Boiling Lake (On Voyage): short stories - Paperback

by Sharyn O'Mara (Illustrator), Sharon White (Author)

The very short stories in Boiling Lake (On Voyage) inhabit the voices of travelers from the past, present, future - and other worlds. The tales take their language from exploration narratives and the terrain of the heart. Written with the authority and inventiveness of an award-winning poet, these tales challenge and unsettle the reader just as foreign landscapes force us to reexamine our identity in the world.

Praise for Boiling Lake (On Voyage)

"With mad singing in strange lands and familiar places, these tiny stories speak a language of dark lyricism. Unleashing the unconscious, White dares to venture through a tapestry of nightmare memories to illuminate strange moments of reality bordered by pure beauty. The book flies fast and free on the wings of words lit by the light on the moon." -Aimee Parkison, author, The Petals of Your Eyes

"Boiling Lake (On Voyage) is that place of in-betweens, mergings, undefinable spaces where the familiar rubs up against and engages the exotic and unknown: the so-called "human" world and the natural one; the America of strip malls and the America as it appears to a Mexican immigrant; a series of islands described from the viewpoint of voyagers across the temporal spectrum of history and the inhabitants of those islands; a woman's body in a catalog of materialist and feminist protestations. These voyages are described in a series of blunt, uncompromising prose pieces, in search of an unknown destination, a "fertile country inhabited by sweet dispositioned savages who can be harnessed and used to good advantage." The striking energy and territory of Boiling Lake (On Voyage) is a deeply conflicted cultural, metaphysical, and psycho-sexual space, a myriad, cubistic series of personae and forgotten voices that make our post-natural world both new again and hauntingly known." -Sam Witt, poet, Sunflower Brother and Everlasting Quail

Author Biography

Sharon White's book, Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award in creative nonfiction. She is also the author of two collections of poetry, Eve & Her Apple and Bone House. Her memoir, Field Notes, A Geography of Mourning, received the Julia Ward Howe Prize, Honorable Mention, from the Boston Authors Club. Boiling Lake was a finalist for the Iowa Prize in Fiction. Some of her other awards include the Italo Calvino prize in Fabulist Fiction, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, the Leeway Foundation Award for Achievement, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in many magazines and journals including ISLE, Ecozon@, Isotope, Appalachia, Kalliope and North American Review. She teaches writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.