Who by Fire wins Notable Literary Fiction Award

I want to share this news with my friends and, one can always hope, readers—though that last is a tough one. I certainly have kept in mind and heart and action Grace Paley's advice to the artist: "Keep your day job," and I hold in my heart Tillie Olsen's words of solace from her brilliant book Silences: 

“Literary history and the present are dark with silences; some the silences for years of our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all.

“These are not natural silences, that necessary for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural; the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature.”

But every now and then, one can take a measure of courage to continue.

I salute all of you who read, all of you who support the arts and all of you who struggle alone in the silence of your attic, in the breath of your spirit.

My publisher announces the news that Who by Fire has won Shelf Unbound's Notable Literary Fiction Award.

See the margin of this website for the full view of the Notable Fiction Award.