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The Radiance of Fossils by Pat Carr (Main Street Rag Press, July 2012)
A coming-of-age story for Baby Boomers, this novella focuses on Dr. Dalton Randall, who is separating from her husband and who decides to attend a writers' weekend with 'bad-boy' author, Archer Giles, to see if she still loves the man she thought she loved thirty years before. In the isolated mountain retreat, while interacting with the other writers and reconnecting with Archer, she discovers more about herself and her past than she imagined possible, and by the end of the weekend, she's ready to start a new life at age sixty.
One Page at a time: On a Writing Life, by Pat Carr (Texas Tech University Press, December 2010)
Pat Carr may be the only person in the United States who spent her childhood next door to a Japanese relocation camp in Wyoming in the 1940s, grew up to pass for black in 1950s Texas, started teaching college in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s, and crossed paths with scores of other authors over half a century’s journey as a professional writer. But universal truth is found in every writer’s singular experience, and Carr’s memoir illuminates the path for others who have chosen the writing life. “Everything we do, everywhere we’ve been, influences us,” Carr believes. Pacing her revealing memoir as a series of single-page episodes, she offers distilled glimpses of the people, places, and moments that made a lasting impression and provided the fabric and fuel of her writing. At the same time Carr’s pages reveal her attempts to find the authentic centers of her life: relationships with family, friends, lovers, fellow writers; struggles with racial and gender discrimination; and above all her writing identity.
Pat Carr has taught creative writing and literature in universities across the South. She is the author of fifteen books, including The Women in the Mirror, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and more than a hundred short stories in the Southern Review, the Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, and other publications. She lives in northwest Arkansas.
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Pat Carr has taught creative writing and literature in universities across the South. She is the author of fifteen books, including The Women in the Mirror, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and more than a hundred short stories in the Southern Review, the Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, and other publications. She lives in northwest Arkansas.
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Writing Fiction with Pat Carr by Pat Carr (High Hill Press; First edition, 2010.)
Writing Fiction with Pat Carr is a comprehensive guide to writing fiction. It doesn't matter what genre you write in, Pat's book can steer you in the right direction. It can also help you undo all those bad habits you've gotten into with your writing. Pat includes prompts and writing exercises to help you figure out how to create scenes, characters, and action that come alive on the page. At the end of the book Pat has included three of her award winning short stories. Read the book, then read the stories and you'll see that Pat Carr certainly knows what she's talking about.
Beneath the Hill by Pat Carr (Gray Rabbit Publishing July 16, 2010)
Five American women come together briefly in 1962 in Cali, Colombia, beneath the hill that dominates the city
* Nora, the archeologist, who doesn't relate to other women.
* Alicia, who knows she's beautiful and can attract any man.
* Melanie, who doesn't recognize her own beauty and intelligence.
* Seraphia, whose French husband is barred from the United States.
* Charlotte, who is on her third affair.
Their interwoven stories of birth, death, love, and loss bring each to an awareness and resolution that one critic has called "as satisfying as if I just had a full meal."
* Nora, the archeologist, who doesn't relate to other women.
* Alicia, who knows she's beautiful and can attract any man.
* Melanie, who doesn't recognize her own beauty and intelligence.
* Seraphia, whose French husband is barred from the United States.
* Charlotte, who is on her third affair.
Their interwoven stories of birth, death, love, and loss bring each to an awareness and resolution that one critic has called "as satisfying as if I just had a full meal."
The Death of a Confederate Colonel by Pat Carr (University of Arkansas Press, 2007)
Pat Carr’s interest in the Civil War began when she was a child and her grandmother told stories of how her plantation-owner father hid the silver in pillowcases in a well to save the flatware from Yankee marauders. Never mind that her grandmother hadn’t even been born until nearly twenty years after the Civil War ended, Carr never relinquished her fascination with the period and the tragedy of the war.
Dramatically compelling and historically informed, The Death of a Confederate Colonel takes us into the lives of those left behind during the Civil War. These stories, all with Arkansas settings, are filled with the trauma of the time. They tell of a Confederate woman's care of and growing affection for a wounded Union soldier, a plantation mistress's singular love for a sick slave child, and an eight-year-old girl's fight for survival against frigid cold, injury, starvation, heartbreak, and lawlessness. Here are women holding down the home front with heroism and loyalty, or, sometimes, with weakness and duplicity. Will a young belle remain loyal to her wounded fiance? How long can a caring nurse hold her finger on a severed artery? And how does anyone comprehend the legacy of slavery and the brutality of war?
The Death of a Confederate Colonel triumphs in its portrayal of desperate circumstances coated in the patina of the Civil War era, the complexity of ordinary people confronting situations that change them forever.
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Dramatically compelling and historically informed, The Death of a Confederate Colonel takes us into the lives of those left behind during the Civil War. These stories, all with Arkansas settings, are filled with the trauma of the time. They tell of a Confederate woman's care of and growing affection for a wounded Union soldier, a plantation mistress's singular love for a sick slave child, and an eight-year-old girl's fight for survival against frigid cold, injury, starvation, heartbreak, and lawlessness. Here are women holding down the home front with heroism and loyalty, or, sometimes, with weakness and duplicity. Will a young belle remain loyal to her wounded fiance? How long can a caring nurse hold her finger on a severed artery? And how does anyone comprehend the legacy of slavery and the brutality of war?
The Death of a Confederate Colonel triumphs in its portrayal of desperate circumstances coated in the patina of the Civil War era, the complexity of ordinary people confronting situations that change them forever.
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Border Ransom by Pat Carr (TCU Press, 2006)
In August 1914, recently orphaned Cooper Harrison arrives in El Paso to live with grandparents she’s never met. The minute the fifteen-year-old steps off the train, everything seems wrong. The heat is stifling, her grandfather Luther is cold and appraising and, worse, doesn’t even mention the recent loss of both parents. Her grandmother, Angelica, is remote and childlike and wears only black and diamonds. When Cooper asked to come live with her grandparents, she wanted to help in the family antique business and soon shows her aptitude for the field. But, she discovers that Luther not only runs a shady concern but also profits from the Mexican Revolution smuggling arms across the border.
Luther leaves for Mexico with a wagonload of bullets hidden in sacks of corn and is kidnapped by Pancho Villa’s men. Cooper realizes she’s the only one to carry the ransom to Villa’s camp. She meets a Hollywood actor and cameraman—in El Paso to film Villa’s life—and convinces them to join her in the attempt to rescue her grandfather. The ensuing adventure takes the reader on a wild ride deep into the Mexican countryside.
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Luther leaves for Mexico with a wagonload of bullets hidden in sacks of corn and is kidnapped by Pancho Villa’s men. Cooper realizes she’s the only one to carry the ransom to Villa’s camp. She meets a Hollywood actor and cameraman—in El Paso to film Villa’s life—and convinces them to join her in the attempt to rescue her grandfather. The ensuing adventure takes the reader on a wild ride deep into the Mexican countryside.
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If We Must Die: A Novel of Tulsa's 1921 Greenwood Riot by Pat Carr (TCU Press, 2002)
For decades, a riot that killed three hundred people and wounded hundreds of others was scarcely heard of. But several new studies have focused attention on Tulsa's Greenwood race riot of 1921. In If We Must Die novelist Pat Carr turns that tragedy into a riveting novel. When Berneen O'Brien's mother dies, the seventeen-year-old moves from Wyoming to Tulsa to live with her stern uncle. Berneen secures a teaching position at Liberty Elementary School. When she meets the principal, Nelson Flowers, she is amazed to find that he is a black man. Slowly, as she meets the other teachers, Berneen realizes that she is teaching in a black school. Her worries about being an outcast soon disappear, as the other teachers make her welcome. Berneen, who is of Black-Irish descent, doesn't realize that the teachers and students all assume she is also black. At school and after hours Berneen finds herself moving in the world of the segregated Greenwood neighborhood. And she finds herself increasingly drawn to Nelson Flowers. Racial tension erupts into violence when a young white girl accuses a black shoeshine boy of raping her in an office-building elevator. Whites burn Greenwood and storm the neighborhood, shooting and beating black men, women, and children. Berneen is trapped in the school with Nelson Flowers and the teachers when the mob approaches. The story of their desperate attempt to escape is realistic and frightening, made more so by its historical accuracy. This novel is both insightful and a real page-turner.
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Sonahchi A Collection of Myth Tables by Pat Carr (Cinco Puntos Press, 1988; 2nd ed. 1995)
When Pat Carr was researching ancient Pueblo tales for her archeological work on deciphering the myths contained in the Mimbres story bowls, Mimbres Mythology, some of the Native American tales began to haunt her. She found herself responding to their basic human conflicts and experiences—love, death, birth jealousy, betrayal—all those archetypal themes so important to world literature, and she began recreating the stories in her own style with her own interpretations and character motivations. This collection is the result of that love of the ancient myth-tales.
Night of the Luminariasby Par Carr (Slough Press, Austin Council for the Arts Award, 1986)
Set beneath the limitless desert sky of West Texas, this collection of short stories is peopled with passionate misfits, intense suicides, existential survivors who must somehow cope with the darkness. But it is a darkness occasionally illuminated by the faint candle glow of luminaries or by flashes of insight, and in Pat Carr's clean, sparse, poetic prose, the characters ultimately achieve both dignity and a glimmer of hope.
Mimbres Mythology by Pat Carr (Texas Western Press, 1979, 1987, 1989)
The people who dwelt in the Mimbres Valley of New Mexico during the eleventh and twelfth centuries lacked a written language to record their history. They left a more distinctive heritage, however, in their black-on-white pottery designs that often depicted the lore of the Mimbrenos. Pat Carr explains some of the stories found in these unusual bowls in Mimbres Mythology. “The presence of the Mimbres myth bowls shows that the Pueblo complex of the Southwest did have a literature in a continuum that extended from centuries prior to 1000 A.D. to the present.”
The Women in the Mirror (Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction) by Pat Carr, Univ of Iowa Pr (March 1978)
Pat Carr's first collection of stories is a gallery of finely-drawn psychological portraits gathered from worlds as far apart as a small-town Southern childhood and a Peace Corps mission in the jungles of South America. Whether she is depicting a brutal native initiation rite or the small, desperate ironies of a young girl's birthday party, a thread of shared humanity runs throughout. Like the woman who reads cards in "The Witch of Peach Tree Street," Carr displays the fates of her characters in brief illuminating moments. Not just the reflections of a central shaping intelligence, these are women of common circumstances brought to life with uncommon talent.
Contents
The party -- Miss Amelia's -- Sunday morning -- Progress report-Candelaria project -- The Peeping Tom -- Mermaids singing -- Exiles -- Pascuas Caleñas -- Indian burial -- The cake-eaters -- Bullfight -- Wrought iron lace -- A visit from the consul -- October afternoon conference -- Mrs. Jessie Martha Jones -- An evening's seduction -- The witch of Peach Tree Street -- Rite of passage -- Andrew's mistress -- Incident at Finnegans wake
Contents
The party -- Miss Amelia's -- Sunday morning -- Progress report-Candelaria project -- The Peeping Tom -- Mermaids singing -- Exiles -- Pascuas Caleñas -- Indian burial -- The cake-eaters -- Bullfight -- Wrought iron lace -- A visit from the consul -- October afternoon conference -- Mrs. Jessie Martha Jones -- An evening's seduction -- The witch of Peach Tree Street -- Rite of passage -- Andrew's mistress -- Incident at Finnegans wake
Bernard Shaw (World Dramatists Series) by Pat Carr (Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1976)
This addition to the World Dramatist series offers a reassessment of Bernard Shaw decades after his death, during which time his reputation among critics has undergone expected shit and changes. The often controversial Anglo-Irish playwright, who contributed to the theater on both sides of the footlights, was critic, anarchist, wit, vegetarian, admirer of women, brilliant talker - and prolific writer during an exceedingly active life.
In this book Professor Carr elaborates on the themes that proved so fruitful in Shaw's long career and on the elements that contributed to the Shavian comic vision. Despite Shaw's protestations to the contrary, that vision ultimately became optimistic and idealistic.
In this book Professor Carr elaborates on the themes that proved so fruitful in Shaw's long career and on the elements that contributed to the Shavian comic vision. Despite Shaw's protestations to the contrary, that vision ultimately became optimistic and idealistic.
In fine spirits: The Civil War letters of Ras Stirman with historical comments by Pat Carr Washington County Historical Society (1986)
Confederate States of America; Army; Biography; Fayetteville (Ark.); Arkansas; United States; History; Personal narratives; Personal narratives, Confederate; Civil War, 1861-1865; Soldiers; Correspondence; Fayetteville; Stirman, Erasmus
Dec 8, 2009 ... Among the Civil War documents in this collection are letters, ... The letters comment on the feelings of the civilian population of .... Of particular interest in this collection are forty letters written by Ras Stirman to his sister ... in In Fine Spirits (Fayetteville: Washington County Historical ...
http://www.amazon.com/fine-spirits-letters-historical-comments/dp/B0006EQTZU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1287332868&sr=1-2
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Dec 8, 2009 ... Among the Civil War documents in this collection are letters, ... The letters comment on the feelings of the civilian population of .... Of particular interest in this collection are forty letters written by Ras Stirman to his sister ... in In Fine Spirits (Fayetteville: Washington County Historical ...
http://www.amazon.com/fine-spirits-letters-historical-comments/dp/B0006EQTZU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1287332868&sr=1-2
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