When Orlie Breton shows up in June of 1979 to work as a paramedic in New York City’s 911 system, she finds herself plunged into a violent and magical world, populated by medics who are not terribly different from the homeless people—the "skels"—who comprise most of their patient population. Orlie draws parallels between her experiences to the stories and feelings represented in the works of her favorite writers, including Jack London, Walt Whitman, Rimbaud, and Mark Twain. Skels was written with the question in mind of what would happen if the ambulance world really was permeated with the works of past writers, and the skels were carrying the consciousnesses of the writers themselves. What would the protagonist have done if she had met the greatest poet of all, dirty and covered with lice, and been granted the chance to save him? Not from dying, but from his own life. With Skels Dubris shares what she saw during her own time as an EMT— not literally, but more importantaly, how she felt in her soul, magical and violent and funny, filled with passion, and like it contained some ancient element that was invisible from the outside.
Weep Not, My Wanton collects eight short stories and a fifty-page poem, "WilleWorld," all based on Maggie Dubris' experience as an EMS worker in and around Times Square, New York City. Here, too, is an ambitious series of linked poems, "Toilers of the Sea," concerning other themes: extinction, time, comic books, and the passage of the old world into the new. Ms. Dubris tells us "how it is" in unheroic, often comic detail. Her stories and poems are full of strobe-lit images of the homeless, the lost, and the luckless in emergency rooms, hotel rooms, and subway tunnels. The New York street photographer Weegee wrote: "When you find yourself [feeling] a bond between yourself and the people you document, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and their tears, you will know you are on the right track." Maggie Dubris, in this debut collection, is most definitely on the right track. "I used to think that working on an ambulance would be like being in a war," she writes. "I thought that I would go up against death, face to face, and that I would win, because I wanted to so much. But that's not how it is.
Imagining a world wherein ambulance drivers transport "skels," or the souls of dead writers, through the underworld, the author pens a unique novel set in 1979 New York that merges the ancient with the modern. Original.
When Orlie Breton shows up in June of 1979 to work as a paramedic in New York City’s 911 system, she finds herself plunged into a violent and magical world, populated by medics who are not terribly different from the homeless people—the "skels"—who comprise most of their patient population. Orlie draws parallels between her experiences to the stories and feelings represented in the works of her favorite writers, including Jack London, Walt Whitman, Rimbaud, and Mark Twain. Skels was written with the question in mind of what would happen if the ambulance world really was permeated with the works of past writers, and the skels were carrying the consciousnesses of the writers themselves. What would the protagonist have done if she had met the greatest poet of all, dirty and covered with lice, and been granted the chance to save him? Not from dying, but from his own life. With Skels Dubris shares what she saw during her own time as an EMT— not literally, but more importantaly, how she felt in her soul, magical and violent and funny, filled with passion, and like it contained some ancient element that was invisible from the outside.
Weep Not, My Wanton collects eight short stories and a fifty-page poem, "WilleWorld," all based on Maggie Dubris' experience as an EMS worker in and around Times Square, New York City. Here, too, is an ambitious series of linked poems, "Toilers of the Sea," concerning other themes: extinction, time, comic books, and the passage of the old world into the new. Ms. Dubris tells us "how it is" in unheroic, often comic detail. Her stories and poems are full of strobe-lit images of the homeless, the lost, and the luckless in emergency rooms, hotel rooms, and subway tunnels. The New York street photographer Weegee wrote: "When you find yourself [feeling] a bond between yourself and the people you document, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and their tears, you will know you are on the right track." Maggie Dubris, in this debut collection, is most definitely on the right track. "I used to think that working on an ambulance would be like being in a war," she writes. "I thought that I would go up against death, face to face, and that I would win, because I wanted to so much. But that's not how it is.
Telling the story of an unlikely friendship, STEPMOM, is a moving but ultimately uplifting tale. Two remarkable women, Jackie, a divorced mother of two, and Isabel, the career-minded girlfriend of Jackie's ex-husband, Luke, continually clash over the well-being of Jackie and Luke's children. But when Jackie discovers she is terminally ill with breast cancer, she finally has to come to terms with her husband's second wife for the sake of her children. Because of Jackie's illness, she and Isabel find friendship and mutual support as Jackie teaches the woman, who was her rival, to mother her children.
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