These four master storytellers examine life’s many twists and turns, from the mundane to absurd. Ron Carlson’s The Blue Box, a collection of flash fiction, uses small space to tell big stories whose themes run the gamut from finding love to stumbling across lake monsters. InKids in the Wind, Brad Wethern tells delightful tales of childhood in a small seaside town and of the magic and madness found in the minds of the young. Ellen Meeropol’s On Hurricane Island confronts the hot-button issue of personal freedom in her wild tale of a math professor kidnapped by federal agents. In How to Carry Bigfoot Home, Chris Tarry tells thrilling tales to lay bare what makes us truly human.
Ron Carlson is the author of five story collections and six novels, including Return to Oakpine and The Signal. His fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Playboy, GQ, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His book of poems, Room Service: Poems, Meditations, Outcries, & Remarks, was published by Red Hen Press in 2012. His book on writing, Ron Carlson Writes a Story, is taught widely. He is the director of the writing program at the University of California at Irvine and lives in Huntington Beach, California.
A Southern California native, businessman Brad Wethern is a Cal Berkeley graduate. An actor for several years in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, he returned to California to go into business as a real estate agent. He has recently appeared as a regular on the KVCR TV show, Voice of the Inland Empire. Additionally, he appears as a motivational speaker on a regular basis at the Claremont Center for Spiritual Living. He has two grown children and makes his home in Ontario, California.
Ellen Meeropol’s characters live on the fault lines of political turmoil and human connection. She is the author of one previous novel, House Arrest (Red Hen Press, 2011). A literary late bloomer, she began seriously writing fiction in her fifties. Her short fiction and essays have been published in Bridges, DoveTales, Pedestal, The Rumpus, Portland Magazine, Beyond the Margins, The Drum, and The Writer’s Chronicle. A former pediatric nurse practitioner and part-time bookseller, Ellen holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. She lives in Western Massachusetts.
Chris Tarry holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, and has been published widely. His fiction has appeared in publications such as The Literary Review, On Spec, The GW Review, PANK, BULL, and Monkeybicycle. His non-fiction has appeared in the anthologyHow to Expect What You’re Not Expecting, and Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine. In 2012, his story “Here Be Dragons” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is also a four-time Juno Award winner, and one of New York’s most sought-after musicians.
Kate Gale is Managing Editor of Red Hen Press and Editor of The Los Angeles Review. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Echo Light (Red Mountain Press, 2014) and The Goldilocks Zone (The University of New Mexico Press, 2014), and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis, which had its world premiere in October 2010 at the Florentine Opera, Milwaukee.