Fund-raiser: Writers Uniting Against Cancer.

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Product Description

Join the fight against cancer by purchasing this fund-raiser by authors Jan Chandler, Shawna Chandler, Huda Orfali, Duane Simolke, Timothy Morris Taylor, and Bill Wetzel. All author and editor royalties go to funding cancer research! These stories range from gritty and controversial to gentle and touching. Starting with the West Texas setting from Duane Simolkes collection The Acorn Stories, this new anthology takes readers across several landscapes, during times of trouble, change, hope, and triumph.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3084851 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 154 pages

From the Author
The Acorn Gathering is the long-awaited spin-off from The Acorn Stories, a story cycle set in the fictional West Texas town of Acorn, published in 1998. Some of the tales in The Acorn Gathering continue plots from The Acorn Stories. The others use a variety of new settings and characters. This collection stands on its own, giving readers any background details they might need about the characters, so readers need not start with The Acorn Stories. Five writers joined me in contributing stories to this project. I invited the authors to share their talents and their vision. The resulting anthology provides a variety of voices more diverse than I ever created with my fictional narrators, yet more cohesive than I ever imagined. My original idea of setting all the stories in my fictional West Texas town of Acorn proved too limiting. Still, the writers paralleled each other’s stories with similar themes, issues, conflicts, and chance encounters. That cohesive echoing seemed especially surprising to me, since most of the authors wrote their stories before reading the other stories.

About the Author
Duane Simolke, Ph.D., wrote the iUniverse books The Acorn Stories, Degranon, Holding Me Together, and New Readings of Winesburg, Ohio. He edited and co-wrote The Acorn Gathering: Writers Uniting Against Cancer. His home page (duanesimolke.com) includes some of his writing, as well as a variety of links.

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Customer Reviews

Tender and lyrical stories
After reading the first three chapters of "The Acorn Stories" , I knew that I wanted to purchase Simolke's book. I live in West Texas, the setting for this collection of fiction. On the Texas plains, any nuance in the landscape calls attention to itself, and Simolke's writing is rich with nuance: simple gestures, like the movements of hands or the flips and turns of a swimmer, can shape a story. The prose is spare and lyrical. Simolke treats his characters and their situations with genuine tenderness. I give "The Acorn Stories" five stars on the basis of its first twenty-five pages, and I look forward to sitting down with this book and enjoying the next two hundred pages.

A Wide Variety of Personalities Awaits You
It was a real pleasure to read about the fictional town of Acorn, TX and get to meet all the different and varied people that Mr. Simolke so eloquently fleshed out. The many and varied voices with which he was able to assume to bring these characters to life made me wonder at times if he'd even transcribed recordings! He was successful in making me believe he was young, old, White, Black, Hispanic, straight, gay, male, and female. It is the mark of a truly talented author who has the ability to listen and look at a wide variety of people, then translate what he hears and sees of them onto paper--and successfully make me believe. And even though each of the vignettes was relatively short, I had a sense that I really knew each of the characters who was speaking or thinking. Mr. Simolke is an author one shouldn't ignore.

Acorns for Cancer
It was an extreme pleasure reading The Acorn Gathering. This talented group of writers have put together a wonderful collaboration of short stories. What makes this an outstanding buy is that all the royalties go to the American Cancer Society for cancer research. I highly recommend you going out, buying copies for yourself and your loved ones, and enjoy reading this book.

Each story in The Acorn Gathering deals with situations in life that most of us can easily relate to and have experienced. They deal with breast cancer, life on an Indian reservation, struggles of gay life in a small town, losing weight, divorce, coming to terms with feelings of an abandonment, and wonderful story about a hero who goes to New York City to help after the September 11 Terrorist Attacks, just to name a few. If you think none of those stories sound like you, wait until you read them and experience the way each writer brought those issues into a world we all understand. I found myself caught up in several of the stories, feeling at times, that they were about my own life. This collaborative work, even though it is made up of different short stories, has a common thread that runs throughout the book that gives it an unbroken flow. One story seems to lead right into the next even when they are dealing with new people and new topics. Duane Simolke had put this book in perfect reading order.

The Acorn Gathering has something for everyone. The stories will provoke happiness, laughter, sadness and sometimes anger. Each is an extremely poignant view into the life of people that are all around us. The subject matter is extremely diversified that not only will you enjoy this book but it will open your eyes to the broader picture of how life exists for others around you.

As a person who's life has been greatly impacted by cancer, I applaud the writers of The Acorn Gathering for sharing their talents with us through these stories and the proceeds to help find a cure for those with cancer. The American Cancer Society is a responsible choice to receive these funds. Your contribution by purchasing this book will be well spent. No better gift can be given to someone who is suffering from cancer, than hope. You support of this book will do just that.