Christopher Stewart

Near the village of Poivre Blanc, an old soldier lives up a hill from the quiet lives below, visited on occasion by a shepherd girl who is teaching him to read and write in exchange for an escape from her life. Everywhere else, and on the hills while shepherding, she is inseparable from Thierry, her neighbour and mentee in all questions of life. In the village jail, the lone prisoner remains a man racked with guilt over a tragedy that changed the shepherdess' family forever. In the chapel, the local priest wrestles with how to tend to his people best.

Put To Flight My Blindness (Vol. 1)

Quraysh Ali Lansana

Quraysh Ali Lansana is from Enid, OK. Christopher Stewart was raised in Dallas, small Texas towns, and Chicago neighborhoods. A white man and a black man born in post Kennedy, post-King southern and midwestern USA, though both disagree with those geographical tags. Through these poems, the poets assert that their births, their ways of seeing, and their pains are rooted in what Ali Lansana's OU film professor termed "the Walmart Republic," a land where shopping center is community center. Where the failures of the father are re-learned in the lessons of the son. As poet Elise Paschen declares, "Quraysh Ali Lansana and Christopher Stewart pack the punch in these gritty poignant poems. Their poetic techniques counterpoint each other from lyric narratives to sharp edgy sonic bursts, creating a novel-like narrative. We follow two different journeys which begin in the Bible Belt and reach adulthood in places across the map. These gutsy poems explore identity and race against the backdrop of an ever-changing America.

The Walmart Republic

Brutally honest in its telling, readers will find themselves engrossed as Joe shares a penetrating insight into the possibilities of transformation, using his own life's painful trials and ultimate success as examples. Joe was an easygoing and sensitive "fat" kid who fell victim to merciless bullying. Humiliation turned to anger and towards a life of "looking out for number one". For most of his teens and early adulthood he became a self-absorbed cheater, drug abuser and alcoholic who cared only for himself and his pleasures. He learned that his abuses came at a high cost, losing his first professional job and unable to maintain any enduring relationship. Then, in 1982 he was critically injured in a car wreck, landing in a chronic pain clinic, barely able to move his body. Lying there in the hospital bed paralyzed by pain he had an epiphany that the key to happiness was not the self-oriented life he was living but on helping others. Slowly, he refocused his mind on healing his broken body, an effort that took almost seventeen years. He transformed himself from near-cripple to a Black Belt in martial arts, long distance bike rider and personal trainer. His transition was not complete, however. He was only able to repair his body because he was able to repair his mind. His thinking changed his physical life, and then went to work on the outside world. He started with fostering troubled gang members and over fourteen years he and his wife helped more than 100 children adolescent teens navigate through troubled upbringing. He then started to share the philosophy of his holistic, mind-based, life-changing system that transformed him from an "everyday Joe", into a happy, caring individual who embraces life and works everyday to help people do the same.

Rebecca de Mornay

Rebecca

At the turn of the century, Ovel must face the consequences of its accelerated growth. One hundred and twenty seven federated countries and eleven sovereign nations, spread across the homeland and in colonies settled onboard orbiting stations and on a nearby planet. Fourteen billion inhabitants struggling to thrive under the rule of a corrupted Global Government, in power for over forty years. Fuelled by a recent scientific finding, the once in a lifetime discovery of a discontinuity in the cosmic fabric of the neighbouring space, a coalition of politicians is willing to stand up for the people and radically change things. Now relegated to the ranks of an obscure sect, the once dominant Community and its disciples must effectively handle the requirements of the Celestials to ensure that the most favourable of all possible destinies comes to pass. Meanwhile, halfway across the world, a young monk must learn to collaborate with the Enlightened Ones in order to successfully discharge the essential task he has accepted to fulfil in behalf of his monastery. Will the crucial 2206 electoral campaign climax on the emergence of a charismatic Progressive leader, or will the decried Chancellor prevail despite the many forces scheming for his downfall ? On a background of environmental and financial crises, and religious influences intertwining with political manoeuvres to determine the fate of the overpopulated orb, The Threshold chronicles the evolution of the Ovelian civilization as it heads towards unprecedented upheaval.

Christopher Stewart

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