For the third time, I am honored and privileged to have a story selected for publication in a Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group anthology.

The new anthology is due out in the spring.

This year’s prompt was “WRITING A WRONG,” which kicked off a furious discussion among member about the meaning of the prompt.

It was not RIGHTING a wrong,” but WRITING a wrong, so a story about some wrong committed somewhere by someone. It was a challenge because we really want to write “hero” stories, that is righting a wrong, not a story about something that is a wrong.

My story is called “MISS AGNES WHITNEY HALL DIED AT AGE 83.”

The title comes from a newspaper headline I saw on Facebook in a collection of weekly newspaper pages from Oswego County/Fulton N.Y., where I lived for a while, being digitized for preservation. I jotted the headline down for some reason.

The story I wrote takes elements from the 1960s Civil Rights movement, a time when I was teenager,   the U.S.  interstate highway system, an environmental issue, and the loss of a black neighborhood in a predominantly white city.

Addressing these issues in the story is Cassie Taylor, a mid-20s black newspaper reporter who is shaken out of her self-satisfied lethargy – she wants to be famous but not to work for it. The discovery of Agnes Whitney Hall’s life gives Cassie a chance to “write a wrong,” even as part of the wrong is her own.

In the 2023 Anthology WRITING ACROSS AMERICA I was honored to have selected my story, THE PIANO PLAYER’S GIFT.

The story includes a rapid road trip from Central Maine to Boston and poses the question: What happens  when Dan  finds out that his silent, withdrawn and dead for a decade grandmother left him her house and that in her youth played piano is a strip club.

The elements of this story are based on my life. When  I worked in Central Maine we often took daylong trips to Boston for theater, visits or baseball games. The travel portions of this story reflect those trips.

The other part, the grandmother, is based on a photo of my own grandmother.  She is standing in a kitchen with an expression of loss and fear on her face. She was  suffering from dementia in a time before Alzheimer’s was even a common term for the condition. Best to my knowledge, though, she did not play piano in a strip club.

Find the collection here:

Writing Across America: 2023 GLVWG Anthology: Members, GLVWG, Ochs, Christopher, Sukley, Bernadette: 9781733678629: Amazon.com: Books

Also look for the  award-winning 2021 edition:

The Greater Lehigh Valley Writer’s Group has received word that  the 2021 Anthology “Writes of Passage”  was awarded First Place in the 2022 Bookfest contest.

I was honored to have my short story DANNY’S B-29 selected for the anthology.

It’s the story about a teen-ager left alone to build a swimming pool in his backyard with cement blocks, a few bags of cement and blue paint. The effort to build the pool brings out harsh memories about his best friend, Danny. The pool becomes a memorial to his friend.

For this story, the swimming pool is real. When I was 14 or 15, my friend Jimmy  Morrison and I found  ourselves trying to construct an inground swimming pool out of a large hole in the ground,  some cinder blocks and cement.

Writes of Passage: 2021 GLVWG Anthology – Kindle edition by Members, GLVWG, Evans, John, Giunta, Phil, Grieco Mattaboni, Suzanne, Ochs, Christopher D., Grieco Mattaboni, Suzanne. Literature