Pond 76 - August 2023 |
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How lucky we are to be able to share poems, stories, ideas. But bottom-line, AI is here. If you’ve ever read something produced by ChatGPT or other AI tech, I’d like to hear from you - what were your perceptions?
Hello? World? Thoughts go here. Personally, as far as art, poetry, and writing in general are concerned, I think it cheapens everything it touches. But maybe I’m wrong. Tell me what you think as it relates to our shared craft. - Ken 
"Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn' have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul."
- Tom Joad, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck |
2022 Anthology is now available
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SHORT STORY
Margaret Karmazin - Curses, Foiled Again
POEM
Bruce Greenhalgh - Before falling; falling
SHORT STORY
Charles Williams - Silent Auction
POEM
Richard Weaver - Stealing summer fruit
FROM THE EDITOR - POEM
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SHORT STORY
Ed Dearnley - Things Can Only Get Better
SHORT STORY
Steven Bays - It’s Paris, Silly
POEM
Sally Boyington - Dogpile in the Morning
POEM
Carol Sadtler - Slow Time
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Author Profile
Vern Fein 
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Mind of a Poet
Carol Sadtler 
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Dream...
ARTISTS and SHUTTERBUGS I’m looking for original artwork and enhanced photos featuring Carp (including Koi) for the Carpwork Gallery. See the Submissions page for details. |
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Authors' Row
Click on any image to order.
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Wayne Cresser
In these fourteen short pieces, Cresser develops engaging scenes, and the inner thoughts of his characters go in directions unexpected. Cresser also shows a real knack for sharing the inner lives of his characters, allowing them to develop, warts and all, with resolution and reflection coming in captivating ways. - Fred Shaw
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Cheryl J. Fish
With age 40 looming, Nate, Nora, and Lulu find their lives unraveling, their aspirations dashed. Nate, dead broke, in his eighth year of graduate school delves into yoga. Nate's ex-girlfriend Nora finagles a position in Finland where she tries on men like miniskirts and embraces sisu, the Finnish concept of perseverance, in pursuit of motherhood. And yogi Lulu, Nate’s talented teacher, yearns to get to the bottom of her nightmares of childhood abuse. OFF THE YOGA MAT takes the reader on three risky coming-of-middle age journeys through sensuality, emotional evolution, and breathing deep.
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John Pearson
Seventeen years after surviving a family tragedy, a voice from deep within compelled John Pearson to walk the 500-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain. After two years of training, he stepped onto the Via Frances at St. Jean Pied de Port and an adventure began. At first, his motivations were unclear, but as the journey progressed, it became a pilgrimage and a Celebration of Life. This is a moving memoir of John's transformational journey. He takes you through each day providing an honest, humorous, and detailed account of the many challenges and triumphs on the trail. John holds nothing back.
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Ateret Haselkorn
Obie lives with an artificially printed heart and no one can know. Humanists are on the prowl for “abominations” like her. When her best friend is shot and injured, Obie decides to find an organ for him. In order to succeed, she becomes a black market shopper, a brain surgeon, and an expert negotiator. She realizes it isn’t the boundary between human and machine that we should fear but between individual people. When we can modify each other, who gets to decide how?
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Tim Hunt
When I hear Van Morrison say he’s going down the old mine with a transistor radio in “Brown-Eyed Girl,” I always wonder if young folks are going to know what he’s talking about. They would if they read this marvelous book. In the pleasure it offers and the knowledge it imparts, Ticket Stubs & Liner Notes provides more than a soundtrack to the dawn of the present day—it also supplies a vocabulary essential to our understanding. ~David Kirby, Author of Help Me, Information Winner of the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award
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Vali Hawkins-Mitchell
Now more than ever we are all well served by truly deeply listening; to the voices that come from within and from the voices of others. Reading some of these voices may help you find your own.
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Kim Malinowski
Kim Malinowski's verse novel plays The Phantom of the Opera the novel by reflecting the original characters' roles onto modern day characters. Who wears the true mask--The Phantom or the protagonist protecting her agency?
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Terry Tierney
Set in the Vietnam War era, Lucky Ride tells the story of a recent veteran, an unraveling marriage, and a hitchhiking trip steeped in hippie optimism, post-war skepticism, and drug-induced fantasy.
“A bang-zoom road trip novel with the queasy high-flying pace of Easy Rider and the breakneck prose of On the Road” --Douglas Cole, author of The White Field. |
Charles Springer
Nowhere Now Here is a collection of prose poems that read and feel whimsical on the surface, with solid and brilliant imagery, but underneath this surface lay undercurrents of grit and pathos. It's a standout collection of ordinary lives and their seemingly ordinary moments made extraordinary.The collection has received many wonderful endorsements from the likes of David Keplinger, David Shumate, Gene Twaronite, Michael Martone, Barbara Henning, Rebecca Kinzie-Bastian and Matthew Lippman. Available from the publisher, Radial Books
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Annette Sisson
Without its "hue and profusion," Annette Sisson reminds us, "the world is an orphan." And often these poems seek to clothe some austere loneliness in the multiplicity of life's visions and illusions. ... Like all good poetry, Sisson's shows that everything that matters, whether tragic, as in her poem "Eclipse," or buoyant, as in her poem "Résistance," takes place on earth, in our world. This book is a loving celebration of the connections and tensions that help us to live our lives. - Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry and Dailiness
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Richard Sipe
In his new book of poetry Richard Craig Sipe explores what happens in the aftermath of a life, a town, or a love. These are the LOVELY DREGS: what is left over, what remains, what is never the same, except that, somehow, oddly, it is.
LOVELY DREGS is available from Atmosphere Press |
Patrick T. Reardon
Prompted by the suicide of his brother David, Patrick T. Reardon undertook a deep exploration into their shared childhood as the two oldest siblings in a family that grew to 14 children and into his own painful babyhood. Puddin’ is told from the perspective and in the voice of a baby. Each of this small book’s 101 single-page chapters is imagined. Yet, each is rooted in reality, in facts and feelings. In an Afterword, Reardon, a journalist for half a century, explains in detail how created a special language for Puddin’ as the baby sought to understand his life.
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John Michael Flynn
Dreaming Rodin is Flynn's second story collection, available from Publerati. All proceeds of the book's sale go to funding literacy programs worldwide. John can be reached at Delays Flights.
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Terence Gallagher
Conrad is an office techie long past obsolescence, who spends his days at work waiting for the axe to fall. His refuge at night is his cool, dusty house teeming with memories, and his dreams–dreams of another world, an empire peopled by robber knights, kidnapped ladies, and a sinister warrior brotherhood. It's no wonder Conrad gets a little addled, and no surprise that the dream empire and the waking world begin to run together.
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William Quincy Belle
A post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi thriller.
Antigravity: floating cites. Pandemic: 80% dead. Flesh-eating disease: artificial body parts. Insects as food. And murder in dystopia. |
Patrick T. Reardon
This exceptional book enables us to see, as if for the first time, something that is right under our noses. It is almost impossible to imagine downtown Chicago and the Loop ‘L’ without each other, and Patrick T. Reardon explains just why that is so in a lively narrative full of information and insights.”
—Carl Smith, author of Chicago's Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City |
Peter Dabbene
Complex Simplicity reprints the first 101 entries from Peter Dabbene's monthly column in the Hamilton Post newspaper, plus assorted essays focusing on comic books, movies, social media, politics, mixed martial arts, astronomy, and more. With humor and style, these pages probe the important and not-so-important issues of everyday life in New Jersey, and America at large.
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Ken Poyner
A collection of fantastical mini-fictions. A man who encounters mammoth rustlers. Houses that begin to move on their own, forcing the inhabitants to finally introduce themselves to their neighbors. Giant chickens that are hunted for processing in the chicken sandwich industry. And much more.
Humor, irony, mythical realism, surrealism, soft science fiction. |
Fred McGavran
"McGavran’s are stories of obsession and experience. They are the stories of characters who are nearing death and who are thinking about what they will leave behind. They are deeply human, and entirely serious, with a touch of humor and a little bit of magic to light the way." - Anna Kasik, Englewood Review of Books
Hear Roberta Schultz's review on WVXU |