Love to the Spirits, Winner of the Independent Publishers' Book Award for Short Story Fiction, 2005

Presenting a diverse range of authentic characters, the sixteen stories in Love to the Spirits are unified by a common theme: the characters' efforts to complete perilous passages in their lives across a span of ice dangerously thin. The collection opens with Jenna, an endearing twelve-year-old girl learning to hustle pool from her grandfather in West Texas, and ends with two feuding brothers in a rickety airplane off North Carolina's Outer Banks spreading their mother's ashes over the water. In between, we meet a gravedigger baffled by a body that mysteriously resurfaces after storms and a dying con man who sells his "services"---a promise to convey messages to departed loved ones---to the residents of a nursing home. A bus driver is terrorized by an armed hijacker. A musician with a stolen mule seeks refuge in his estranged wife's back yard. A hungry child draws strength from the power of a family story relating how his great-grandfather survived being adraft at sea. Although the stories are told in a variety of voices, they all illuminate people in moments of crisis and transition, who make their journeys with subtle, often comic, grace.