Hope Floats is a collection of four short stories about loss and living on and two essays on grief and grace. Coming Soon.

In “The New Year’s Box,” we find a couple unhinged by another loss at the time of year when most people are planning resolutions and hoping for a better, brighter, happier new year.

“The Happy Place” begins at a funeral as a mother recounts memories of her only child and then leaves to find solace at the shore as she contemplates where to go next.

Even the fourth story, a bonus since it was already published in Sleigh Ride: A Winter Anthology, “Snowflakes and Stones,” deals with a mother’s loss, only it’s guilt keeping her stuck in time and unable to move forward.

I switch point of view and gender, with “Pockets of Hope,” told from a twenty-four-year-old male’s perspective as he sets out on a blustery October day letting himself feel his feelings on a journey of familiar stops he had taken with his first love.

The essays, “On Mother Loss and Being a Motherless Mother,” examines how my loss of my mother when I was four and my grandmother who raised me when I was nineteen impacted my own approach to mothering my three children.

In “Grief, Guns and Grace,” I look at the loss of three “Drews” to gun deaths beginning when I was in 7^th grade and ending with a friend’s murder and how grace can call us to transform our hearts and society.

If you are reading this and grief is breathing over your shoulder, I’d ask that you read it together. I think you’ll find that you aren’t enemies at all; that inside the clenched fist of grief are three coins, inscribed with “Love,” “Hope,” and “Remember.”