For the first time, we are announcing finalists in our book awards categories prior to the announcement of our winners at the 2025 Fall Gathering (Writing Retreat) at Rock Springs Ranch on Sunday, October 5. This has been quite an undertaking. We are grateful to all of the individuals who volunteered to serve on our reading committees. ​

This novel challenges any reader who picks it up, and I invite you to do so. Using an unlikely narrative device, authors Warren Ashworth and Susan Kander tell the century-long story of a house through a dialog between the house itself and a portrait hanging on the wall in the dining room. It took me a couple of chapters (they’re short) to get comfortable with this storytelling ploy, but once I was, I raced through the novel.

The house, called Ambleside, actually exists in Newton, Kansas. The portrait subject, Mrs. S. Peale, is fictitious, though the artist who painted her was not. Through a healthy dose of willing suspension of disbelief, we listen to a conversation begun between the house and the woman in the portrait. The house can see the world outside (through its windows) but has only limited awareness of its insides. Mrs. Peale, mistakenly called Mrs. Speale by the generations of family who live there, can only see what is before her, which is almost exclusively the dining room. Yet all of the 20th Century (and parts of the centuries before and after) pass through the house as world events affect the residents and visitors, and the world arrives in many ways in tiny Newton, which grows as well during the novel.

At the beginning of their dialog, Ambleside is almost childlike and asks Mrs. Peale to explain what is happening in the small part of the world outside it can see and about the people who live within it. Mrs. Peale is a bit of a scold, but she brings her understanding of the conversations she overhears and what she had experienced of the world before her death to answer Ambleside’s questions. (Just go with it.) In a way, it is very much a conversation for our age of instantaneous communication with people we will never meet. Yet as the novel progresses, both characters show growth. Both change through their interactions and in their understanding. They are true, round characters in a story.
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Like many long friendships, there comes a parting. But there is a happy gift for the reader in the last two pages.

What are you reading? Help us lift and share the good news about Kansas literature. Tag your book loves and reviews on social media with #ReadLocalKS and submit here to be posted on the Kansas Authors Club website. ​

Member Gretchen Eick (Wichita) shares a current Kansas read by Paul Lamb (Overland Park). 

--Gretchen Cassel Eick, author of Finding Duncan,
The Set Up: 1984, They Met at Wounded Knee,
Dissent in Wichita, Where is Ana Amara?,
Maybe Crossings, & Dark Crossings 
 

What are you reading? Help us lift and share the good news about Kansas literature. Tag your book loves and reviews on social media with #ReadLocalKS and submit here to be posted on the Kansas Authors Club website. ​

​​​If you have news of writing events that would be of interest to all Kansas Authors Club members, or if you are a member (dues current) who would like to announce an achievement, please submit your news via this form.

Order from IngramSpark or bluecedarpress.com
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February 1 Reginald D Jarrell, Finding Myron: an adopted son’s search for his birth father
A Black man adopted by extended family and raised in a loving home is haunted by questions about the birth father that no one will tell him about. A haunting memoir about the power of DNA connection and the persistent need to know your roots.

Jarrell’s story will be helpful for adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents, as well as youth groups and classes in congregations and social studies classes.

​Retail Price: $20.00
ISBNs: 978-1-958728-16-1 (paper) &  978-1-958728-17-8 (ebook)
LCCN: 2023949737

March 1 G. C. Eick, Where is Ana Amara? [an international thriller]
When a Syrian journalist disappears from the London home she shares with her British partner while investigating the treatment of asylum seekers by Britain’s Ultra Party, her partner seeks help from four renegade Members of Parliament and the community of Syrian immigrants. Their search for Ana leads them to an international adoption network, Britain’s retired chemical weapons facility, and a runaway Saudi princess and provokes an international scandal.

Retail price: $20.00
ISBNs: 978-1-958728-18-5 (paper) & 978-1-958728-19-2 (ebook)
LCCN: 2024930300
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March 15 Aida Dziho-Sator, For Me, the War Begins in an Elevator (poems)
Aida Dziho-Sator was a child when the Bosnian War began in 1992. She has since become an internationally traveled professor  of English Literature who somehow manages to also write exquisite poetry while teaching, applying for travel grants, and raising two children. Her poems are about relationships, memory, being a woman, and internal and external wars. They are truthful, powerful, and even funny.

Retail Price: $15.00
ISBNs: 978-1-958728-21-5 (paper)  &  978-1-958728-20-8 (ebook)
LCCN: 2024930887

April 30 The Death Project: An Anthology for the Living
36 authors from different ethnicities and religions reflect in prose and poetry on losing loved ones and finding a way forward. Includes information on how different religions handle death and how people have coped with deaths from war, from police violence, suicide, murder, AIDS, dementia, illness.

Perspectives include a mortician, a New Age spiritualist, a police officer, and women and men from around the world. New edition with added material. A book for congregations, funeral homes, and all those living with loss. Profits from will go to international health care workers.

Retail price: $15.99
ISBNs 978-1-958728-22-2 (paper) &  978-1-958728-23-9 (ebook)
LCCN: forthcoming
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June 1 Paul Lamb, Parent Imperfect (a novel)
Pressed by Kelly, newly married Curt and Kelly agree to adopt a child. But Kelly struggles with depression and memories of his family’s abusive rejection of him because he is gay and Curt is uncertain if he can love their unusual son. With the help of Curt’s parents, they work at it, sustained by the cabin in the Ozarks that has for generations been a lodestone for all of the men in Curt’s family. Can they be a family? Can the cabin’s magic include two outsiders, Kelly and their son Clarkson? A moving story of loving and making family in the Twenty-First Century. The sequel to One-Match Fire (2022).

Retail price: $19.99
ISBNs 978-1-958728-24-6 (paper) & 978-1-958728-23-9 (ebook)
LCCN: forthcoming
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June 15 The Love Book: Collected Shorts on Love
Selected poetry, short stories, and memoirs about different kinds of love and loving for your favorite persons. These pieces were selected by judges from a contest held by Blue Cedar Press in 2024.

​Retail Price: $20.00
ISBNs: 978-1-958728-26-0  (paper) & 978-1-958728-27-7 (ebook)
LCCN: forthcoming 

Member Paul Lamb has an article about copyrighting his book that would be of interest to publishing authors. 

Read it here.

Wichita's indie press, Blue Cedar Press, has published 5 books in 2022, 4 by Kansas authors.
Order from bluecedarpress.com, B&N online, or your favorite bookstore.
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One-Match Fire, a novel by Paul Lamb (Paul Lamb's stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including The Adroit Journal, Aethlon, Foliate Oak, MOON Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, Magnolia Review (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Little Patuxent Review, Platte Valley Review, and others.) For David the cabin evoked memories of his father. For his son it was family and sanctuary. All that was wrong was fixable when they were at the cabin. But would this weekend change everything? A story of fathers and sons and the work of loving despite profound differences.) Oct. '22
ISBN: 978-1-958728-04-8 (paper) $20
ISBN: 978-1-958728-03-1 (ebook) $6.99
LCCN: 2022945368
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Today, we welcome Paul Lamb, a new KAC member from Overland Park (D-2). 

As is our custom, we'll let Paul tell us a bit about himself: 


I have a cabin in Missouri, at the edge of the Ozark Mountains. The cabin waits most of two hours away from my home in suburban Kansas City, and while I visit every chance I can, it is an undertaking to get there, engage in chores or foolishness, and then get home in a single day.
I can’t remember when the seed was planted to have a cabin in a forest, but I suspect it was during my summer nights at Scout camp, when I was first serenaded by whippoorwills.

When the cabin became a reality, it dismayed some of my friends. One in particular was baffled by how I could profit from rocky, scrub forest too thick to plow and too thin to timber. I told him I intended to write at my cabin. “You can’t pay your bills with writing, Thoreau,” he had scoffed. This exchange made it into my first novel.

The irony is that I don’t write there. The setting seems ideal, doesn’t it? A one-room cabin with a shady porch overlooking a sparkling lake, at the end of a road no one needs to come down, deep in a trackless forest. The only sounds that intrude are the occasional lowing of cattle from the ranch to the east or maybe a distant chainsaw. I have a chair and a table and pencils and notebooks there. I have uninterrupted solitude. I have everything a writer needs, and yet I cannot write at my cabin.

I’ve tried. Repeatedly. I’ve schlepped out there many times with my laptop and back-up battery and installed myself at my table. Notes at hand. Rested and ready. And all I feel is a desire to go outside, into the forest, down to the lake, along the paths. I want to see what bird is calling, whose shadow is floating across the ground, what I heard scampering through the leaf litter. I want to feel the sun on my skin or listen to the rain on the roof. Stare into the orange flames of a campfire. I want to throw a line in the water or watch for a beaver emerging from the lodge across the lake.

In short, when I’m there I want to do all these things that keep me from entering the fictional universe where my characters go about their lives and let me observe them.
Instead, I write at home. I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I call it a win. Originally, I was writing freelanced feature articles for newspapers and magazines. Sometimes it paid, but mostly it paid in bylines. I developed a rapport with several editors who regularly took my work, but they’d move on, and the new editors brought their own writers. My work grew unfocused; I would write about anything that would get me published. But during this feature work I was also quietly writing fiction, practicing my craft, and wondering when I would dare try submitting a story.

At a writers conference, the editor of a literary journal turned to me and, completely unbidden, asked what kind of writing I did. I told him about a story I had recently finished full of introspection and regret. He said to send it along, so I did. And he took it. I had finally become a published fiction writer.

About this time I had completed a master’s degree in English and Writing from the University of Missouri at Kansas City. I had pursued this purely as an indulgence for myself, still reeling from my misguided and soulless undergrad degree in business administration. I didn’t get the master’s to make myself more employable but to immerse myself in what I liked best and what two prescient high school English teachers had told me I should aspire to. I’m glad I did.

I continued to write features, and get them published, but the personal satisfaction that came from fiction grew, and I eventually abandoned feature work altogether. In my short stories I controlled the universe. I could write about whatever I wanted, go in any direction I wanted, and reach my own conclusions.

Most of my published fiction is what would be considered literary. Character focused, with human emotions at stake. I’ve dabbled a little in very light fantasy and even some speculative stuff, but I’ll leave that to the professionals and continue to write what seems to be my calling.

Among these stories was one I wrote about a little cabin in the Ozarks. It was supposed to be a one-off, a sort of guide for what my children might do with my cabin when I was gone. I thought the story worked well – it was eventually published – and I certainly knew the setting thoroughly. Then I thought maybe I could write another story about the cabin. That one worked well too and was also published. These stories brought a momentum with them, and soon I had a half dozen set at the cabin or about the characters connected to it. I began to wonder if I had the beginnings of a story cycle, though a friend told me that no, it was a novel. That novel became One-Match Fire.

I’m retired now from being a wage slave in the vulgar business world where I had worked to pay my bills but had never sought a career. My children are grown and flown, leading fulfilling lives. I am free to pursue writing my stories as much as I want, and so I do.

​​Welcome, Paul!