Coming September 2011 from Texas Christian University Press

ISBN 978-0-87565-437-9

The Story: It’s 2003 with the country embroiled in a war in Iraq. Nineteen-year-old Jason Sanborn feels lost. He dropped out of high school just two months shy of graduation, and now his former classmates are off to college, the military, or minimum-wage jobs. The only pressing date on his calendar is an upcoming appearance in court on an assault charge, and when his over-achieving, beloved girlfriend, Lisa, departs for UT Austin to study premed, Jason can hardly abide his hometown of Mesquite. When his mother died two years back, his father Burl, fifteen years sober, fell off the wagon briefly, but he has since met a new wife, Lily, in AA. Lily brings a daughter into the house: Emily, an eleven-year-old know-it-all whose existence irritates Jason. Three days before Jason’s court date, he gets a “we can still be friends” letter from Lisa. Heartbroken and determined to convince Lisa of his worth, Jason decides to hitchhike to Austin. Since Emily also hates the new family circle, she is desperate to rejoin her father, a UT professor, so she demands to accompany Jason on his mission. When Burl and Lily find their children missing, Lily puts out an Amber Alert for Emily, accusing Jason of abducting her daughter. The frantic search that ensues threatens to destroy the tentative household that Burl and Lily have just begun to establish, and the end of the journey brings surprises for both the children and their parents.

Advance Praise:
“Steplings is a tender and deeply touching story that deftly unwinds the tale of an endearing young man’s coming-of-age and first love with such pitch-perfect dialogue and engrossing plot that its characters leap off of the page and into your heart. Steplings is a novel as timeless as it is unforgettable.” ~Sarah Bird, author of How Perfect Is That, The Yokota Officers’ Club, and The Gap Year.

“With Steplings, Charlie Smith has flawlessly captured the experience of being young, misunderstood, and full of longing. He manages to craft a tale that is at once gorgeously heartbreaking and a page-turning adventure. His ear for dialogue and lyrical prose are irresistible, as are his complex, loveable Jason and Emily—these aren’t characters in a novel, they’re people I know. Smith has accomplished that rarest of literary feats: to leave the reader on the final page equal parts exhilarated at having finished a gripping work of fiction, and forlorn at not being able to spend more time in the world he crafted.” ~Melissa Kirsch, author of The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything.

“Launched with scenes and exchanges of dialogue that are laugh-out-loud funny, C.W. Smith’s Steplings maintains the rare wit but sobers up in a hurry. A nineteen-year-old boy, grieving over a first love’s broken heart, and his eleven-year-old stepsister, yearning for her prior home and family, take off hitchhiking in the middle of the night and share an adventure that is hair-raising, tender, and wise. Here is an accomplished novelist at the top of his game.” ~Jan Reid, author of Comanche Sundown and The Bullet Meant for Me.

Mary Powell, author Auslander and Galveston Rose, describes Smith’s prose as “rich and sophisticated, yet accessible, and the dialogue is right on….Though Jason and Emily grapple with universal teen issues, their troubles feel like uncharted territory when expressed through pitch-perfect narrative voices. Steplings is a friendly, hopeful, humorous, and thoughtful book about growing up,” said Powell, though “watching Jason self-destruct is akin to watching someone in a horror film go down into the basement.”

Kate Lehrer, author of Confessions of a Bigamist, says that Steplings “touches our hearts with the struggles and failures that are a part of finding our way, whatever our age.  With both sensitivity and a strong narrative thrust, the book portrays the tugs between generations, couples, and, most especially those conflicts within ourselves as we come into adulthood, which often takes an entire lifetime.  C.W. Smith’s deftly written book is compelling on many levels.”

Lee K. Abbott, author of the short-story collections Dreams of Distant Lives, Living After Midnight, and All Things, All at Once has written, “Lordy, Steplings is a novel you read with increasing awe and dread, for C. W. Smith, page by page by artful page, is laying bare the illusions by which the American family sustains–and deceives–itself. In the matters of romantic love, marriage, community, school, class, and work, we’re in peril, not least from our benighted yearnings for grace and harmony. Mr. Smith has used his great compassion and his enviable gifts as a storyteller without peer to detail what so animated Updike in the Rabbit series of novels: our innocence and our sentimentality for what never was. You won’t read a more achingly beautiful book this season.”

C.W. SMITH’S novels are Thin Men of Haddam, Country Music, The Vestal Virgin Room, Buffalo Nickel, Hunter’s Trap, Understanding Women, Gabriel’s Eye and Purple Hearts. He has also authored a memoir, Uncle Dad. His short stories have appeared in The Southwest Review, descant, Mademoiselle, Cimarron Review, American Short Fiction, American Literary Review, Sunstone Review, The Missouri Review, Carolina Quarterly, Quartet and in his story collection, Letters From the Horse Latitudes. Smith is a Dedman Family Distinguished Professor at Southern Methodist University. He belongs to PEN American Center, The Author’s Guild, and the Texas Institute of Letters. He was a Dobie-Paisano Fellow at the University of Texas and has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Follow Steplings on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/Steplingsthenovel

http://www.cwsmiththeauthor.com

=====================================================================================
* if you would like to no longer receive these emails, please reply with the word “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line and you will be removed immediately.

scroll to the end for more sharing options

downloadable press release • right-click to download print-ready photo

Dallas, TX  – In a modern-day battle of good v. evil, psychological thriller author Melanie Wells wages a fight against adult illiteracy through on online campaign called “I Told Two Friends.” By rallying readers and do-gooders across the country, Wells hopes to raise $100,000 for ProLiteracy, an organization whose mission is to end adult illiteracy worldwide, by donating 100 percent of her profits from book sales.

Book lovers are invited to visit IToldTwoFriends.com. There they will find an invitation to help fight illiteracy through a chain reaction. They are asked to buy two copies of the psychological thriller, My Soul to Keep, by Melanie Wells and give them to two friends and encourage those friends to also join the campaign by visiting the website and buying two books for two other friends …and so on and so on until thousands of dollars are raised to help eager adults learn to read these sentences.

“The ability to read is taken for granted by so many of us — we are completely unaware of the millions of people who struggle with this basic life skill.  Addressing literacy is one of the few simple things you can do in the world which can truly make an enormous difference,” says Wells of the inspiration behind the campaign.

The goal of the I Told Two Friends campaign is to sell 100,000 copies of Wells’ books. For every copy sold at retail price, Wells will donate 100 percent of her profits to ProLiteracy.

“Partnerships such as this are so important to ProLiteracy’s mission to help adults learn to read, write and speak English,” says Lynne Jones, ProLiteracy’s vice president of development and membership. “Everyone who joins Melanie’s campaign will help profoundly change the lives of countless adults and their families.”

Wells encourages those who take part in the IToldTwoFriends.com effort to creatively record their efforts. Videos of the book exchanges and documentation of the books purchased will be published on the site. Prizes will be given along the way for most friends enlisted and most original documentation efforts.

According to the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, approximately 32 million adults in the U.S. fall into the lowest levels of literacy. They struggle to get and keep jobs, to help their children with homework, and to participate fully as citizens.

Readers can participate at www.IToldTwoFriends.com and www.proliteracy.org and can follow on Twitter at www.twitter.com/IToldTwoFriends.

About ProLiteracy

ProLiteracy, based in Syracuse, champions the power of literacy to improve the lives of adults and their families, communities, and societies. It works with adult new readers and learners, and with local and national organizations to help adults gain the reading, writing, math, computer, and English skills they need to be successful. ProLiteracy advocates on behalf of adult learners and the programs that serve them, provides training and professional development, and publishes materials used in adult literacy instruction. ProLiteracy has 1,200 member programs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and works with 125 nongovernmental international agencies.  For more information, please go to www.ProLiteracy.org and www.NewReadersPress.com.

About Melanie Wells

A native of the Texas panhandle, Melanie Wells is a licensed therapist, business owner, musician and author of the critically acclaimed Dylan Foster trilogy of psychological thrillers. Her debut psychological thriller, “When the Day of Evil Comes,” was released in 2005 and sold more than 25,000 copies in the first six months. “The Soul Hunter,” her subsequent book, followed in 2006. Her latest book, “My Soul to Keep,” was released in 2008 from Waterbrook Multnomah Publishers, a division of Random House.

Melanie holds masters degrees from both Dallas Theological Seminary and Our Lady of the Lake University, and has been in private practice as a counselor since 1992.

Since 1992, Wells has been in private practice as a counselor. She is the founder and director of The LifeWorks Group, a collaborative creative community of therapists based in Dallas, and is a clinical member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.

Wells currently lives and writes in Dallas. She is at work on her next novel.  See MelanieWells.com for more information.

=== if you would like to no longer receive these emails, please reply with the word “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line and you will be removed immediately. ===Meal

map • scroll to the end for more sharing options

downloadable press release

Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 9 a.m.-3 p.m. at the new Wyly Theatre in downtown Dallas Arts District

Presented by the Cultural Affairs Commission, City of Dallas and Dallas Area Cultural Advocacy Coalition

WHAT:

Arts Advocacy Day is an opportunity for everyone interested in the arts and arts education to learn how to successfully advocate for arts funding and how to create a greater awareness of the impact of arts and culture on a community.  The featured speaker is Douglas C. Sonntag, Director of Dance, National Endowment for the Arts.

There will be workshops and panel discussions in the morning dealing with advocacy and public relations techniques.  The cost for Advocacy Day is $35 and includes lunch and all workshops.

WHEN:

9:00 –   9:30    Registration

9:30 –   9:45    Welcome and Introductions

9:45 – 11:30    Panel Presentations

• New Media Marketing and Communication:  Anne Bothwell – KERA, Director Art&Seek, Jill Magnuson, Vice President Marketing and Communications, Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, Donna Harris, Owner/Publisher, Intownmix.

• Economic Impact of the Arts:  Mark Nerenhausen, CEO, Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, Phillip Jones, President/CEO, Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau, Larry Kivett,  Deloitte, LLP

11:30 – 12:30    Welcome by Mayor Tom Leppert

Lunch featuring Keynote Speaker, Douglas C. Sonntag

1:00 -    3:00    Private meetings with Dallas City Council members at City Hall

WHERE:

Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, Dallas Center for the Performing Arts
2403 Flora Street
Dallas, Texas 75201

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

Since 1997, Douglas C. Sonntag has served as the Director of Dance for the National Endowment for the Arts.. From 2004 to 2008 he was also the Director of the Office of National Initiatives where he supervised work on several signature Endowment programs. Previously, he served as program administrator and senior program specialist for the Arts Endowment’s Dance Program. From 1981-1986, Mr. Sonntag was general manager of the Repertory Dance Theatre in Salt Lake City, Utah as well as an associate instructor for the University of Utah’s Institute of Arts Administration and a staff specialist for the Department of Ballet. From 1980-81, Mr. Sonntag was the project director of the Utah Playwriting Conference, a joint project of the Sundance Institute and the Utah Arts Council.  He has served as a judge for the American College Dance Festival/Dance Magazine Awards, and as a panelist for the Utah Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation, and the Carlisle Project. He has spoken at and served on panels many organizations including Dance/USA, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the International Association of Blacks in Dance, and at the International Tanzmesse NRW in Dusseldorf, Germany, and the Monaco Dance Forum, Monte Carlo, Monaco. Mr. Sonntag attended the American College in Paris and the University of Utah graduating with a B.F.A. in Ballet and an M.F.A. in Theater with an emphasis in arts administration.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Register online at: www.brownpapertickets.com/event/73006

Due to ongoing construction and safety precautions, tickets will not be available at the door. Please park in the Arts District Parking Garage and you will be directed to the event site.

Joanna St. Angelo, President, Dallas Area Cultural Advocacy Coalition

Joanna@sammonsartcenter.org
214-520-7789

=== if you would like to no longer receive these emails, please reply with the word “UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line and you will be removed immediately. ===

map • add to calendar • scroll to the end for more sharing options

downloadable press release • right-click to download print-ready photo

John Allen, aka Johnny Dolphin, author of the recently released Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir by the Inventor of Biosphere 2, the definitive autobiography of one of the most luminous minds of our time, will speak Friday, April 17 at 8 p.m. at the Museum of Nature & Science, 1318 Second Avenue in Dallas’ Fair Park.  Tickets are $15 general admission, $10 students and members of Wordspace and Museum of Nature & Science. Call 254-495-9976 or go to www.wordspacetexas.org for tickets and more information.  This event is produced by Wordspace and is sponsored in part by the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs.

Johnny Dolphin is the nom de plume of John Allen–an explorer, author, poet, playwright, scientist and heroic guru of the avant-garde. He has authored dozens of scientific articles, many books of poetry, prose, and plays, including The Dream and Drink of Freedom and 39 Blows on a Gone Trumpet, taught hundreds of actors, and performed all over the world. His latest book, Me and the Biospheres is an awe-inspiring glimpse into a luminous mind and his project-by-project chronicle of man’s potential to sustain the environment while interfacing it with art.

Born and raised in Oklahoma, he left a successful post-Harvard career in New York in the early1960s to live in the Tangiers art scene then ventured through the secret back trails of war-torn Vietnam and Tibet. He began meeting the people who partnered his creation of Synergia Ranch, the Theater of All Possibilities and his historic environmental and cultural projects.  He is the inventor of Biosphere 2, co-creator of the RV Heraclitus Planet Water Expedition, Rainforest Enrichment and Sustainable Forestry Project (Puerto Rico), Pastoral Regeneration Project (West Australia), The October Gallery (London), Les Marrionniers (France), Institute of Eco Technics and Caravan of Dreams (FW).
His conferences and collaborations on culture and science include such diverse members of the world’s intelligentsia as Timothy Leary, the Dalai Lama, William Burroughs, Ralph Metzer, Yvgeny Yevtushenko, Buckminster Fuller and Ed Bass, He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Linnean Society, and the Royal Geographical Society.

The Biosphere 2 project was surely one of the great scientific and technological enterprises of our time. Building a working model of the Earth’s biosphere is essential preparation for the coming era of space travel and manned exploration of other worlds. In this memoir by the multifarious genius inventor/explorer John Allen, we learn how he used his knowledge and experience in engineering, metallurgy, design, ecology, large-scale organizational finance, agriculture (and other fields), to draw together and inspire an extraordinary team of highly skilled and knowledgeable collaborators from a wide range of scientific and technical disciplines. He relates amazing stories from his years of travel in all parts of the world, doing ecosystem restoration projects, building a research ship that (still!) sails the seven seas and co-creating a travelling theatre in which he and his friends explored the mythic and moral dimensions of the multifaceted adventure of life in the biospheres. An astonishing book! Inspiration guaranteed!
-Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., author of The Unfolding Self and Green Psychology

About the Author

John Allen – traveler, author, poet, playwright, and scientist – studied anthropology, classics, writing and history at Northwestern, Stanford and Oklahoma universities. He served in the U.S. Army’s Engineering Corps as a machinist, later receiving his MBA with High Distinction from Harvard Business School and became a Union organizer on Chicago’s south side in 1951-52.

In the late 1950s, Allen headed a special metals team at Allegheny-Ludlum Steel that developed over thirty alloys to product status. He subsequently worked with David Lillienthal’s Development Resources Corporation in the U.S., Iran, and Ivory Coast, giving up his career in 1963 to journey around the planet.

On this journey, Allen contacted the avant-garde and Berber scenes in Tangiers; hitch hiked across North Africa and studied the origins of civilization in Egypt before heading south to explore the origins of humanity.  Meeting with tribal chiefs and shamans from South Sudan to Lake Victoria; he journeyed through Uganda, Kenya, to the sacred Zambezi River; north to Swahili Mombasa, taking third class sea passage with refugees to the Rann of Kutch. Having wandered through the physical and metaphysical realms of Hindu Karma yoginis and Tibetan Lamas, Allen encountered America again working as a journalist and a volunteer with a hospital located on the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Allen has since led expeditions exploring ecology and early civilizations of Nigeria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Tibet, Turkey, India, Mexico and the Altiplano. His rich personal history alongside the social history of his many destinations is chronicled through novels, poetry, short stories and plays. Allen emerged as an accomplished author with his trilogy of the sixties, beginning with Thirty-Nine Blows on a Gone Trumpet.

Allen writes his fiction and poetry under the pen name Johnny Dolphin; he has read for audiences around the world in venues such as George Whitman’s Shakespeare & Co., Paris, in New York accompanied by Ornette Coleman on saxophone; October Gallery, London (on occasion accompanied by fellow poets such as Ira Cohen, Sebastian Barker, Jack Hirschman, Pops Mohammed, Taiwo Jegeday, and Aidan Dun); Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center, Fort Worth, Texas and City Lights Book Store in San Francisco. His plays have been performed on every continent, from ICA London and Theatre du Soleil in Paris to villages on the Amazon and streets in California. He has set up ten acting studios, instructed some 200 actors and still performs annually with poetry and drama readings.

Of two dozen publications to Allen’s credit, about half are scientific. A fellow of the Linnean Society, Explorer’s Club, Royal Geographic Society and the World Academy of Art and Science, Allen co-founded the Biosphere 2 project – the world’s largest laboratory for global ecology (www.biospheres.com). As Executive Chairman, then Director of Biospheric Research, Development and Engineering, he led the world class science and engineering teams that created Biosphere 2′s materially closed life system and development of spin-off technologies.

He currently serves as Chairman of Global Ecotechnics Corporation, an international project development and management company with a Biospheres Division engaged in preparing to build the second generation of advanced materially closed biospheric systems and ecologically enriched biomes (www.biospheretechnologies.com).  He also chairs the EcoFrontiers Division which operates ecological projects he helped design in France, Australia, Puerto Rico and England (www.ecotechnics.edu), and is director of the non-profit Institute of Ecotechnics whose research ship, the Heraclitus, has sailed over 250,000 nautical miles exploring Planet Water and the ethnosphere (www.rvheraclitus.org).

An accomplished speaker, Allen continues to lecture at international forums on the emerging science of biospherics, the implications of Biosphere 2 for health, environment, science, and culture, the future role of space biospheres and on humanity’s place within the biosphere.

map • add to calendar • scroll to the end for more sharing options

downloadable press release

Catch two creative souls on Thursday, Feb. 12, 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the Bar Belmont, 901 Fort Worth Avenue at Sylvan in Oak Cliff.   Singer/songwriter Trish Murphy will join Dallas-based author Melanie Wells for a night of songs, stories and hand-made sweets.  Admission is free.  Call  (877) 476-3378 for more information.

Recording artist Trish Murphy officially launched her music career after receiving a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Dallas, in Irving, and quitting her college job at The Wall Street Journal. Critically esteemed as a gender-defying songwriter who “stands toe to toe with the boys and rocks just as hard as they do,” her discography includes four solo albums, three of which she released on her own label. She tours the U.S. and Europe, and the annual all-female Lilith Fair tour was a career highlight in the late 1990s. Her songs have also been recorded by fellow Texan Pat Green and CMT favorites Cross Canadian Ragweed. http://www.trishmurphy.com

Melanie Wells began her writing career by telling lies on the playground.  A licensed psychotherapist and licensed marriage and family therapist and accomplished fiddle player (no, really – she went to SMU on a music scholarship), she is the author of the critically acclaimed Day of Evil series: When the Day of Evil Comes, The Soul Hunter, and My Soul to Keep.  Melanie holds two masters degrees and is the founder and director of LifeWorks counseling associates, a collaborative, creative community of psychotherapists (www.wefixbrains.com).  She lives in Dallas with her dog, Gunner, who wishes she would not spend so much time at her computer. http://www.melaniewells.com