Change Happens

Change happens to everyone. How we react is the key to survival. The authors in this anthology—ordinary people—took a hard look at change in people’s lives and wrote about their journeys in poems and short prose.

Some of these pieces step back in time; others are set in the future. All remind you of a related experience in your own life, and cause you to reflect on how your whole life changed from a single, sometimes insignificant, choice that you made.

According to author Jack Lindy, basketball is the smell and feel of sweat, elbows in your ribs or his, and the taste of blood. In “David and Goliath,” Jack weaves a fascinating story of two high school basketball players—one a friend and the other an opponent by the name of Wilt Chamberlain—and how they changed his life.

Walter Bunker’s “Growing Up With Uncle August” tells the story of a young boy’s view of his beloved uncle, a man who gave him everything—a home, an education, and a career in his plastic paper clip business. Uncle August stuns everyone with his late-in-life announcement.

Losing a parent at any age is difficult. In Mo Conlan’s “Rosemary Climbs Up,” Rosemary and her brother Charley are both single and living with their mother when she dies. After talking about life and death with a seven-year-old girl who is wise beyond her years, Rosemary devises a plan to confront Charley and change her own life.

For a flat-out humorous look at how to deal with change, “Mother Goose 2014─Cincinnati Legal” and “Mother Goose 2014─CSI (Miami Ohio)” by Harry DeMaio will keep you in stitches.

Fourteen poems, interspersed throughout the anthology, enrich the collection as the poets crystalize their life-changing experiences into a few select words.

Talented student artists from Cincinnati’s AIC College of Design contributed striking illustrations for many of the works.