A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own lives—and see clearly the people we love most. “Transcendent.”—The Washington Post • “You’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.”—The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TOWN & COUNTRY Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death—a calamity that claimed her favorite person—she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Smyth’s story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf’s Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss, and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel—and crafts an elegant reminder of literature’s ability to clarify and console. Braiding memoir, literary criticism, and biography, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author. Praise for All the Lives We Ever Lived “This searching memoir pays homage to To the Lighthouse, while recounting the author’s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer. . . . Smyth’s writing is evocative and incisive.”—The New Yorker “Like H Is for Hawk, Smyth’s book is a memoir that’s not quite a memoir, using Woolf, and her obsession with Woolf, as a springboard to tell the story of her father’s vivid life and sad demise due to alcoholism and cancer. . . . An experiment in twenty-first century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh.”—Vogue “Deeply moving – part memoir, part literary criticism, part outpouring of longing and grief… This is a beautiful book about the wildness of mortal life, and the tenuous consolations of art.”—The Times Literary Supplement “Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story... gently entwining observations from Woolf's classic with her own layered experience. Smyth tells us of her love for her father, his profound alcoholism and the unpredictable course of the cancer that ultimately claimed his life.”—Time

In Seeking Solace is the raw account of a life lived in search of love. It details a voice that, though most often strangled, continues to cry out to know and be known, to love and be loved well. In Seeking Solace is Peni-El Raphakumwah's first published work. She is a true poet who tells of her most intimate life and love perceptions in poems such as: DaddyLinks Come Home with Me Hold Me Down Erotica Love Starved My Man Wedding Day Written with Raphakumwah's innate musical sensibilities, Solace reads like a compact disc plays, complete with interludes that masterfully continue the flow of distinct, melodious, and sometimes piercing thought. Quite musical, there is a story here that never breaks its flow or its tumult; not until it reaches placidity in the final hopes of a heart left unscarred in battle, still ambulatory, and moving forward in search of a true, abiding, and everlasting love. In Seeking Solace For Those Who Have Never Been Loved Well but will be.

SEEKING SOLACE is the debut memoir of poet Tonia Jaehn- aka Zae Rankin. It celebrates how the belated power of her self-determination defeats adversity. At age 2, she grapples with food allergies stemming partly from her mother’s stormy pregnancy and passionate cravings for sugary treats. External environmental factors causes Zae’s acute asthma, which requires several hospitalization to save her life. Thus, a dependency on prescription drugs. As an older adult, she is victimized by a hit and run crime still unsolved She sustains substantial nerve damage. No cure for fibromyalgia - just reliance on loads of other medications. After a while, they become ineffective, so she embraces vodka. Chronic abuse steers her life toward gut wrenching down falls and more near-death episodes. Worse, her crack cocaine addiction leads to eye-popping sexual depravity and botched male/female relationships. In the end, though, she digs deeper into her soul and makes a stunning reversal: self-rehabilitation that eventually brings substantial solace in her life. Her love of domesticated animals, now for her latest Chihuahua “Allison”, is a motivating factor... a priceless replacement for her departed, long-term friend and companion, Solas, a Maltipoo mix breed.

Love left her wanting. Fate called her back. Alexis Mackie has spent the past two years trying to forget the memories of the man she left behind. Despite her attempts, forgetting 'the one' isn't that easy. Desperate for relief, she fights her way back to find the one person who can can help her. But as she steps foot on Obsidian soil, an ancient prophecy comes to life... Navigating her way through harsh surroundings, she soon discovers that Obsidia hasn't been the same since she left. With political tension rising and the menacing rebel group closing in on discovering her presence, Alexis struggles to make her way to Kassius. Despite getting help from old friends, fate has other plans for her. As secrets of the realm begin to reveal themselves, she begins to question what really brought her back... Will Alexis return to the man that holds her heart? What dangerous consequences await her if she does? Seeking Solace is the second book in an intriguing YA fantasy series. If you like gripping fantasies, strong dynamic characters, and tender romance, then you'll love T.N. Watson's fascinating tale. Buy Seeking Solace and discover the secrets of the mysterious land.

Finding Solace in the Soil tells the largely unknown story of the gardens of Amache, the War Relocation Authority incarceration camp in Colorado. Combining physical evidence with oral histories and archival data and enriched by the personal photographs and memories of former Amache incarcerees, the book describes how gardeners cultivated community in confinement. Before incarceration, many at Amache had been farmers, gardeners, or nursery workers. Between 1942 and 1945, they applied their horticultural expertise to the difficult high plains landscape of southeastern Colorado. At Amache they worked to form microclimates, reduce blowing sand, grow better food, and achieve stability and preserve community at a time of dehumanizing dispossession. In this book archaeologist Bonnie J. Clark examines botanical data like seeds, garden-related artifacts, and other material evidence found at Amache, as well as oral histories from survivors and archival data including personal letters and government records, to recount how the prisoners of Amache transformed the harsh military setting of the camp into something resembling a town. She discusses the varieties of gardens found at the site, their place within Japanese and Japanese American horticultural traditions, and innovations brought about by the creative use of limited camp resources. The gardens were regarded by the incarcerees as a gift to themselves and to each other. And they were also, it turns out, a gift to the future as repositories of generational knowledge where a philosophical stance toward nature was made manifest through innovation and horticultural skill. Framing the gardens and gardeners of Amache within the larger context of the incarceration of Japanese Americans and of recent scholarship on displacement and confinement, Finding Solace in the Soil will be of interest to gardeners, historical archaeologists, landscape archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and scholars of Japanese American history and horticultural history.

'She lets us see the often chaotic and nature-starved modern world through the eyes of our foremost conservation president ...a view that is at once uplifting and provocative, but always fascinating.' Tony Flemming, Geologist and co-author, Geologic Map of the Washington West Quadrangle, Oct 24, 2020 Washington D.C. naturalist Melanie Choukas-Bradley dives into the natural history and beauty of Theodore Roosevelt Island, an island wilderness less than two miles from the White House and a memorial to the United States' foremost conservationist president. In 2016, as the presidential election dealt a body-blow to progressive thinkers in the US, Melanie sought the solace of Theodore Roosevelt Island. In this book she reflects on the inspiring environmental legacy of Roosevelt, and how immersing oneself in nature can help to heal, restore and encourage a person, even in the midst of the strange new reality of a divisive occupant in the White House. Melanie leads the reader along walks and kayak trips around the island, as together with other Washingtonian nature lovers, birders, conservationists, and even descendants of Roosevelt, they find solace in the island's natural wonders, and ponder their nation's future. Includes a foreword by Tom Lovejoy, Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation.

Inspirational Poetry with introductions to each poem topic, including a "Behind the Poems" section where the provide background information for each poem and further discuss the issue that each poem addresses. Many of the included poems are selected from among the authors' signature poems that have received encore applause when performed on stage, on television, in churches or featured on music albums.