A.J. Franks, Stephen T. McCrea, Leah Stenson (Inkwater Press)

Join us for our monthly reading by authors from Inkwater Press!

Keep You Cold: Chilling Tales by A.J. Franks: What if you received disturbing glimpses of a fate you couldn’t change? Have you ever wondered what thoughts might run through your head just before those final moments of death? How does it feel to wake up and find a dark entity hovering over you, only to discover you can’t move your body and escape? Uncover the darker side of humanity and the supernatural in this genre‑blending collection of original short stories that will scare, shock, and surprise. Stay warm if you can. It’s about to get cold.

Jerk Radar: How To Stop a Bad Relationship Before It Starts by Stephen T. McCrea: Have you ever gone out with someone who seemed perfect at first, but ended up being a nightmare? Do you find yourself falling in love but ending up feeling disrespected and used? Would you like to make sure that something like that never happens to you (or someone you care about) again? If so, this book is written for you.

There are lots of books about how to tell if you’re in an abusive relationship. This book will keep you from getting into one in the first place. “Jerk Radar” will help you see how a Jerk takes advantage of common cultural expectations and romantic myths to blind you to his true intentions. It will give you concrete ways to test out his intentions in the course of a normal conversation. And the “Jerk Radar Quiz” provides an effective tool to screen every partner for Jerky tendencies well before obviously selfish behavior emerges.

Full of true stories from abuse survivors, “Jerk Radar” pulls no punches in exposing what Jerks do and why we fall for it. This is a useful, down-to-earth, practical guide to avoiding a bad relationship instead of recovering from one. Read it today—it just may change your life!

Reverberations from Fukushima: 50 Japanese Poets Speak Out, edited by Leah Stenson: A timely collection of poems, commentary, and essays about the first nuclear disaster of the 21st Century. These powerful poems by 50 Japanese poets address the accident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant on March 11, 2011. The poems plead for restoration of the balance between humans and the environment, provide eloquent testimony to the consequences of breaking with tradition and the cycle of life, present prophetic visions of a nuclear future that has sadly come to pass, lament the loss of home and livelihood, portray the exploited and the exploiters of human life bound together in a hellish cycle of destruction, unveil the lies fed to the Japanese public, and decry how the nation was “brainwashed” into accepting nuclear power.

This anthology includes a preface by editor Leah Stenson and commentary by her co-editor, Asao Sarukawa Aroldi, as well as commentary by Hisao Suzuki and Jotaro Wakamatsu, both editors and contributors to the full-length work on which this abridged anthology is based-Farewell to Nuclear, Welcome to Renewable Energy: A Collection of Poems by 218 Poets (Tokyo: Coal Sack Publishing Company, 2012). Reverberations from Fukushima also features essays by David Krieger, poet and founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and by Francesca Giovannini, nuclear policy expert and affiliate to the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University, and to the Managing the Atom (MTA) project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University. This anthology will help readers gain a deeper understanding of the Fukushima nuclear disaster from a humanistic rather than technological or political perspective, while at the same time, enhancing their appreciation of contemporary Japanese poetry.

AJ Franks is a Portland-based author and playwright. His most current works include Keep You Cold: Chilling Tales and the stage play, Bereavement, which debuted at the 2015 Fertile Ground Festival. He was a semi-finalist in FiLMLaB’s 2013 Script-to-Screen contest with his original short screenplay, Sometime over Coffee.

Steve McCrea, MS, has worked for over 20 years with survivors of domestic abuse and their children. He has participated in many local collaborative projects on domestic abuse, and has provided community trainings on working effectively with domestic abuse survivors. He currently works as an advocate for children in the foster care system. He has volunteered for the past 9 years as a facilitator for an online abuse survivor community, whose members contributed most of the stories in the book.

After graduating with an M.A. in English Literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook, Leah Stenson worked as an assistant editor in New York City for Hawthorne Books and School Library Journal. In 1977, she moved to Tokyo to pursue a spiritual quest to deepen her understanding of Buddhism and spent 16 years teaching English at a Japanese university and a women’s junior College. In 1993 she moved to Portland, Oregon where she served for several years as the managing director of Oregon Peace Institute while continuing to do freelance editorial work. She is an actively practicing Buddhist and a member of the Interfaith Council of Greater Portland. She serves on the board of Friends of William Stafford and hosts the Studio Series, a monthly poetry reading and open mic.

Leah has published essays, editorials and feature articles for various newspapers and magazines and coauthored a textbook for Japanese students of English in addition to publishing poetry in literary journals and magazines. Her chapbook, Heavenly Body, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2011 and “The Turquoise Bee and Other Love Poems” is scheduled to be published by the same press in 2014. She served as a regional editor for Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2013).