PUBLICATION DATE: NOVEMBER 18, 2025
If the River Dies For a bunch of years now, I have had a YA science-fantasy novel kicking around in my head and hard drive. I have finally finished it, and the good folks at Ten16 Press have accepted it for a November 18 release. It is the story of three girls who band together on a perilous journey to save their world from ecological disaster. Sincere thanks to Dana Breunig and her team for the cover design! I have enjoyed working with everyone at Ten16 and look forward to seeing my book become real! |
PUBLICATION DATE: SEPTEMBER 30, 2025!!
The Wrong Shadow
Ten16 Press has set a release date set for The Wrong Shadow: Fox River Hauntings. This book of ghost stories—all set locally here in Northeast Wisconsin—will enter the world on September 30! There are stories based on local legends and events and also stuff that just came spilling out of the keyboard over the past few years. I’ll have more on this book as the date looms…
The Wrong Shadow
Ten16 Press has set a release date set for The Wrong Shadow: Fox River Hauntings. This book of ghost stories—all set locally here in Northeast Wisconsin—will enter the world on September 30! There are stories based on local legends and events and also stuff that just came spilling out of the keyboard over the past few years. I’ll have more on this book as the date looms…
"In all fairness, there wasn't a story included which I didn't like. Every single one: excellent. But if you're looking for feel-good happy endings... um, no. This isn't it. That's not to say the book is a downer. It's not that either. For me, this was high-caliber short story writing as short stories SHOULD be. Reminiscent of my other favorite short story writers such as River Dixon, Philip K Dick, and Robert Birkhofer who all write super intelligent, deep stories that make you think long afterward. The kind that stick with you. The kind where they don't have to explain every little detail or wrap it up at the end, but where you get to imagine a hundred different endings yourself. And THAT, to me, is the GOOD short story author. It gets in your bones." -- Tara Caribou
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the man flows into town
drags his heels down Main Street
like a stone that skips across a pond
and the woman who watches thinks
he's just a lonely sailor washed ashore
by a desperate wind...
drags his heels down Main Street
like a stone that skips across a pond
and the woman who watches thinks
he's just a lonely sailor washed ashore
by a desperate wind...
Imagine a monastery without religion, where secular monks gather throughout each day to sing... but for what?
Toward what?
With no god in common, about what?
What would their days be like?
What would the prayers sound like?
Think of this book of poems as an agnostic hymnal, a series of supplications to nobody and to nothing but vague and restless hope shouted, whispered, and groaned. It is arranged as a Book of Hours, with prayers aimed into the void for every moment of every day...
Toward what?
With no god in common, about what?
What would their days be like?
What would the prayers sound like?
Think of this book of poems as an agnostic hymnal, a series of supplications to nobody and to nothing but vague and restless hope shouted, whispered, and groaned. It is arranged as a Book of Hours, with prayers aimed into the void for every moment of every day...
Luke is an anti-hockey “smart kid” in his hockey-crazed far upstate New York hometown in 1999. A year earlier, he had happily escaped to a prestigious university downstate, only to slink back home after one disastrous year away. Embarrassed and shrinking deeper into himself, he is forced to come to terms with his hometown, his father, his professional hockey-playing older brother, and the sport of hockey. And what about the high hopes he had for his own life? Are they gone, too? In this coming-of-age comedy, everybody—a crazy Russian hockey coach, the oddball brothers who run the local newspaper, the guys at the rink, and his brother’s old girlfriend—seems to have an idea for what Luke should do next. But can Luke navigate the insanity to discover in himself what he actually needs?
Someday soon, a husband convinces his wife that the only thing that can save their marriage is for them to move to an experimental mining colony on an asteroid near Jupiter. Two things to remember. First, in the history of really bad ideas proposed by husbands to their wives over the centuries, this one is actually kind of okay. You know, there's death and pain and all because of it, but his heart (not necessarily his brain, but so be it) was in the right place. Second, no matter where you go in this solar system, there better be good Chinese food.
Hauntingly intimate and ruggedly local, Bill Gillard’s verse-novel, If a Clod Be Washed,rings the changes on a variety of themes in the life of Bell, teacher-protagonist at a Benedictine Abbey high school, his daughters, his wife, and various colleagues and students. Out of touch with the world of iPhones and FaceTime, “he … likes his letters stamped and sealed by hands and / tongues and penmanship.” One poem, “The Biologist and His Daughter,” imagines an encounter with a beloved child. “Ora et Labora” mimes the Last Judgment, and “Indifference” is a biologist’s invective against extinction. With images and allusions sufficient for the industrious reader, If a Clod Be Washed may arrest or annoy, but will certainly make one pause to consider this spiritual adventurer’s world.
—Ed Block, author of Banners of Longing: New and Selected Religious Poems and Emeritus Professor of English at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
—Ed Block, author of Banners of Longing: New and Selected Religious Poems and Emeritus Professor of English at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Poems about love and loss, living and dying, late night board games, and the kind of hunger that can be satisfied only by that little Indian place in the East Village.