Walls and Bridges

A lovely treasure trove created by a group of professional artists and writers in Southern New England. All of the tales and images center around the concepts of what walls and bridges have represented in their lives.

They enclose and isolate us, but also allow access to worlds beyond our own, they constrain and free us.

Walls & Bridges contains exquisite writing from many genres, from memoir to sci-fi, humor to the paranormal, poetry to tragedy. There are sumptuous black and white photographs and sketches to complement the expert writing.

"Shut Away Behind Convent Walls" by E. Bell Carroll, "Walled Away" by J.N. Day, "The Bridge to Nowhere" and "Nicki" by Nancy Driggs, "The Bridge" by Jessica Grota, "Ninety-five Miles in Pleasantburg" by Amy Machado, "Mr. Bobo" and "Tiny Murders" by Sally Sanford, "Charity-1912" by Barbara Moore, "The Prodigal Son" by Gil Paradis, "My Journey Home" by Ramona Perham, "Crossing Guards" by Kristi Petersen Schoonover, "The Aftertaste" by Richard Alan Scott, "From the Bridge to the Wall" by John Michael Skaggs, "Driving Home" and "One Patch of Earth" by Heather Sullivan, "A Year Knit in Socks" by Susan West Kurz and "Dreams for Sale" by Thomas Allen Mays.

The wealth of authors range from accomplished names to exciting new voices. Be surprised as you are taken to so many varied a musician's purgatory of his own making, a bitter crone's paranoid isolation, one woman's anguish over witnessing her brilliant mother deteriorating and another woman's certainty that her relationship is doing the same, a haunted palace as imagined in a lost Poe manuscript, a year of milestones remembered in a knitting project, a Vietnam veteran's reflections on the highs and lows of existence, a homesick girl's letter from a convent, a hilarious and a bizarre feud between neighbors which hinges on a dastardly chihuahua, and a small town where a medicine show barker guarantees to send you into another person's skin.

These are only a fraction of the tales that await you in this volume, all wrapped up in evocative photos and art from Melissa Martin-Ellis, Donald Heywood, Jill Meyers, Richard Alan Scott, Mark Ellis and Sylvia Hampton, as well as several of the aforementioned authors.