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  From Fail to Grace - My Journey...

  Grace Gan

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  There is light in the sharing of our stories. 
  "I began to realise that maybe things didn’t have to be this way. That maybe something can be done to turn things around. That perhaps miracles are attainable when faith and hope are shaped into crowns on our tiny brains. There were voices in me urging me to step out of my comfort zone to make that change. And I remember having an inclination — to not repeat the mistakes my parents made. For that’s their way of showing me what I should not be doing. But I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know what I had to do to turn things around. I was clueless. But I gathered small steps would lead me to big ones and I asked myself what was the worst choice I had ever made in my life at that point. To my surprise, it didn’t take me long to figure this one out at all. It came to me like lightning itself. Striking, clear, and loud — it was my thoughts. My very negative thoughts." 
  - FROM THE PREFACE

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  The Ghost in the Cupboard Room -...

  Wilkie Collins

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  Wilkie Collins was born on 8th January 1824 in Marylebone, London.  
  The family moved several times in his early years before, at 12, they travelled to France and Italy for 2 years where the sights and atmosphere made a deep and lasting impression on him. 
  He resumed his education at Mr Cole’s private boarding school in Highbury, Islington.  Here, he began his literary career under unusual circumstances: the school bully would give him no peace until he had been told a bedtime story.  This ‘little brute’ helped create one of England’s greatest writers.  
  On leaving school, in 1841, he became a clerk at a tea merchant before, 2 years later, publishing his first short story.  However, his first novel was rejected and remained so during his lifetime.  
  A brief stint at Lincoln’s Inn to please his father and to acquire a steady income was halted by his father’s death.  Collins then wrote and published his fathers’ memoirs.  He then completed his legal education though he would never practice.  
  In March 1851, he was introduced to Charles Dickens and there now started a period of sustained literary output and a remarkable lifelong friendship.  His stories were published in Dicken’s magazines, and he toured with Dicken’s theatrical before the two of them travelled to the Continent. 
  By the early 1860’s worrying signs of ill-health appeared with rheumatic gout.  As it worsened, he sought respite and cures in German spa towns and gave up writing to help his recuperation. 
  His personal life had become very complicated.  He was living with the widowed Caroline Graves and conducting an affair with a much younger Martha Rudd.  With the serialised release of ‘The Moonstone’ and vicious attacks of gout Caroline left him and married another.  Collins was now prescribed opium and was soon its lifelong dependent.  Martha bore him two children and with the return of a now divorced Caroline Graves he now divided his time between the two women. 
  In 1874 he set aside writing to tour North America on a reading tour. 
  Throughout his later years he continued to write and publish.  In all 30 novels, 14 plays, 60 short stories and over a 100 non-fiction essays as well as many more collaborations with Dickens. 
  In 1884 the Society of Authors elected him as it’s Vice-President. 
  Wilkie Collins died from a paralytic stroke on September 23rd, 1889, in London. He was 65.

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  Jim Morrison Rare Words -...

  Cyril Taylor-Carr

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  James Douglas Morrison was an American singer, poet, and songwriter who was the lead vocalist of the rock band the Doors. Due to his wild personality, poetic lyrics, distinctive voice, unpredictable and erratic performances, and the dramatic circumstances surrounding his life and early death, Morrison is regarded by music critics and fans as one of the most iconic and influential frontmen in rock history. Since his death, his fame has endured as one of the popular culture's most rebellious and oft-displayed icons, representing the generation gap and youth counterculture. 
   
  Together with pianist Ray Manzarek, Morrison founded the Doors in 1965 in Venice, California. The group spent two years in obscurity until shooting to prominence with their number-one single in the United States, "Light My Fire", taken from their self-titled debut album. Morrison recorded a total of six studio albums with the Doors, all of which sold well and received critical acclaim. Morrison was well known for improvising spoken word poetry passages while the band played live. Manzarek said Morrison "embodied hippie counterculture rebellion". 
   
  Morrison developed an alcohol dependency throughout the band's career, which at times affected his performances on stage. In 1971, Morrison died unexpectedly in Paris at the age of 27, amid conflicting witness reports. His premature death made him a member of the infamous 27 club. Since no autopsy was performed, the cause of Morrison's death remains disputed. 
   
  Kristoffer Kristofferson is a retired American singer, songwriter, and actor. Among his songwriting credits are "Me and Bobby McGee", "For the Good Times", "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down", and "Help Me Make It Through the Night", all of which were hits for other artists. 

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  Sister Stories: Bonds that Shape...

  Brenda Peterson

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  "Sisters are doing it for themselves," sings Annie Lennox. In this classic and far-ranging portrait of sisterhood Peterson explores a hilarious slumber party, a singing duo of sisters about to find their fame, a Zulu tribe of sisters, the chosen sisterhood of Isabel Allende and Tabra Tunoa, and the sisterhood of animals, such as dolphins and elehants. Weaving memoir, research, interviews, and lively storytelling, Peterson celebrates how the feminine can balance and restore our health and survival. Her well-told insights from psychology, mythology, history, and anthropology reveal the enduring alliance of sisterhoods—from childhood bonds to growing old together as Crones.

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  Posting the Word - Chris Harris...

  Chris Harris

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  Posting the Word tells of the story of how Chris Harris, a laicised priest, managed, against all the odds, to set up a successful adult religious education course by distance learning. Life Light Home Study Courses grew over nearly half a century into a facility which has enabled thousands of mostly lay Catholic students to develop their biblical and theological literacy. A very large number of these have moved on to positions of responsibility for RE in schools and parishes.
  
   
  In the background lies a human story which unfolded in a succession of different settings: monastic, seminary, university, school, home and parish. The challenges confronted along this winding road are here described in some detail.
  
   
  Of particular interest is the contribution made by Chris and his wife Heather to the spirituality of Christian married life. Both had a deep appreciation of religious life and sought to lay the foundations of a complementary and equally rich spirituality for married people.
  
   
  Posting the Word offers a fascinating insight into lived Catholicism before and after the Second Vatican Council and also into the history of adult theological education within the Roman Catholic Church.

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  Nadja

  André Breton

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  In Paris, during the fall of 1926, André Breton met a young woman from the provinces who called herself Nadja because, she said, "in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and because it's only the beginning." Their love affair was brief, intense, and intensely self-conscious. They both talked exuberantly of the book that Breton would make out of their days and nights. And indeed a year later (after Nadja was institutionalized and Breton had moved on to other love affairs) he began to write Nadja—a book of memory and analysis taking its cue in part from Freud's case studies, but also a book of ingeniously intercut images, drawing on Surrealist ideas to portray a soul whose very way of being approaches, in Breton's words, "the extreme limit of the Surrealist aspiration."In this, the first new translation of Nadja in more than sixty years, Mark Polizzotti captures the youthful excitement, the abiding strangeness, and above all the freshness of Breton's prose. He also provides an illuminating introduction about the fate of the real Nadja, whose identity remained jealously guarded until the twenty-first century. A gripping tale of infatuation and a meditation on the surrealism of everyday life, Nadja is still a thing of convulsive beauty, impossible to pin or put down, a precursor to works of Julien Gracq, Julio Cortázar, and W. G. Sebald.

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