Blood on the Bayou

Bouchercon Anthology 2016 edited by Greg Herren, published by Down & Out Books

Blood on the Bayou was published in conjunction with Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, which was held in New Orleans in 2016. As with the convention itself, the anthology spreads a broad canopy across a wide variety of crime writers from across the country and around the world—including both veteran writers and the brightest up-and-coming talents in the field. These stories range from the light-hearted and fun to the darker side of crime; just as New Orleans and the bayou country can show both to the unsuspecting.

Anthony Winner—2017

Read my contribution, “Voodo at the Jitterbug.”

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Praise

“There is a double pleasure in anthologies, reading already-favorite authors like Elaine Viets and Edith Maxwell, and discovering new authors for future reading. I loved the variations on the New Orleans theme, with some set in NOLA, and some elsewhere with transplanted people and customs. Kaye Wilkinson Barley’s “Voodoo at the Jitterbug” and Liz Milliron’s “Three Rivers Voodoo” share lessons abound about not messing with wishes and pretend voodoo.”
—Storyteller Mary, Blogger and reviewer

It’s All Relative

Tales from the Tree from 75 western North Carolina Women Writers

Edited by Celia Miles and Nancy Dillingham

Pundits have a penchant for comparing families to food. Best-selling author, columnist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen proclaims: “In the family sandwich the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.” Journalist and social activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin says: “If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but inseparable—each segment distinct.” An old Chinese proverb cautions: “Govern a family as you would cook a fish—very gently.” Another puts it more succinctly: “Families are like fudge—mostly sweet with a few nuts.”

In this smorgasbord of family stories, essays, and poems, you can nibble on a nugget, munch on a morsel, or gobble down a whole meal.

Amazon

Praise

“Expect closet doors to yield some sharp edged skeletons here. Fine laughing episodes will linger in between. For their fourth collection, the editors sought contributions with edgy family atmosphere. Readers rank this group of authors the best to date in their talents for stirring emotion. You can debate whether murder is funny. On the other hand, for the finale, observe poet M. Ramsey evoke the tears and smiles that etch a mother’s face when her child leaves home.”
—Mona Rae Miracle, artist/writer, co-author of “My Sister Marilyn”

Women’s Spaces Women’s Places

from 50 western North Carolina Women Writers

Edited by Celia Miles and Nancy Dillingham

In her 1929 lectures, Virginia Woolf, hoping to leave her audience with “a nugget of pure truth,” exhorts giving a woman a room of her own and letting her speak her mind. Almost seventy years later the Dixie Chicks proclaim in their mega-hit “Wide Open Spaces”: She needs wide open spaces/Room to make her big mistakes/She needs new faces/She knows the high stakes. The women in this book express those same universal needs and desires. In essay, memoir, poem, and story, they write of their own seeking and finding of space and place: the solitude of the sea, the solace of music, the sweet familiarity of lineage, family and home; the chimera and calling of landscape in Venice, Greece, and other exotica; and the simple satisfaction of snaring that oft-elusive bon mot.

Amazon

Praise

“Grab a new star here. Or flip to a writer you’ve enjoyed in Miles and Dillingham’s two previous anthologies. Ride the breeze with Martha O. Adams in “What the Heart Needs to Know.” Leap a long distance with Wendy Stephens in “My Venetian Chimera.” Stake a claim with “In the Home” by Nancy Cash. The cover by Karen Hollingsworth paints symbols that represent choice: an open window, books to educate and titillate, the cat’s contentment, and a landscape of confinement—or of challenge.”
—Mona Rae Miracle, artist/writer, co-author of “My Sister Marilyn”

Clothes Lines

from 75 western North Carolina Women Writers

Edited by Celia Miles and Nancy Dillingham

Stories, poems, essays, and memoirs presented in this volume run the gamut from women’s fascination with shoes and the color red to the history of bras, from gas masks to girdles, from communion dresses to wedding dresses, from prom dresses to muu muus, from jump suits and pants suits to bathing sits and too-tight jeans, from housedresses to uniforms, from flour sacks to polyester, from granny panties and step-ins to thongs, from kerchiefs to scarves to shawls, from cloaks to mink stoles, from chartreuse to gold lamé, from lace to silk and satin to tulle and crepe de Chine. This was my first experience in being published. I will be thankful to Celia Miles and Nancy Dillingham forever and a day for accepting my submission for inclusion. Never have I been happier or more proud than I was to see my piece, “Needing a Little Something Red,” published with such a group of talented women writers.

Amazon

Praise

“Enjoy looking for yourself in the many mirrors in this second collection edited by Celia Miles and Nancy Dillingham. Do your clothes announce sackcloth sadness or runway power? From shoes echoing a military stomp, to lockets hiding secret loves . . . view the spectrum of self-decoration motives. These stories, memoirs, and poems contrast clothing as an accidental symbol with style as a conscious statement. Readers are apt to conclude that not only beauty, but humor as well, lies perspective of the beholder.”
—Mona Rae Miracle, artist/writer, co-author of “My Sister Marilyn”

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