Books by Certain Age Authors
Certain Age is proud to publish established and emerging women writers. Our contributors have written novels, plays, memoirs, poetry collections, essays. So if you like what you read here, you are going to love their longer works.
a novel by Jean Shields
Grief opens doors, sometimes unexpected ones, as Caroline Davies is about to discover. In Chicago to bury her father, Caroline, an event planner by trade, has orchestrated the funeral down to the make-up on her father's face. So why does she feel so blank? After indulging in a few too many - drinks, harsh words, taboo kisses - Caroline runs away.
"Jean Shields seems to have discovered a new, wonderfully paradoxical genre: the realistic romance." - Antonya Nelson
Writing the Life Poetic takes poetry off of its academic pedestal and makes it accessible to (and enjoyable for) everyone. With friendly lessons, engaging prompts, and inspiring example poems, Writing the Life Poetic invites readers to discover and express the poetry of their everyday lives.
“Poems hold us to a higher standard by which we become more visible to ourselves and more authentic in that unveiling. It is only by writing ourselves through this poetry prism – then sharing what we’ve written – that we can arrive at the threadbare intimacies of ‘real’.”
- Sage Cohen, author
Brontosaurus Illustrated
Leanne Grabel
Brontosaurus Illustrated is the story of a rape, now fifty years old, and its effects over five decades. Nina Gold was a 19-year-old Stanford sophomore riding a full math scholarship to the American dream. But her avid quest was trampled one spring break-like an ant by a boot-when she was kidnapped and raped at gunpoint on a Baja beach, a trauma the size of a brontosaurus.
Broken Light
Joanne Harris
Broken Light is a bold and timely novel that explores how women can feel invisible as they grow older—and what happens when they decide to take back control. Bernie Ingram is forty-nine, menopausal, lonely. Married, with no close friends and few family ties, she feels as if the past thirty years have been sacrificed to others. Bernie’s own ambitions and dreams have been forgotten by everyone – including Bernie herself. Until the murder of a woman in a local park unlocks a series of childhood memories, and with them, a power that she has suppressed for all her adult life.
Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful."
Mary Shelley
Second Story
Denise Duhamel
When her Florida apartment is damaged by the ferocity of Hurricane Irma, poet Denise Duhamel turns to Dante and terza rima, reconstructing the form into the long poem “Terza Irma.” Throughout the book she investigates our near-catastrophic ecological and political moment, hyper-aware of her own complicity, resistance, and agency. She writes odes to her favorite uncle—who was “green” before it was a hashtag—and Mother Nature via a retro margarine commercial. She writes letters to her failing memory as well as to America’s amnesia. With fear of the water below and a burglar who enters through her second story window, she bravely faces the story under the story, the second story we often neglect to tell.
For the Willing
Kristin Berger
These are poems to conjure with. For us, the willing, Kristin Berger tells the natural history of motherhood as tautly, as fiercely, as just-plain-well as I’ve ever read it. From the roots of beets to the dust bowls of wrens, to the blue highways of birth-ready breasts and the arc of a kid on a bike, her poems travel for the garden, for the world, for all of us.
~Robert Michael Pyle, author of The Thunder Tree and Evolution of the Genus Iris.
“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
Audre Lorde
And: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World
Felicia Murrell
And: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World is an invitation to move beyond binaries, beyond hierarchy and comparison to embrace the concept of "AND," with inclusion and generativity that allow for more than one perspective and/or way of being. This book is for those who want to think more deeply, those who are asking questions of how, what, and perhaps even why, and those who want to engage in deep listening and empathy.
Rain, At Times Heavy
Debi Goodwin
Rains, At Times Heavy tells the story of the Kemp family, seemingly cursed to lose their men to stormy weather. Through vivid landscapes and complex characters, Rains, At Times Heavy explores how one moment, one trauma, can spiral through the generations until a single person steps bravely into its path.
The Catalog of Small Contentments
Carolyn Martin
Carolyn Martin’s fifth collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments (Portland, OR: The Poetry Box, 2021), sparkles with delightfully accessible poems that revel in truths inspired by a host of poets, artists, and philosophers from Billy Collins and Mary Oliver to Teilhard de Chardin and Claude Monet; from Virginia Wolf and Maggie Smith to Henry James and Joan Miró.
Erica Buist
By the time Erica Buist's father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, he had been dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies.
She found herself descending into a bout of pyjama-clad agoraphobia, stalking friends online to ascertain whether any had also dropped dead, unable to extract herself from the spiral of death anxiety... until one day she decided to reclaim control
With Mexico's Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world - one for every day they didn't find Chris.
Debi Goodwin
Ever since her childhood on a Niagara farm, Debi has dug in the dirt to find resilience. But when her husband, Peter, was diagnosed with cancer in November, it was too late in the season to seek solace in her garden. With idle hands and a fearful mind, she sought something to sustain her through the months ahead. She soon came across Victory Gardens — the vegetable gardens cultivated during the world wars that sustained so many.
During an anxious winter, she researched, drew plans, and ordered seeds. In spring, with Peter in remission, her garden thrived and life got back on track. But when Peter's cancer returned like a killing frost, the garden was a reminder that everything must come to an end.
A Victory Garden for Trying Times is a personal journey of love, loss, and healing through the natural cycles of the earth.
Jeannette Brown
When Jaime Wright returns to her childhood home to say goodbye to her dying father—patriarch of the West Texas village of Silver Falls--she uncovers decades-old secrets that reshape her sense of self and lead her to reimagine her future. Surprised by revelations from the past, Jaime re-sees the present as she recognizes the subtle and tenacious beauty of the remote, gritty, windblown place in which she is more deeply-rooted than she realized. "With keen insight and wry humor, Jeannette Brown’s debut novel, The Illusion of Leaving, depicts the pains and the joys of ageing and of friendship and family relationship to illuminate our deep need for human connection." –Allen Wier, author of Tehano and Late Night, Early Morning
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