Caitlin Hicks's Blog: Book Reviews, page 11
December 7, 2020
Magical Solstice Broadcast
CHRISTMAS IN CORNUCOPIA, the popular winter story about a town so beautiful it inspired songs and stories since ‘time immemorial’ will be broadcast and available as a podcast on December 21st 2020, all day, for free, to celebrate the Winter Solstice and to bring light into our lives at the end of this Year of the Pandemic.
The story toured British Columbia and Washington state to excellent reviews, and was broadcast on CBC national and regional radio numerous times. This recording features beautiful four-part harmonies by After Hours, a Sunshine Coast vocal jazz quartet, singing Christmas favourites in and out as background to the story. Locals Patrice Pollack, Brian Harbison, Brian Corbett and Mary Ellen Scribner were members of this group and the recording was produced at White Line Studios in Gibsons with Dave Kelln.
CORNUCOPIA begins with “In everyone’s life, there are magic times!” and traces a child’s love for ice skating back to a moonlit moment on a dangerous frozen lake on Christmas Eve. An ode to creativity, the story reaches back into her childhood and her relationship with her best friend Marnie, who loved to play the drums, but was not encouraged by her family to play. Both girls become women as the town changes and they follow their separate fates, only to be reunited on the same dangerous, frozen lake of Christmas Present.
Performed by Caitlin Hicks, with sound design by Gord Halloran, the short story can be downloaded and listened to in the 24 hour period of the Winter Solstice, December 21st, as a temporary episode in the podcast series SOME KINDA WOMAN, Stories of Us – on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio and wherever podcasts are found.
Listen here, your invitation to CHRISTMAS IN CORNUCOPIA on The Winter Solstice, December 21st
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November 25, 2020
“Joe” by guest author, Sharon McInnes
An almost-missed opportunity.
Life, circumstance, death.
How do we find meaning?
We’re hosting a short story written by Sharon McInnes. Joe, originally titled “The Neighbour” was shortlisted for the 2020 Federation of BC Writers Short Fiction contest.
Today is November 25th 2020, (the pandemic election year) the day before the US Thanksgiving.
Sharon McInnes, a writer from Cumberland, British Columbia, is the author of Across a Narrow Strait and Up Close & Personal: Confessions of a Backyard Birder. In 2020, four of her short stories, including The Neighbour, were published, shortlisted, or took first or second prize in four different writing contests across Canada.
Illustration by Gord Halloran: https://www.theispot.com/artist/ghall...
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November 24, 2020
Celebrating our first year!
Women’s life-changing stories
November is the one year anniversary of podcast SOME KINDA WOMAN, Stories of Us! During COVID lockdowns and isolation, this podcast provided listeners with a rich connection to story, using a simple, intimate technology: one voice to an audience of one. Thirty six stories were recorded in Roberts Creek, eight illustrations were created and 3,300+ downloads were listened to and shared since November, 2019.
The podcast features historically-based, local and international stories reflecting women’s life-changing experiences taken from theatrical plays written by Caitlin Hicks and directed by Gord Halloran. Eight illustrations were created by Halloran to capture the essence of each story.
The work is humorous and emotional, the characters outspoken, the issues and events in women’s lives from lighthearted Christmas stories to the exhilaration of a powerful birth, to losing a child to divorce, death, miscarriage, abortion. Podcasts in the series THE LIFE WE LIVED tell of physical, emotional and financial hardship as settlers of a harsh land.
The theatrical play and film SINGING THE BONES provides stories of women, birth, and motherhood in many of it aspects, all told from a deeply personal point of view. (Rachel is Born, Wind Water, Window to the Universe, She’s Not Screaming) Other stories capture hilarious characters who speak their minds (Six Palm Trees and Gertie!)
Two stories proved to be favourites with audiences. The first, A KNOCK ON THE DOOR, tells the tale of a hippie mother in Pender Harbor in the Seventies who wakes one winter morning to discover her 5 year old daughter is missing.
By far, the most popular story, CHANGE GONNA COME is excerpted from Hicks’ second novel, KENNEDY GIRL, (soon to be published) and reflects the day Martin Luther King was killed, from the pov of a white teenager volunteering at the offices of Robert Kennedy’s Wilshire Boulevard campaign for President in 1968.
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November 5, 2020
Chapter 20 – A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE
“But how could one moment of seeing your baby be enough? The moment is over so soon, and then the baby is gone for the rest of your life.” – Annie Shea
See TRAILER for the novel, A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE
It’s 1963 and teen mums with babies born ‘out of wedlock’ are separated from their newborns at birth. In this chapter from A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, a young teen gives birth to a baby girl and the next day, desperately needs to see her newborn, before the adoptive parents come to claim her. At the nursery, Annie is distracted by a young couple who has come to take their adoptive baby home.
A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE is my first novel, the fictionalized story of an enormous family of Catholics in Pasadena, in 1963. Here are some early reviews of this popular book
KENNEDY GIRL takes place five years later, 1968, in Southern California during the turmoil of the late Sixties and takes a journey up the coast of California to Canada during the Vietnam War. The novel is on its own journey towards being published; thereafter I will be creating an audiobook.
Individually, we are a drop, together, an ocean” – Ryunsuke Satoro
VISIT my PATREON PAGE
to JOIN THE COMMUNITY OF SOME KINDA WOMAN.
As a member of this community, you will receive extra content, (audiobooks, paperback
novel, new writing, artwork) as well as other perks related to these podcasts,
while supporting the costs of their creation
Back to:
ALL MY PODCASTS PAGE
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Audiobook! Chapter 20 – A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE
“But how could one moment of seeing your baby be enough? The moment is over so soon, and then the baby is gone for the rest of your life.”
– Annie Shea in Chapter 20, from A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE
See TRAILER for the novel, A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE
It’s 1963 and teen mums with babies born ‘out of wedlock’ are separated from their babies at birth. In this chapter from A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, a young teen gives birth to a baby girl and the next day, desperately wants to see her newborn, before the adoptive parents come to claim her.
Annie and & her two sisters visit their friend, Bee Bee in the hospital. Annie, “a runty 12” (so she won’t be suspected), scouts the nursery to see if she can sneak Bee Bee in to see her baby. Instead, Annie converses with a young couple as they meet and claim their adoptive baby. The baby’s name is Lily.
A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE is my first novel, the fictionalized story of an enormous family of Catholics in Pasadena, in 1963. Here are some early reviews of this popular book
KENNEDY GIRL takes place five years later, 1968, in Southern California during the turmoil of the late Sixties and takes a journey up the coast of California to Canada during the Vietnam War. The novel is on its own journey towards being published; thereafter I will be creating an audiobook.
Individually, we are a drop, together, an ocean” – Ryunsuke Satoro
JOIN THE COMMUNITY OF SOME KINDA WOMAN,
As a member of this community, you will receive extra content, (audiobooks, paperback
novel, new writing, artwork) as well as other perks related to these podcasts,
while supporting the costs of their creation
VISIT my PATREON PAGE,
to join the community of SOME KINDA WOMAN
and get your copy of the AUDIOBOOK OF
A THEORY OF E X P A N D E D LOVE
Back to:
ALL MY PODCASTS PAGE
The post Audiobook! Chapter 20 – A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.
Audiobook: A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE
L I L Y
“But how could one moment of seeing your baby be enough? The moment is over so soon, and then the baby is gone for the rest of your life.” – Annie Shea in Chapter 20, from A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE
See one of the TRAILERs for the novel, A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE
Bee Bee is recovering in a hospital operated by nuns in California in 1963. Just yesterday, Bee Bee gave birth to a baby girl and was pressured to sign papers for adoption. Now she desperately wants to see her newborn, but is forbidden to do so. Annie and & her sisters, Clara and Madcap visit Bee Bee, helpless to solve her painful dilemma. Annie, “a runty 12” is chosen to scout the nursery to see if she can sneak Bee Bee in to see her baby. At the nursery, Annie interacts with a young couple as they meet their baby for the first time.
THE Audiobook A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE is being produced right now! VISIT my PATREON page, to access the complete audiobook, as soon as its produced.
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October 23, 2020
A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, Chapter One
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie Shea creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the short list to be elected the first American pope.
Chapter One we meet Annie as she realizes her shot at stardom begins unexpectedly.
“Hicks adopts Annie’s precocious voice skillfully and draws from it self-effacing humour, spiritual bargaining and enough charm to fill the corridors of Vatican City twice over.” – Foreward Reviews
The post A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE, Chapter One appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.
Chapter One, A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie Shea creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the short list to be elected the first American pope.
Chapter One we meet Annie as she realizes her shot at stardom begins unexpectedly.
“Hicks adopts Annie’s precocious voice skillfully and draws from it self-effacing humour, spiritual bargaining and enough charm to fill the corridors of Vatican City twice over.” – Foreward Reviews
The post Chapter One, A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE appeared first on Caitlin Hicks.
October 18, 2020
Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
You like this character, she’s under your skin; you want to go on this journey with her. And then she says, “I’ve decided to die.” It’s only page 27.
Beautiful, emotional, and tearing at your moorings, this is a story for the ages, a meditation on what connects us throughout our evolutionary history. Without sentimentality, Charlotte McConaghy takes the reader on a searing emotional roller coaster right to the edge of the abyss, and then she pushes; we gasp and claw to right ourselves.
A wild woman who soars only when surrounded by water or skies, who will leap without hesitation into freezing water to rescue others, Franny Stone is a woman you’d perhaps consider brave and ferocious until you realize that she has lost everything—and so has nothing left to lose. She lives in a soon-to-be world we all recognize, where we are “unable to stop the maddening inevitable doom we have built.” And with this, Charlote McConaghy yanks us into her novel’s orbit.
The recognition is so instant, and rings so true, we begin to feel we may have been shaken from the dream that living on earth used to be. The birds have all disappeared; the fish decimated; many species of animals extinct. We, too, have lost everything and begin to feel the claustrophobia Fanny feels, trapped by a teeming world devoid of meaning, without the sound of a feather moving on an updraft through the air.
With characters from central casting, fishermen who still haul their living out of the deep because they have been doing it for generations, Migrations follows Fanny Stone on a vessel named Saghani (Inuit for Raven), chasing a dwindling group of Arctic terns on their last migration. In return for her passage, she has promised the ship’s captain, Ennis, that she will lead them to fish if they follow these terns.
With alternating chapters, Fanny’s past life is revealed along with her reasons for her desperate existential exploration. Abandoned as a child. Sleep walker. Loves fiercely. Takes to children. Liar. Murderer. Attempted suicide with her toothbrush. Married, and yet, belongs nowhere. Fanny’s inability to stay in one place, to be captured and kept runs like a lightning bolt throughout this novel. With every salvaged animal in captivity, even if caged to be saved and sheltered, we feel the panic and breathlessness of confinement. A female gray wolf (thought to be extinct) is captured, and Fanny says “I can’t help but think no animal, ever, should live in a cage. It’s only humans who deserve that fate.”
The book is saturated with the realities we now predict, chilling events within our grasp in 2020: “the extinction crisis an acceptable trade for greed,” the earth’s species “violently and indiscriminately slaughtered by our indifference.” Fanny visits Yellowstone Park devoid of deer, bears, wolves.
And yet. . . the electronically tagged arctic terns—the few surviving on their last migration, fly just out of reach, chased by the Saghani, but still visible—as “red beacons of hope”—dots on the ship’s computer.
In spite of the sadness of these losses, we want to read on; the writing is breathtaking and by now, our hearts are held captive by this writer. Fanny leaps into yet another body of freezing water and we jump in with the gorgeous prose that describes it; we survive violent storms on the ship’s deck, we wake with Fanny coughing and gagging in a sleep-walking dream, we hear of the extinction of the raven, the kestrel, 80 percent of all wild animal life. Ironically, the hated rat and cockroach are “fucking miracles” who are still among us in the wake of decimation of other species and in spite of human effort to be rid of them.
As Fanny writes with longing to her husband in her journal, somewhere in the world, the last family of elephants is slaughtered by poachers for their tusks. Finally, governments come belatedly to their senses as a complete ban on fishing is imposed around the world.
Arriving at port, Fanny defends herself at knifepoint against “the anger to swallow the world” inflicted upon her by a placard-holding protester, and the entire crew—in an act of solidarity for Fanny—flees back into the ship, into the water, and now they’re all fugitives. On board, mutiny erupts as Basil the cook turns them in, and suddenly police vessels descend upon the limping ship.
Fanny asks important but elusive questions for the ages: What does a death matter? What is life worth? And not just a human life. The theme of choking is woven throughout and parallels our gagging culture, stuffed with plastic and toxic human excess, hubris and stupidity. But the heartache at the core of this book revolves around love. When we understand all that has been lost, it’s no wonder we have felt it in every word; the book builds to an almost unbearable realization of what has already been lost.
And then, McConaghy pulls us back from the frightening abyss with hope and love that even after the harshness, are powerful enough to salvage something of the beauty in this world we hardly know anymore.
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October 10, 2020
Exit, Stage Left
A parent disinherits his beloved child. Or so the child believes she is beloved. Where does it begin, the decision to punish someone irrevocably? How forms this secret betrayal of forever with lasting, public consequences? Where does it begin, the chain of events that bring about a reversal of fortune? A denial of love?
In this podcast, “Exit, Stage Right”, a daughter looks back to understand why her father cut her out of his will — and finds instead, the person she has become.
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