
As an English teacher in Oakland by day, I’m always thinking about how to make writing matter to somebody who didn’t ask to read it. I ask students to connect what we’re reading to their own identities and experiences. That keeps me thinking about the person on the other side of the page. Hosting my bi-weekly Get-Hype Open-Mic series at Discover Community Cafe in West Oakland keeps me listening, too. There are so many ways to tell a story, and I get to hear people finding theirs.
Now I’m carrying that experimentation into music and film for I Was, Am, Will Be, including the short film Affirmations (Why Write). A beat changes how I deliver a poem. A pause, an image, even the smallest sound bite, can hold something I might otherwise explain in another line. I’m still learning those forms, so give me grace. I’m enjoying being a beginner at something again.
Your writing moves quickly between humor, vulnerability, cultural commentary, and grief. How do you decide when humor belongs in an emotionally difficult piece?
Humor, jokes, and playing the dozens are woven into nearly everything I write. Comedy is also one of the ways I cope. I often make a joke before I’m ready to say what’s actually bothering me. Sometimes it helps me get through the moment, yet sometimes I’m avoiding something. So when humor shows up in my writing, I pay attention to what the character is doing with it. In “Good Sunday,” Jonah moves through a day that can look pretty carefree from the outside, but his past keeps interrupting him. He makes witty observations, including about people dealing with some of the same emotional stress he carries. The joke can be funny and still show how uncomfortable he is with himself.
Grief has strange timing. You can be laughing and then remember somebody who should be there laughing with you. That feels close to life as I know it. I don’t want every difficult piece to announce its seriousness from the first line and stay there. When I revise, I ask whether the humor helps us understand Jonah or keeps us too far away from what he’s feeling. If I’ve let a joke cover up something the reader needs to sit with, I give that feeling more room.
What do you hope readers who have experienced trauma, grief, or mental-health struggles see in your work?
I hope that readers take away a better sense of hope and understanding that we are beyond our pain. Our lives are not defined by damage. In spite of loss, we still have a future. I started writing poetry after losing my best friend in a car accident when I was thirteen. I didn’t have the language for everything I was feeling, and writing gave me somewhere to put it. I’ve also had to work through the loss of my father and my own struggles with bipolar disorder. I’ve written about purpose because there have been times when I had a hard time finding my own.
Broken Pencils took fifteen years to reach publication. There were rejections, long stretches when I put the manuscript away, and times when grief made it difficult to care about the dream. Looking back, I’m grateful I returned to it. In I Was, Am, Will Be, Jonah is twenty-five and traveling through Europe, carrying questions about identity, love, and loss into unfamiliar places. That grew out of my own time abroad. Distance can change your perspective, but the past still comes with you.
I’m proud of the books and the work I’m doing now, and I still have days when taking care of myself has to come first. Therapy and the people close to me have helped me get here. I hope somebody reading can feel less ashamed of needing that support, or feel that their own story is worth telling. We are what remains from damage, and what remains still deserves a chance.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Leaving behind the familiar confines of America, Jonah embarks on a three-month journey through Spain, Greece, France, and Amsterdam. As Jonah immerses himself in the rich European landscapes and cultures, will he confront the ghosts of his past or succumb to the uncertainties of his future?
Art Is For The Creator
All the Things I Want to Tell You transforms the emotional intensity of adolescence into poetry that explores what it means to feel deeply in a complicated world. What inspired you to begin writing poetry, and how did that passion develop into this collection?
In all honesty, I have no idea why I began writing poetry. I pretty much just sat down at my dining room table one day and started a journal entry that somehow became a poem. After that, I continued writing because I had a few people tell me that my poetry was good and I realized I enjoyed writing it. It became a collection by accident, really. My publisher, Nick, happens to be a long-time friend of the family, so when my mom mentioned to him that I’d begun writing, he asked to see it and I sent some stuff over. He liked it a lot and asked if I’d be willing to work with him to publish my writing and of course I said yes, and here we are!
What have you learned about accepting contradictions within yourself, such as feeling confident and uncertain at the same time?
I’ve learned that it isn’t necessarily bad to feel multiple or even opposing feelings toward someone or something. Emotions are complex and often intense, and that’s okay; they’re part of what makes us human. Some of us feel things more deeply than others, or at least are able to better show or communicate their feelings, but I think I can safely assume we’ve all had mixed emotions about something at one time or another. Labeling feelings as either good or bad doesn’t get me anywhere. Mostly I just try to be aware of when I’m feeling negatively about an emotion and do my best not to feel guilty or think of my emotions as wrong in any way. It’s hard, but I’m getting better at it.
How can poetry and other creative outlets help encourage empathy and more open conversations about mental health?
If people choose to share their poetry or other art, it can be helpful for others to see that they aren’t alone in their struggles. Often, when people have depression or other mental illnesses, they feel like they are the only ones experiencing that type of hardship and it gets very isolating. Just being able to see themselves in someone else can be helpful. Art is also a great way to help people who don’t have mental health issues understand what it’s like for those who do. There have been multiple times when I’ve shown a poem to one of my parents and they’ve been like wow, I had no idea that was true for you or that was what you were dealing with and they’ve been better able to support me because of the conversations my poetry has started.
What advice would you give teenagers who want to express themselves creatively but feel hesitant about sharing their work?
First of all, you don’t have to share anything! Art is for the creator, not the audience, and you should never be pressured into showing off something that you don’t feel comfortable sharing. If you do want to show someone, start with someone you know will react well to it. For me, that was my mom and a close friend. They were both people that I had a lot of deep conversations with, and as a result, they already knew me very well. I knew that if they liked my writing, they wouldn’t be shy about complimenting it, and if they didn’t, that they would say so kindly. From there, I slowly expanded that circle of people I shared my work with until I’d had enough people tell me that my writing was good that I could mostly ignore the people who inevitably disagreed. Also keep in mind that it is okay if someone doesn’t like your art—not everyone will, and that’s okay. Again, your art should be made because you enjoyed creating it, not because you wanted others to like it.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
My Heritage, My Pride
My Heritage, My Pride by Manmohan Sadana is a thoughtful and personal collection of spiritual poetry, cultural essays, historical reflections, and short fiction celebrating India’s extraordinary religious and literary heritage. Drawing from Hindu mythology, Sikh history, Sufi mysticism, and centuries of philosophical thought, Sadana explores the beliefs and traditions that have shaped generations. The book moves comfortably between ancient scriptures and contemporary life, examining how timeless teachings can still guide our understanding of leadership, relationships, compassion, and personal responsibility. Its combination of Indian spiritual literature, mythology, and cultural heritage makes for an engaging exploration of faith and identity. Throughout the collection, Sadana’s admiration for his cultural roots is unmistakable, and his enthusiasm encourages readers to consider how inherited wisdom continues to influence everyday decisions. There’s a genuine sense of affection running through these pages, giving the book the warmth of someone sharing stories and ideas that have held special meaning throughout his life.
Essays about Guru Nanak’s companion Bhai Mardana, the mystical poetry of Bulleh Shah, and the spiritual traditions of Kashmir offer fascinating perspectives on devotion, equality, and religious harmony. His discussion of Christian carols, Sikh Shabad Kirtan, and Sufi ghazals is particularly interesting, showing how music creates emotional connections across different faiths. Hindu mythology also occupies a central place, with explorations of Lord Rama, Lord Jagannath, Goddess Siddhidatri, and the philosophical significance of Shiva’s Tandav. Sadana often connects these traditions to modern concerns, including ethical leadership, environmental responsibility, and social justice. His reflections on lessons from the Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita in corporate settings are an especially distinctive touch. These connections give the book a practical dimension, inviting readers to recognize the continuing relevance of ancient Indian philosophy in today’s world.
Sadana’s spiritual poetry frequently uses vivid natural imagery, rhythmic language, and an almost prayerful sense of wonder. Pieces such as “Baba Buddha,” “The 13th Spiral,” and “When the Preserver Walked Through Time” revisit familiar spiritual and mythological figures through questions of courage, duty, mortality, and moral choice. His portrayals of characters from the Mahabharata, including Duryodhan, Yuyutsu, Urvi, and Hidimbi, encourage readers to consider different emotional and ethical perspectives within these enduring narratives. The collection also includes intimate writing about family, love, and belonging. “Welcome Rachel Bani” is especially tender, celebrating a newborn child while reflecting on the inheritance of traditions across generations and continents. Meanwhile, the story “Sargi” brings cultural customs into the intimate world of marriage and companionship. Sadana’s style is expressive and earnest, sometimes richly embellished, with recurring images of light, rivers, flowers, and sacred music creating a recognizable poetic voice.
What makes My Heritage, My Pride memorable is its consistent belief that cultural heritage becomes meaningful through the values people carry into their lives. Across its spiritual essays, historical discussions, mythology-inspired poetry, and contemporary storytelling, Sadana returns to compassion, humility, integrity, and the importance of respecting different religious traditions. His treatment of Sikhism, Hindu philosophy, and Sufi spirituality reveals a sincere interest in the common human desire for understanding and connection. Readers interested in Indian mythology books, South Asian cultural history, spiritual poetry collections, and religious philosophy will find plenty to appreciate here. The book’s wide-ranging structure also makes it suitable for reading a chapter at a time, allowing individual subjects and reflections to settle before moving to the next. Above all, Sadana’s collection feels like an invitation to celebrate where we come from, reflect on what our traditions teach us, and discover how the wisdom of earlier generations can remain a living part of the present.
Pages: 256 | ASIN : B0HJJL9YKT
All The Things I Want To Tell You: A Window Into the Life of an American High Schooler Through Poetry
C.J. Canino’s All the Things I Want to Tell You is a poetry and prose collection about growing up with a busy mind, strong feelings, and a demanding set of expectations for yourself. Written during her teenage years, it brings together reflections on friendship, first love, family, faith, and mental health, alongside responses to the dangers and injustices young people see around them. What drew me in was the tension between understanding yourself and knowing how to live with that understanding. Canino’s speakers can recognize their own patterns and still struggle to change them. They want closeness, worry about being too much, and question whether their achievements make them worthy of affection. That mix gives the collection an intimate, sometimes uncomfortable honesty. You’re reading someone trying to find words precise enough to explain feelings that keep shifting.
Canino has a knack for giving emotions bodies, personalities, and competing agendas. Fear, Joy, Sadness, and Love become creatures whose behavior makes inner conflict easier to picture. Oceans, fire, flowers, and broken glass also recur throughout the collection, creating connections between poems about very different experiences. I especially appreciated the smaller, everyday observations: remembering something a loved one wanted in a shop, noticing the comfort of a familiar sweatshirt, or finding reassurance in someone’s touch. Those details give the writing texture and make its affection feel personal. The poems move between loose rhyme and conversational free verse, often using short lines to slow down a thought or emphasize a question. There’s a directness to the voice that makes it easy to follow, even when the emotions being explored are complicated.
The collection’s intensity is both a strength and a source of repetition. Images of burning, breaking, and drowning appear frequently, and some longer poems explain feelings that their strongest images have already communicated. I found the writing most effective when Canino trusted a concrete detail or allowed a contradiction to stand without resolving it. A little more restraint in those passages would give individual lines more room to register. The prose adds a welcome change of pace and develops the relationship between religious belief, queer identity, and the desire to be loved. The closing interview and glimpses of early drafts are worthwhile additions, too. They let you see how writing fits into Canino’s life and how she uses it to examine her reactions. That context makes the book feel like an invitation to take young people’s creative work seriously.
I recommend All the Things I Want to Tell You to older teens and young adults who enjoy personal, emotionally direct poetry, particularly readers familiar with perfectionism, intense friendships, or questions about faith and sexuality. Parents and educators willing to listen closely to a teenager’s perspective could also find a lot to consider here. The collection includes explicit depictions of suicide, self-harm, sexual violence, and school shootings, so its emotional weight matters when choosing a reading audience. Alongside that distress, there’s considerable tenderness: gratitude for friends, love for family, attention to animals, and pleasure in small moments. Canino’s willingness to put all those feelings on the page is the book’s strongest quality. It gives readers plenty to recognize, question, and talk about.
Pages: 224 | ASIN : B0HLJFZCGT
Unresolved Conflicts
Love Letters & Disillusion / Cartas de Amor y Desilusión explores love after its illusions have faded, revealing what heartbreak can teach about forgiveness, memory, faith, and knowing when to let go. At what point did you recognize that these individual poems were collectively telling a larger story about your life?
The letters were written over many years. Writing has always been one of my love languages. If I love and care about someone, chances are they will eventually receive a poem or letter from me. Over time, I accumulated quite a few of these expressions of affection, but I also recognized that love wasn’t always sweetness and tenderness.
When the idea came to me to gather my love letters into a collection, I realized that I couldn’t tell the whole story without exploring disillusionment. I already had poems about heartbreak and disappointment, but I deliberately revisited certain memories to capture those experiences more fully. I even wrote a response to a poem that had once been written for me.
Only when I had captured both the tenderness and the disillusionment did I feel the collection was complete. Duality has always been central to how I understand love and life.
The collection addresses family members, friends, colleagues, lovers, and your younger self. What interested you about examining love across so many different kinds of relationships?
Love, much like life, is not linear, although we sometimes wish it were. It evolves, diminishes, grows, and transforms alongside us. The way we experience love as children is not necessarily how we understand it as adults, and the love we share with family differs from what we experience through friendship, romance, or even our relationship with ourselves.
I wanted to explore these different expressions of love because each has taught me something about who I am and who I’ve become. To capture that honestly, I had to revisit the people and experiences that shaped my understanding of love throughout my life.
Love is one of life’s greatest teachers. The people we encounter can embody its many forms, but ultimately, we ourselves are also embodiments of love.
What have you learned about yourself through revisiting relationships that once felt very different from the way you understand them now?
I’ve learned that you cannot change another person; ultimately, you can only change yourself. If you cannot accept someone for who they are, perhaps you shouldn’t be with them. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge one another to grow, but when our fundamental values are incompatible, forcing the relationship will only create more suffering. Anything that’s forced is bound to break.
I’ve also come to see romantic relationships as two people’s traumas trying to coexist, sometimes even trying to dance with one another. Each person brings their own wounds, fears, experiences, and unresolved conflicts into the relationship. The challenge is learning how to navigate those internal struggles while confronting the external challenges of loving another person.
In many ways, romantic love becomes an attempt to find harmony between two people who are still learning how to find peace within themselves.
What do you hope bilingual readers experience as they move between the English and Spanish versions?
Above all, I hope they experience connection. Whether someone reads my work in English or Spanish, my intention remains the same: to reach another person through words. Readers don’t have to agree with everything I write, but if they recognize themselves in even one poem, then I feel I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.
For bilingual readers, I hope there’s an additional layer of appreciation in experiencing how the same poem can evoke different emotions depending on the language. Although the meaning may remain consistent, the rhythm, musicality, and emotional weight of certain words can change considerably between English and Spanish. One version might resonate more deeply with a reader than the other.
Translation has always been an interesting creative challenge for me because some expressions simply don’t carry the same beauty or emotional force when translated literally. A direct translation might preserve the meaning but diminish the poetry.
For me, the process becomes a balancing act between remaining faithful to the original message and preserving the musicality and emotional depth of the work. Ultimately, I want both languages to offer readers an authentic poetic experience.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Amazon
Este segundo libro continúa el recorrido iniciado en su obra anterior, nacida desde la apertura y la creencia, y avanza hacia una voz más atenta al discernimiento y al autodominio. Lejos de idealizar el amor o dramatizar la pérdida, Garcia lo aborda como un proceso vivido, uno que enseña, templa y deja huella.
En su obra, el bilingüismo no es decorativo sino esencial. El inglés permite distancia y contemplación; el español sostiene la intimidad, el cuerpo y la memoria afectiva. Ambas lenguas conforman una sola voz que negocia la vulnerabilidad sin rendirse y la ternura sin ilusiones.
Love Letters & Disillusion / Cartas de Amor y Desilusión se escribe desde el después, después de que la creencia ha sido puesta a prueba y la claridad se ha asentado. No es un rechazo del amor, sino un reconocimiento de su costo y de aquello que aún vale la pena conservar.
I Did Not Survive. I Just Refused To Stop.
I Did Not Survive. I Just Refused To Stop. is a collection of essays, poems, brief scenes, and observations about the demands placed on women, especially within the Desi Muslim communities the author knows. Writing as MissFit, the author draws on her own experiences and stories entrusted to her by other women. The book moves through five parts, from “The Cage” to “The Flight,” tracing a shift from social scrutiny and private distress toward a life shaped by personal choice. Its subjects range from marriage proposals and career expectations to religious practice, consumer habits, desire, and the freedom to take pleasure in ordinary things.
MissFit’s humor is sharpest when she lets a scene carry the argument. In one memorable account, strangers help a cyclist gather vegetables spilled across a Dubai street, only to hear him complain, “Please keep tomatoes separate.” The encounter becomes a compact portrait of how readily generosity can be met with another demand. Elsewhere, the author questions why a woman’s title changes with marriage, why a family’s preferred profession can outweigh a child’s interests, and how luxury goods acquire authority over individual taste. Her jokes and lists give these familiar pressures a recognizable voice. They also establish the social world from which the book’s more painful accounts emerge.
As the collection progresses, its wit gives way to writing about abuse, isolation, panic, and a moment of suicidal crisis. These passages ask the reader to sit with the consequences of silence enforced in the name of family reputation. The later sections examine faith with the same questioning attention MissFit brings to social custom. She recalls seeking an answer during a visit to Mecca and finding space for grief and argument in a quiet street. The book’s range is ambitious, and some short pieces make their point so quickly that a reader may wish for more of the detail found in its longer scenes. At its best, the movement between anecdote and verse gives the collection a rhythm that feels close to thought itself: a joke, a memory, a question that won’t go away.
The final part turns toward nature, play, kindness, and the act of writing. MissFit notices birds, rain, shells, tea, and the pleasure of being present; when someone asks whether she photographed a sunset, she answers, “I was there.” That small exchange captures the attention she wants to reclaim for herself. The closing pages don’t erase the injuries described earlier. They show a person choosing how to spend a day, what to value, and how to speak in her own voice. I Did Not Survive. I Just Refused To Stop. is most affecting when its defiance stays grounded in such particulars. Its lasting image is of a writer who has kept her capacity for wonder alongside her anger.
Pages: 245 | ASIN : B0H5CVNDNF
Challenging Myself and Readers
Disconnected is a genre-blending collection of speculative stories, surreal sketches, poems, and philosophical reflections exploring identity, loneliness, belief, technology, political power, and the search for belonging. What inspired you to create this collection?
There were two main sources of inspiration. Firstly, I had just joined a band with a couple of mates. I wanted to write lyrics for songs; taking most of my inspiration from John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band and Imagine Album’s. This is the main reason for the more political poems and some of the more intimate poems. Why I wanted to write lyrics, I’m still not sure. It was a compulsion of sorts. Some unknown force was driving me to write. Secondly, Kafka and Pessoa. When I first discovered Franz Kafka and Fernando Pessoa as writers, they blew my mind. These two persons were effectively nobodies in their time but they had such great insight into society through social observation. I found instant relatability and attraction in their work; I wanted to emulate it. From these two sources of inspiration, I set out to challenge myself into exploring society through various angles, asking questions about everything and allowing the reader to think for themselves about the answers.
Why is loneliness such a persistent concern throughout the collection?
I don’t think It was ever the intention to write about Loneliness, it just happened as a result of what I was trying to achieve. I wanted to question society from various angles. This often meant writing characters as outsiders who were able to question the society they were placed in. Although it can also be said, I am a lonely individual. I am sad and lonely, Like Kafka and Like Pessoa, this came through in my work whether I intended it or not.
How important are recurring characters and ideas to the architecture of Disconnected?
I would argue they make up the backbone of Disconnected. It might be a collection of fragmented stories, poems and dreams but I do feel It is one book. Disconnected not unconnected. That is there is a wholeness to it. Like most of the characters being Disconnected from the worlds around them as outsiders. The book is itself disconnected from itself. This is first established in From Emit to Time, which sets up the idea that things might not necessarily be in order. I wanted to use this broken/disconnected structure to emphasize the broken nature of the characters’ minds and their disconnect from society in a more unique manner.
What are you working on now, and how might it build on the ideas explored in this collection?
Since writing Disconnected, I have completed a sequel, Heads & Tales, which will also be published with Atmosphere Press on October 20th, 2026. The Sequel explores the same themes as Disconnected but in a more grounded manner. It’s darker and explores the political systems and stages that cause the very disconnect in Disconnected through the life of Charlie Braeburn.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Facebook
This anthology of short stories, nonsense poetry, and surreal social critiques explores isolation, identity, and the tyranny of time in worlds both magical and unsettling. Meet Chronos, the dictator of time, whose rigid ideology is challenged only by the imagination. Follow Mr. Preston, a man who literally becomes mist; Connor, a musician driven to madness by forces beyond control; and Charlie Braeburn, whose desperate search for connection transforms him forever.
From a dystopian collective consciousness to a city of discarded elders, these tales skew reality with biting humor, melancholy, and uncanny twists. Disconnected is a celebration of dreams, rebellion, and the strange poetry of human existence—a collection that reminds us that sometimes the only escape from the circus of life is through stories themselves.
