My Books
I can’t think of a time when I was not reading or writing something. Below are some projects suspended now in print, but whose stories and words continue to form new truths and old realities.
IN DEFENSE OF SERENDITY: WALKING THE CAMINO DE SANTIAGO
In poems, reflections and photos, the author carries you along with her on the famous Camino de Santiago
pilgrim walk in Spain, highlighting history and comradery, the centuries- old ghosts and ruins of ancient rulers and the faithful , and the sheer magic of walking a 487-mile trek, waking each morning with no obligation other than to buckle on backpack, lace up hiking boots, and walk.
In the Wake of Traders and colonists. Circumnavigating Africa. Pt. 1: Madeira to SOUTH AFRICA’ AND pt 2: nAMIBIA TO cAPE VERDE
n two volumes. documenting a voyage across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, up the Sea of Aqaba and through the Red Sea, and then over two months of stopping at ports while circumnavigating 16 African countries, the author uses poems, photographs, staggered reflections, and collected quotes to reflect on the history and daily realities of the fascinating and challenged African continent, the birthplace of humanity, 200,000 years ago, its ancient kingdoms and brutal history of slavery, the residue of European and South Asian colonialism, and the fierce perseverance and beauty of its diverse peoples and places today.
Vol 1 Available at Amazon.com/Wake-Traders-Colonists-Circumnavigating-Madeira/dp/B0CKBBMVMN?ref_=ast_author_dp
Vol 2 Available at: https://www.amazon.com/Wake-Traders-Colonists-Circumnavigating-Namibia/dp/B0CKB67JLH?ref_=ast_author_dp
Around (Half) the World by Boat
Follow along as a hardcore world traveler, whose previous solo adventures have been centered around hiking, biking, swimming, and economical hostel-staying and backpacking decides to make her first ever cruise , an educational around-the-world-by-the southern-route 144-day "Grand Voyage." Enjoy her commentary and detailed photos as the ship journeys through the Caribbean to Dominica, St. Lucia, and Devil's Island (French Guiana); to Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, and on to Antarctica; then back though the nautically-challenging seas of the Drake Passage and Cape Horn to the glacial seaways of Patagonian Argentina and Chile; and across the Pacific to Easter Island, Tahiti, Pitcairn Island, the Cook Islands, and the Kingdom of Tonga. As the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020 begins to close ports, even as the ship and its 1200 passengers and crew stay healthy, the cruise docks in Auckland and Bay of Islands, New Zealand, and Sydney and Cairns, Australia; before circling the Northern Territories and Western Australia, and "halfway around the world," a compulsory, if premature disembarkment.
Available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08K4SZ13F
The Stories: A Novella
The loss of her parents when Susanna is six, and her adoption and upbringing by an estranged relative, leaves her as a stranger to her only sibling, “DC,” a generation older and separated from her for most of their lives by geography and family secrets. Decades later, confronted with the broken pieces of her elderly brother's legal career and his fatal illness, she struggles to understand who he is, where his life fits in with the never tested version of it she had always believed, and what her role must be in conserving his story. The tale moves with the fast-talking, raconteur powers of the brother, through the corrosive and often comically inept courtrooms of Texas from the 50s to the aughts, to the sister's literary and politically -drenched New York City classrooms in 1968, and the heartbreaking incidents she witnesses in her later work with immigrant detention centers, to plummet the meaning of truth, legend and basic humanity.
Terrafina and Earth Silk
This collection of eloquent and timely poems speak of the "minute particulars", from Brazilian favelas and forgotten First Peoples, to WWI racial discrimination to plastic pollution in the oceans and starry nights in the Southern Hemisphere, from hiking with a 6-year old to traversing the Camino de Santiago, Inca Trail and Grand Canyon, from the emphatic creations of the artist Archibald Motley to the recurring emptiness of a single women's dreams.
The Only Thing I wAS FIT FOR: A NOVEL (r)
As a woman packs up her house and sorts through its history, she follows her imagination and the paper trail of long-buried secrets to dislodge the grip of memory and master the words for deeply ingrained abuses and assuaging joys. She sifts through the attributes of wood, wind, snow, sea and place to celebrate the power of family and relationships, to delve the wisdom in world cultures, to document the pathos of ruthless local and national events, and to arrive at an acceptance of solitude amid hopes for a more gracious and embracive future society.
tHE REST IS SILENCE: POEMS BY FRANCES GARRETT CONNELL
The richly evocative images, musical language and diversified and creative stories of these poems capture and expand on family histories and fantasies, laser-destroying illness and magical health, spiritual inquiry and persistent puzzles. Graciously, firmly, they speak for the raconteurs of several generations, as well as act as a bellwether for the next.
WITH ONE FOOL LEFT IN THE WORLD, NO ONE IS STRANDED: Scenes from another afghanistan
This book charts the life of two young American teachers immersed in an Afghan village, and later in Kabul, from 1973-1976, before the onset of decades of conflict. In this turn back to the memories coded and buried in those years, and in the flashes to more recent events and reflections, the book portrays stories, scenes, people and realities long lost.
In the minute particulars and in the large, political and cultural strokes which made up that complex country of hospitable people who shaped the writer's life in unpredictable ways, one finds the seeds which grew to shape a country, a region, an endless war, and which now impact a new millennium.
down rivers for windfall night: a novel
In this lyrical and sweeping story of one woman's journey to understand the sadness of her past, the fragility of a dying relationship, and the pending death of her father, the reader travels through Celtic myths and Teutonic tales, small town and rural Texas at the turn of the century, suburban St. Louis and student-traveled Ireland in the pangs of the trans- formative 60's and 70's, and beyond.
The story of several generations of a family-- as seen through the wondering and wandering of it youngest daughter-- uses dreams, stories, trips, journals, and letters to trace the power of commitment and consciousness, memory and forgetting, reality and dream, mythology and religion, and mental illness and vision. As the Arthur family gathers to hold a vigil beside the dying father, James, their voices drift in and out over 80 years and two continents to recall their individual lives, as Yvonne, the narrator, discovers her final role .
children kept from the sun:excerpts from an afghan journal 1973-1976
Photographs and reflections from a lost era of an enchanted land and gracious peoples. Here is a masterful and breathtaking collection of photographs--faces, places and poses-- from a lost and enchanted land, Afghanistan in the early 1970's.
between the shadow and the soul: random poems
Spanning images and voices from around the globe, as well as from the tiny, muted corners of a woman's dreams, this new collection spins and stretches and soothes with its vibrant and teasing language and rich stories, as well as its political savvy and dense imagination.