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YOUR CART

​Books


​     Coming soon...
​     ​ ---------------------
Farmwise Almanac

Songs * Stories* Recipes*
from the Driftless Year
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The Lackawanna Valley  George Inness  c.1856  oil on canvas   
National Gallery of Art

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       If someone were to ask you, Where are you from?   

  What would you answer? 


    For me, the answer is:   I grew up in a painting.

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            Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal
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In 1855, the landscape painter George Inness began work
on his commissioned painting The Lackawanna Valley.

A century later, a girl in Scranton, Pennsylvania,
looks out over her coal-strewn homeland
wishing for beauty, wondering where the artist
had stood with his canvas.
Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal
from ​Torrey House Press
September 2023 | Nonfiction | 9781948814836 | 288 pp | $17.95 
https://www.torreyhouse.org/black-diamonds
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**Inness's Window Into History**
 Youtube presentation of Black Diamonds

on  the Lackawanna Historical Society's
Lackawanna Past Times 
​
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OF2duiIqAU
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​* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
~~Listen to selections from Black Diamonds read by author Catherine Young~~
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~Coal Year ~

 "Coal Year" was published in Kestral, Volume 37, Spring
nominated for Best American Essays

Read: "Coal Year"
​​
Listen : 
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~The Time of Anise ~
“Here this day we are warmed in the womb of the sagging kitchen rimmed in red, white, yellow.
Anise clings to our clothes, and even the dog smells like an anise cookie. We are wrapped in the warmth of anise
​on the cold walk home. In this holy time our incense is anise.”
Recorded for WDRT Landward
Listen:
~Gas Stove~
"As we watch TV, the coal furnace rumbles and crunches beneath our living room floor. When all is still, when were upstairs lying on our beds, will hear the coal trains rumble upgrade. We know who we are. It's our coal on those trains. Our coal.
​Our fuel to burn."
​Listen:
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               Listen to a conversation about Black Diamonds and writing from
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https://www.buzzsprout.com/2217249/episodes/14997387-season-2-ep-9-catherine-young-may-2024​
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Listen to a conversation about Black Diamonds and writing from
                 Write On! Four Corners podcast
                     with DelSheree Gladden


                     KSJE from Farmington,
                     New Mexico


   Catherine Young shares stories and experiences from her childhood in        Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley  as she talks
​about her new memoir  
Black Diamonds

​
https://ksje.podbean.com/e/write-on-four-corners-with-delsheree-gladden-interview-with-catherine-young/

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Read a conversation about how Black Diamonds came to be:
www.torreyhouse.org/behind-the-book-black-diamonds

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Read an interview about Black Diamonds and writing
Marshall Cook and Catherine Young March 2017 WLSP Radio 

Here: "Writers and Their Words" 

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Geosmin 
(the scent of soil) is celebration of the startling and shimmering earth, praising creatures of soil, sky, and in-between.

Geosmin paints a deep map of Wisconsin’s Driftless region while evoking a place found within regions of the heart.


“Let us witness / the whirling embrace between / orb and ocean,” writes Catherine Young, who bears witness to the soil, the water and sky, and the amazing richness of a landscape and soulscape that is at once painfully beautiful and alluring and, at the same time, in sad decline. This is “the real America,” she says, “a place / where everyone can freely play together as everything crumbles.”  Young is, I think, a fresh and invaluable voice in American poetry, her linguistic strength vivid in each poem in this pristine collection.  She’s the real thing, and I celebrate her and Geosmin.”
 
Jay Parini, author of NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS, 1975-2015
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Catherine Young writes from the heart and from the land, with the keen eye of a geologist and the soul of a poet. In the tradition of Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, and Louise Glück. These poems honor rural life and the earth itself, poems concerned with the soil, with water, with the changing seasons, and with language. In short, they grapple with what it means to be human and one part of this fragile and natural world.  --

​Christopher Chambers, editor Midwest Review

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Worlds within worlds unfold, ambered in words, as we follow her wanderings on the land. Linguistic sensuosity matches the touch of skin on bark, the rocks’ dance, time and space openings from trilobite murmurings to the purple shimmer on Lake Superior’s shore. We roam through a year of change, visit with dairy and goat farmers in the Driftless region, browse in antique shops, and explore the workings of memory. Young’s Geosmin envelopes us in the sense texture of a region, and distills its perfume. 
 
Petra Kuppers, author of Gut Botany
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Geosmin is Silver Medal Winner
​of the Midwest Book Awards.
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 Geosmin   ~  the scent of earth
 is one of my favorite words 

                    Purchase this poetry collection                         
Hardcover $25       102 pages
​

Ask me to mail a copy to you:  
$25 + $5.00 shipping
*Is there a library you'd like to donate Geosmin to?*
​
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Or support your favorite independent bookstore
Ask them to order ISBN 978-1-952526-09-1
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