PRESS RELEASES
Making Headlines
HOMESTEAD LIGHTHOUSE PRESS BORN IN OREGON & STORY LINE PRESS ARCHIVE ACQUIRED BY STANFORD UNIVERSITY
PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Robert McDowell, co-founder (with Lysa McDowell & Mark Jarman) and publisher of Oregon’s Story Line Press for 22 years (1984-2006), has created and launched a new Oregon literary publishing company, Homestead Lighthouse Press. The press, a 501(c)(3) corporation, will guide trailblazing global poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction into print.
HLP will also champion educational literary programs in rural and traditionally underserved areas and offer community programs in writing, writing as spiritual practice, gender enlightenment, mentor/apprentice relationships, rites of passage and the rights of marginalized people worldwide.
The name Homestead Lighthouse Press honors the work, lives and legacies of two literary geniuses and guiding spirits, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Homestead celebrates Dickinson’s Homeplace in Amherst, Massachusetts, while Lighthouse honors Woolf’s iconic metaphor at the heart of her brilliant novel, To the Lighthouse.
“Writers, activists, and readers will discover a safe haven and unwavering advocacy at Homestead Lighthouse Press,” says McDowell, who is also a poet, author ghostwriter and writing mentor. Over the course of his career at Story Line Press, he selected and guided into print more than 300 books by Pulitzer Prize winners, A Nobel Laureate, five U.S. Poet Laureates, writers in mid-career and beginning writers. The press discovered and championed many Oregon and Northwest authors, several of whom went on to win Oregon Book Awards.
Stanford University has just announced its acquisition of the complete Story Line Press archive.
For more information, contact:
Robert McDowell
homesteadlighthousepress@gmail.com
541-787-5221
HOMESTEAD LIGHTHOUSE PRESS DEBUTS THE NOVEL EMILY & VIRGINIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
EMILY & VIRGINIA A NOVEL BY ROBERT MCDOWELL “An extraordinary novel! Robert McDowell’s book is deeply intelligent, devoted, poetic and timeless, a fantasy so real you can taste it. Woven from meticulous research of the mind and heart, this meeting of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf is a gem. McDowell knows these women, two brilliant artists, each “irreverent, a pistol painfully shy.” --Barbara Dana, author of A Voice of Her Own: Becoming Emily Dickinson and Young Joan
Readers in the know will notice that Robert McDowell’s novel, Emily & Virginia, follows the structure of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but the story is utterly new. Woolf and Emily Dickinson team up in this evolved magical realism tale to journey from the Afterlife to Ashland, Oregon in 2021. Their goal is to guide 25-year-old Lily Ramsay, Manga artist, through her coming-of-age crises and save her from the terrifying De la Nuit, dark agents from the Other World who intend to do her eternal harm. Woolf and Dickinson become Lily’s eccentric ‘aunts’, protecting and mentoring her in life, work and love. The dynamic between the iconic writers will charm and delight readers who already love them, delivering on a divine pairing that until now one could only dream of. McDowell excels at evoking the voices and physical presences of Woolf and Dickinson as they defend and support their young charges, battle Afterlife enemies and become matchmakers for Lily and the young man she meets (who happens to have a ‘thing’ for Virginia’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell). Emily’s sister, Lavinia, Vanessa and other members of the Bloomsbury group appear in this tale, aiding their Afterlife cohorts in their project. Readers may especially appreciate the appearance of Leonard Woolf and his pet monkey, Mitz. Virginia Woolf was four-years-old in 1886 when Emily Dickinson died. The two never met…until now. McDowell delivers one of the most satisfying, unexpected and entertaining team-ups of literary stars in the history of American and English literature. Emily & Virginia is a love letter to these two amazing women and a compelling coming-of-age tale of a talented artist from a new, now generation.
Contact: Emily Stephen
homesteadlighthousepress@gmail.com
(541)787-5221
https://www.homesteadlighthousepress.com
Emily & Virginia by Robert McDowell • July 21, 2021 • Fiction • Trade Paper • $26.95/$16.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-11-7/978-1-950475-01-8 • 278 Pages • LCCC #2020948240
HOMESTEAD LIGHTHOUSE PRESS DEBUTS SWEET WOLF: SELECTED & NEW POEMS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Introduction by Chad Abushanab
“Rare, then, is the contemporary poet who gives privilege to narrative as the engine inside the poem. Rarer still is the poet who masters both the art of deep, complex narrative and moments of mystical musicality where in truths feel just beneath the illusion of sense. It’s for this reason the greatest joy in seeing the best of Robert McDowell’s poetic career distilled between the pages of Sweet Wolf is witnessing the massive swaths of ground McDowell covered between the poles of lyric and narrative. Throughout Sweet Wolf, we see his prowess on the level of the individual poem as well as within the selections from each collection represented.” --Chad Abushanab, from his Introduction: Someplace Between Story and Song
“This fresh, uncompromising voice will be greeted with cheers by readers who have been turned off by the ornate pretentiousness of so much contemporary poetry. Gifted with a novelistic grasp of exactly what it is like to be a twentieth-century American, Robert McDowell is interested in other people, not just himself.” —Frederick Morgan, Poet & Editor, The Hudson Review
“I am caught up again and again in McDowell’s strong narrative line. Whether he’s reshaping an old myth or detailing an actual event, this poet is a storyteller at the top of his form.” --Maxine Kumin
“On Foot, in Flames is filled with loneliness, with the knowledge that ‘the world dismantles us’, but it’s also prayerful, its music an affirmation that threads through even the narratives of violence and betrayal. This is a religious book in the best sense, fusing matter and spirit, ultimately, achingly human.” --Kim Addonizio
“Robert McDowell’s narrative poems are strangely compelling, adding up to an utterly original sense of the world, one brushed clean of all cant, all obscurity and confusion…Dazzling!” --Jay Parini
Robert McDowell is the author of 6 books of poetry, 14 books of fiction, criticism and creative nonfiction and editor and translator of dozens of collections. His poems have appeared in in journals and papers around the world, including Poetry, The Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, The Harvard Review and London Magazine, among others. With Mark Jarman, McDowell co-founded and edited The Reaper magazine and Story Line Press. He served SLP as editor and director for 22 years, selecting and guiding into print more than 250 volumes of poetry, fiction, criticism, memoir, writing guides and verse plays. He created the Rural Readers Project and cofounded the annual international Poets Prize. He has taught at UC Santa Cruz, University of Southern Indiana and the low-residency MFA Program at Bennington College.
Contact: Emily Stephen
homesteadlighthousepress@gmail.com
(541)787-5221
https://www.homesteadlighthousepress.com
Sweet Wolf: Selected and New Poems by Robert McDowell • July 29, 2021 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $24.95/16.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-12-4/978-1-950475-13-1 • Ebook • $5.99 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-14-8 • 278 Pages • LCCC #2020951812
HOMESTEAD LIGHTHOUSE PRESS DEBUTS THE NOVEL SECRETS OF THE TREES
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Alissa Lukara’s Novel Takes Readers on a Quest to Heal Ancestral Trauma’s Impact on Future Generations
What if the trauma of ancestors we have never met through can still haunt our lives today? The field of epigenetics reveals how these past traumas are passed on to future generations in the DNA. The new novel, Secrets of the Trees by Alissa Lukara, explores one woman’s quest to heal the impact of this phenomenon in a story set in Latvia in 2003, thirteen years after the nonviolent Singing Revolution freed the country from fifty years of Soviet rule.
Nikkie, a twenty-two-year-old dancer performing at the Hollywood Bowl, is about to become a star. Instead, she’s sent reeling by the vision of a girl and her parents being shot in a forest in 1940s Latvia. Knowing she will not be able to dance again until she solves the mystery of the vision, she goes on a quest to Latvia, the land of her ancestors, to uncover the secrets hidden in the trees of her vision and to find the father she has never met.
The world-famous Latvian Song and Dance Festival is about to take place. Latvia is in the midst of a renaissance but also living in the shadow of the residual trauma from Soviet oppression. Nikkie discovers the Latvians’ mystical soul connection to nature and trees and the unifying power of their mass choir singing and dancing. She confronts how her ancestors’ resilience in the face of challenge has shaped her own life and how helping the dead of her vision could heal them and free her to fulfill her own dreams.
Alissa Lukara is a first generation American. Her family escaped Latvia during WWII to avoid deportation to Siberia and were refugees for five years. She traveled there three times to research this novel. Her memoir, Riding Grace: A Triumph of the Soul (Silver Light Publications), was called by the Midwest Book Review “a transcendental story about the immeasurable powers of redemption and compassion.” Night Dancin’ (Ballantine Books), her pop culture overview of New York City discoes, is now a collector’s item. She has been a professional writer and writing coach for more than thirty years. She blogs at Transformationalwriters.com, teaches workshops and speak on writing as a transformational journey.
Contact: Robert McDowell
homesteadlighthousepress@gmail.com
(541)787-5221
https://www.homesteadlighthousepress.com
Secrets of the Trees by Alissa Lukara • October 23, 2019 • Novel • Trade Paper • $17.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-03-2 • 334 Pages
HOMESTEAD LIGHTHOUSE PRESS PRESENTS SELECTED POEMS BY DENNIS SAMPSON
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dennis Sampson’s poems since the early Eighties stand with the greatest poems of his generation.
Selected Poems collects the best of Dennis Sampson’s poetry from seven previous volumes.
Sampson has long been considered a cherished poet’s poet by his peers. One could add ‘a poetry reader’s poet’ to this rare accolade. It fits because Dennis Sampson has always been the most voracious of poetry readers and talkers. His beloved, wholly assimilated influences include Dante and Theodore Roethke, William Blake and Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop and D. H. Lawrence among others.
A fierce practitioner and teacher of the art of poetry, Sampson has always lived an independent, rigorous life of principle as he has come to believe in it. Poetry first, Poetry last & Poetry in between might well be his motto. Poetry is his life and his life, in all its strange guises and mazy motions, is in the poetry.
“In an era of handsomely written books of poetry largely about their own skill with language, it’s more than breathtaking to encounter a poet who writes for the most basic reason: because he has to.” --Philip Levine
Sampson was born and raised in South Dakota. His previous volumes of poetry include The Double Genesis, Forgiveness, Constant Longing, Needlegrass, For my Father Falling Asleep at Saint Mary’s Hospital, Within the Shadow of a Man, and The Lunatic in the Trees.
The recipient of grants from The Virginia Council on the Arts and The North Carolina Arts Council, Sampson’s poems have appeared in such magazines as The American Scholar, The Ohio Review, The Hudson Review and many others. He has taught as Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, as the Visiting Poet in the M.F.A Program in Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington, and at Wake Forest University. He lives in North Carolina.
Contact: Robert McDowell
homesteadlighthousepress@gmail.com
(541) 787-5221
https://www.homesteadlighthousepress.com
Selected Poems by Dennis Sampson • October 21, 2019 • Poetry • Hardcover • $24.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-00-1 • Trade Paper -$16.95 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-01-8 • 124 Pages
HOMESTEAD LIGHTHOUSE PRESS PRESENTS THE GIFT OF NOT FINDING: POEMS FOR MEDITATION BY CAROL ALENA ARONOFF, PH.D.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
This is Carol Alena Aronoff’s seventh book of poems and it could not possibly arrive at a better time. As people around the world seek to discover the new normal, the poems here open windows and doors into meditation and the lasting beauty of the natural world.
As the poet Robert McDowell writes in the Foreword, “The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation by Carol Alena Aronoff embodies stillness. Perhaps this is the secret goal of all poetry when it is most fit in consciousness and memory. For what does one desire more than peace and the absence of worry and speculation it brings? Poetry that achieves and evokes stillness—dare I say ‘perfect’ stillness—is a gift that allows one to breathe deeply and be love.”
Carol Alena Aronoff, Ph.D., is a psychologist, teacher and writer who co-founded SAGE, a psycho-spiritual program for elders; helped guide a Tibetan Buddhist Center for seven years; Taught Eastern Spirituality and Practices, Imagery, Meditation and Women’s Health at San Francisco State University for fourteen years. She guided Healing in Nature retreats in Hawaii and the Southwest and had a counseling practice for many years in Marin County.
Aronoff co-authored Practical Buddhism: The Kagyu Path with Ole Nydahl in 1989 and edited five books and four meditation booklets on Tibetan Buddhism. Dr. Aronoff is the author of the textbook, Compassionate Healing: Eastern Perspectives.
Her poems have appeared in dozens of magazines, journals and anthologies.
Contact: Emily Stephen
homesteadlighthousepress@gmail.com
(541) 787-5221
https://www.homesteadlighthousepress.com
The Gift of Not Finding by Carol Alena Aronoff, Ph.D. • August 15, 2020 • Poetry • Trade Paper • $16.95 •
ISBN: 978-1-950475-05-6 • 110 Pages
E-book ISBN: 978-1-950475-06-3
LCCC #2020933946
HOMESTEAD LIGHTHOUSE PRESS PRESENTS EVERY POSSIBLE THING BY KAREN POPPY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Karen Poppy’s poems in Every Possible Thing push the envelope between Here and the Somewhere Else we will all be going to. Philosophically intelligent, metaphorically magical,gender-evolved, Poppy lyrically navigates readers through unexpected explorations and surprising breakthroughs. Along the way, she earns our trust and we double back to re-read poems while getting to the end and wanting more. This chapbook whets the appetite at the beginning of what promises to be a memorable journey in poetry. Karen Poppy is a poet to watch and savor.
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“In Every Possible Thing, Karen Poppy’s imagery soars and her unique vision leads us into a world of literary allusions, of life’s glory, of the earth, of water and waves, of suicide and the harshness of life and death. Exquisitely written, with attention to the smallest detail, to the vastness of mythology, these elegant poems compel the reader to turn the page in order to be richly rewarded by these tender pieces. Haunting, bewitching, evocative, her poems are often other-worldly. In the title poem, hands become “Silver-skinned gloves” and the speaker urges the beloved to “Wear me like finery.” These are poems of the heart-breaking beauty of landscape where no subject is too small, such as the creation of a grain of sand. Her soaring imagery and unique vision propel the reader along, gorgeous poem following gorgeous poem. Skillfully written, always engaging, we need Poppy’s poems of discovery, philosophy, other worlds, spirit, and more.”
--Virginia Chase Sutton, winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize for What Brings You to Del Amo
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Karen Poppy has published poems in The Cortland Review (Best of the Net Nomination), Naugatuck River Review (Finalist in 11th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest), The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, ArLiJo, and Wallace Stevens Journal, among others. In addition to this chapbook published by Homestead Lighthouse Press, she has another chapbook, CRACK OPEN/EMERGENCY, published by Finishing Line Press. An attorney licensed in California and Texas, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Contact: Emily Stephen
homesteadlighthousepress@gmail.com
(541) 787-5221
https://www.homesteadlighthousepress.com
Every Possible Thing, a Chapbook of Poems by Karen Poppy • October 1, 2020 • Poetry • Paper • $10.00 •
ISBN: 978-1-950475-07-0 • Kindle -$2.99 • 32 Pages
Distributed by Homestead Lighthouse Press, Daedalus Distribution, Amazon.com & Barnes & Noble
HOMESTEAD LIGHTHOUSE PRESENTS RIDING THE WAVES OF BLISS: SEASONS OF LIFE POEMS BY SHAI HAR-EL
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Shai Har-El is a poet of love, spirituality and mysticism.
Har-El’s poems follow the arc of his extraordinary life, beginning with growing up in Israel, blossoming in a multi-faceted love for and intimacy with a Beloved, the central figure of the poet’s life for more than fifty years (the poet’s late wife, Rosie), expanding into questions of global oneness and harmony, experiencing spiritual awakening and illumination and ending where life in this realm concludes, in death and grieving.
Readers of all ages and nationalities will identify with Har-El’s lyricism and clear-eyed presentation of all he sees and feels. The diligence of his spiritual practice and long odyssey waft through the poems like the susurrus in dancing trees. The epic love story at the heart of this collection is poignant, empathetic and inspiring, transcending time “like a petalled rose emerging from one stem offering its sweet fragrance and infinite beauty to humanity.”
Watch an interview with Shai Har-El about his poetry here.
Contact the author directly at Shaiharel@comcast.net
Dr. Shai Har-El is a scholar, educator, rabbi, writer, poet, activist, and businessman. He was born and raised in Israel, where he served in the Israeli army and participated in the Six Day War (1967), the War of Attrition (1969-70), and the Yom Kippur War (1973). In Illinois he manages his full-service financial consulting firm, Har-El Financial Group (visit
www.HarelFinancial.com), and directs the Middle East Peace Network (MEPN), an ambitious, global private diplomacy organization (www.MEPNetwork.org). He also gives lectures and workshops, and writes essays on current Middle East affairs and a variety of religious themes.Har-El holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in Middle Eastern History from Tel Aviv University, and Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.
He is the author of Struggle for Domination in the Middle East: The Ottoman-Mamluk War, 1485-1491 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995); Where Islam and Judaism Join Together: A Perspective on Reconciliation (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2014); and In Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace: An Urgent Call for a New Approach to Middle East Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). The last two books are the fruits of his peace advocacy and activism under MEPN.
Har-El’s Discover the Jewel of Wisdom: Eight Paths to Powerful Living, is the result of years of investment in studying, exploring, experiencing, and teaching self-mastery. It is a “living laboratory” report of his personal discoveries while plowing the “fields” of life and his spiritual journey toward rabbinic ordination. His anthology, Many Ways to Courting God: Selected Spiritual Writings, and his daily spiritual guide, Daily Spiritual Affirmations for Powerful Living, were assembled as companion books.
Contact: Emily Stephen
homesteadlighthousepress@gmail.com
(541) 787-5221
www.homesteadlighthousepress.com
Riding The Waves of Bliss: Seasons of Life Poems by Shai Har-El • October 25, 2020 • Poetry • Paper • $16.00 •
ISBN: 978-1-950475-08-7 • E-book -$2.99 • ISBN: 978-1-950475-09-4 •134 Pages
THIS JUST IN!
Homestead Lighthouse Press is proud to announce that Carol Alena Aronoff, author of our just-released poetry collection, THE GIFT OF NOT FINDING: Poems for Meditation is a Poetry New Mexico Finalist for the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards for 2020 for her previous collection, Tapestry of Secrets published by Finishing Line Press.
HLP congratulates the author and Finishing Line Press!
If you'd like to check out Carol's most recent collection of poetry The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation, click here.
