"Remembering Mattie: A Pioneer Woman's Legacy of Grit, Gumption, and Grace" is a treasury of true stories, memorable pictures of people and places from the past, and historic legal documents and papers.

Mattie Stepanek began writing poetry and short stories at the age of three. Some of his poetry explores the uncensored reality of living with a rare form of muscular dystrophy and with the grief associated with the loss of his three siblings to the same life-threatening condition. But most of his poems proclaim the innocent hope. profund wisdom, and delighful humor of childhood.

Martha Harris (1919-1987) was one of the most influential and also one of the most loved psychoanalysts of the generation that trained with Melanie Klein. She also worked with Wilfred Bion, and wrote many books and papers on psychoanalytic training and child development. Her colleague James Gammill cites Mrs Klein as saying: She is one of the best people I have ever known for the psychoanalysis of children ... and she has a mind of her own. Harris was responsible for the child psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic from 1960 onwards, developing laterally the method founded on infant observation that had been put in place by Esther Bick. She established cross-clinic work discussion groups, a pioneering schools' counselling course (in collaboration with her husband Roland Harris), and individual work with disturbed children in the school environment. Her belief that psychoanalytic ideas could and should travel, both geographically and across the professions, led to her seeding the Tavi Model in many other countries through regular teaching trips, in company with her later husband Donald Meltzer. Her influence was not as a theorist, but as a teacher with an extraordinary capacity to engage processes of introjective learning in both students and readers. This tribute by some of those who studied with her is not simply testimony to a remarkable teacher and clinician whose wisdom has been rarely equalled; it also offers inspiration to others who may be struggling to find ways of using psychoanalytic ideas imaginatively in a variety of contexts - clinical, social or scholarly - in what can at times appear to be an unreceptive world.

Sidney Mason is a hard-edged espionage novelist who is as gritty and self-reliant as the great-grandmother who raised her. When Mattie Mason dies, Sidney drives herself even harder to mask her grief. Steven Wade, Sidney's literary agent, fears his top writer is headed for a mental meltdown and urges her to hire an assistant. Enter Parker Bannister, wannabe writer and house sitter, whose career as a Postal Inpector abruptly ends the day a lone assailant shoots her in a post office robbery gone awry. Parker easily adapts to Sidney's home in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Coping with Sidney Mason is another matter. She must supercharge her wits to keep up with the famous writer's demands. During the ensuing months, the two women discover just how intrisically their lives are connected. Past and present merge into reality when Grammie Mason speaks from the grave and at last reveals the true nature of a great-grandmother's legacy.

Have you had periods in your life when everything seemed to be going right, the future looked rosy, you were prosperous and happiness seemed to saturate your whole being? Did it seem as though you were in the spring of life with a promising future when suddenly some destructive force thrust sorrow and despair upon you and every flourishing sprig of hope was crushed by life’s Blackberry Winter? How can any woman lose the most important person to her and still have a meaningful, happy life? Mattie Posey struggles to achieve this and out of desperation agrees to marry an older man, who she admittedly does not love. Grief has dominated her life for the past eight years and she has finally made the decision to marry John Mayo in spite of the fact that she can never give her heart to anyone. He is very understanding, but eventually wearies of trying to compete with a dead man for Mattie‘s affection. BLACKBERRY WINTER continues the true-life story of the Author’s grandparents who were first introduced to you in her book, LEAVE ME WHERE I LIE. Actual events have been fictionalized to create an intriguing story while it still accurately records the course of the lives of Mattie “Parilee” Posey Mayo and her family. You will anxiously follow the romance of Wade Posey who falls in love with a beautiful woman from Ireland and makes plans to marry her in spite of the objections of his children. He is devastated when he learns facts about her that he must consider before asking her to marry him. You will share the joys of Mattie and her family as they thrive in the Roaring Twenties and will also feel their pain as they endure the hardships of The Great Depression of the early thirties and the deaths of some of the people closest to them.

Emotionally neglected by her mother, abandoned by her father, Mattie O’Rourke spent her childhood starved for the one thing she thought she’d never find: love. When her mother dies and, at twenty-two, she finds herself completely without ties of any kind, Mattie takes a chance at ending her loneliness and moves to a tiny coastal Florida town. At the Suwannee Swifty convenience store, a sea change envelops her. Mattie O’Rourke sees Proteus Nicholas Blue and their fate is sealed after only a few shy, stolen glances. Nick walks into Mattie’s life having fled his own. A lifelong fisherman from a remote island off the coast, Nick is haunted by the certain knowledge that the sea will be the death of him (as it has been for all the Blue men) and he has resolved to leave it behind. But as Nick and Mattie settle into an intimacy that both comforts and surprises them, Nick feels the inextricable pull of the waxing moon’s tide and the siren’s call of the dolphins that, Blue legend has it, are his brethren. And so it is that Mattie, who only months before felt that happiness would never find her, returns with Nick to the island home that nurtured him and finds herself embraced by a large and loving family and an alluring and sensual landscape. Life on Lethe is transforming for Mattie. But Nick always knew that the sea would claim him, and all of Mattie’s love cannot prevent the tragedy that is their destiny. Moving and enchanting, Remembering Blue is a lush story of love, loss, and the mythic power of the ocean, told in an elegant and passionate voice that could only come from Connie May Fowler. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Her mother wants her to marry a man whose name she doesn’t know. Today. Mattie Cameron is only 15 years old and playing with the children when a man comes courting. In fear, she marries him that very day, knowing nothing of what to expect from marriage. Her changed status alters her relationships with family and friends, while childbirth strains her connection with her difficult mother. Will Mattie find love and security with a man who was once a stranger? Mattie’s Story is the first of the Settler's Stories novels by Margaret A. Westlie. Vulnerable yet resolute and tough-minded, Mattie will draw you in. Read Mattie’s Story and follow Mattie as she changes from a girl to a woman.