I am delighted to announce that Murder at the Rummage Sale will be published in August, 2016 by Imagination Fury Arts!

I am delighted to announce that The (entire!) Maeve Chronicles are available from Audible as audiobooks. The superb Irish narrator is Heather O'Neill, so the Celtic Magdalen is now even more Celtic. Despite my technophobia, I downloaded the books to my i-phone. Such an irony that 21st century technology gives us the story as Maeve always intended it to be experienced: her voice speaking aloud directly to us. I am thrilled! I hope you will be, too. Even if you've read the books many times, do take the opportunity to hear them. You can listen to samples here.

Forthcoming from Hiraeth Press on September 15th, my third collection of poems So Ecstasy Can Find You. You can read about the book here. There will be a book launch at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY on 9/15 at 7:00. If you live within a day's driving distance of the Hudson Valley, New York and would like to host an event in your area, let's talk. I am also willing (and will become able!) to do readings or talks on skype.

Please spread the word about the audiobooks and the poem collection. If you would like to host an online or in person event, please email me through the contact page. I am game for events within a day's drive of New York State's Hudson Valley. Thank you, combrogos!

Audible will be recording The Maeve Chronicles as audio books, all four of them. Production is about to begin. Heather O'Neill has been cast as narrator. I have heard a clip of her voice, a very rich, beautiful Irish voice. In case you are wondering, yes I would have loved to have recorded Maeve's story as would many other wonderful readers. Authors are kept informed but do not make decisions. I believe Heather O'Neill will do a magnficient job. And Audible has the means to distrbute the Audio Books widely. Rejoice, combrogos!

I am delighted to announce that Hiraeth Press will be publishing So Ecstacy Can Find You, my third collection of poems, on September 15, 2015. If anyone would like to host an event, let me know. I am happy to travel anywhere within driving distance of New York State's Hudson Valley. I am also open to doing events online. Here is the title poem for the collection:

Ecstasy 

Ecstasy takes time, even if it lasts moments,
you have to slow down so ecstasy can find you
the way the light finds each plant in the sweep of a day
or the tide finds its secret way between dark rocks.
Stand still in the wood, on the shore, in your life.
Ecstasy will come, touch you, fill you, leave you changed. 

I am currently working on a new poem cycle with the working title Tales and Tails.

Murder at the Rummage Sale  a new novel by Elizabeth Cunningham 

September 1960. Kennedy and Nixon race for the presidency, and the Women of the Church of the Regeneration, aka the WOR, scramble to prepare for the annual rummage sale, an epic event whose modern equivalent is Black Friday at a supermall.  Crowds will spill down the church driveway into the street for blocks, especially this year…when everyone will want to view the place where Charlotte Crowely, president of the WOR, was murdered.

On the day the WOR begin sorting donations sublime and ridiculous (a sweater without a neck hole, anyone?) Charlotte is discovered dead in the basement, smothered by a bag of coats still in wrapped in plastic from the drycleaners. The local chief of police quickly rules her death an accident, an unfortunate fall down a steep flight of stairs, a bump on the head, and the coats landing just the wrong way.  “Just one of those things, a damn stupid shame, pardon my French, Rev.“

Lucy Way, an older, not-quite-maiden lady with a mystical bent, has her doubts. The coats belonged to her late mother. She brought them to the parish house a week earlier. The church sexton, Frank Lomangino, an ex-con hired by the outspoken, liberal rector Gerald Bradley, carried the coats upstairs for her. Though Charlotte had a reputation for being light-fingered, pocketing little treasures, clothes were not her besetting sin. She had no reason to remove the coats to the basement. By the time Lucy confides her suspicion that Charlotte might have been murdered, Frank, who found the body, has already contaminated the crime scene by simply doing his job.

Though Gerald Bradley is loath to act on Lucy Way’s concern, he has to admit that Charlotte makes a perfect murder victim, the prying, officious woman everyone loved to hate. Who didn’t want to murder her?  Including his organist, the irascible German war refugee, Elsa Ebersbach; pesky, pious parishioner Mildred Thomson, who picks her soul as if it were a nose; and even his own wife, Anne, a quiet woman, locked in grief over the death of their son, whose rage smolders behind a dutiful exterior.  (Gerald considers the company of too many women an occupational hazard. He is grateful to have Rick Foster, a fellow liberal who is running for Congress, to turn to for camaraderie and advice.  He even envies his former sexton, Amos McCready, a misogynous Scot who lives at a home for old soldiers.)

Anne Bradley, a secret unbeliever, finds the unpaid occupation of minister’s wife onerous if not hazardous. She is horrified to find herself appointed head of the rummage sale in Charlotte’s place, another duty to juggle with all her others, including raising her remaining three children largely on her own.  (“When do you expect your husband back?” being a ubiquitous and often unanswerable question.)  When she realizes that Gerald believes her capable of murder, Anne is shaken from absorption in her grief and joins forces with Lucy in an unofficial, and perilous, amateur investigation.  

Unbeknownst to all the adults, the most determined sleuths are Katherine Bradley, the seven-year-old minister’s daughter, and her sworn blood-brother, Frankie Lomangino, Jr. They have seen something no one else knows about— a man in a black sweatshirt (possibly concealing horns and wings) running through the wood next door to the church, the wood with the NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to a tree.  From reciting the Lord’s Prayer, Katherine knows trespassing is bad. She braves the wood, anyway, because she is already guilty of a much worse sin, one she confesses to Frankie when they run away to the wood on the morning of the murder.

A vivid portrait of a vanished world, Murder at the Rummage Sale also brings to fresh life the timeless quirks and contradictions of human nature, both the comic and poignant, the murderous and merciful.   

In September 2013 my husband and I left High Valley and moved across the Hudson River to a smaller place and a simpler life. We are devoting ourselves to writing, gardening and just plain having fun. (I am now a sexagenarian, so it's time!)

I am continuing my counseling practice. (I do have openings, and I do offer phone sessions and Skype may be coming next.) I also offer writing coaching.

I am coming down homestretch (I hope!) on a mystery novel, contemplating a new poetry collection and a possible new collaboration with our Maeve. Meanwhile as noted previously, The Maeve Chronicles are now available on kindle and nook. 

Blessed Bees!

All four volumes of The Maeve Chronicles are now available on Kindle and Nook! Enjoy!

The Red-Robed Priestess, the fourth and final installment of The Maeve Chronicles, wins The Association for the Study of Women and Mythology's 2012 Sarasvati Award for Fiction!

"In making their decision, the judges praised the book’s strong female figures, especially the leading character, Maeve, who was described as “embodying the passions and challenges of any woman’s life.”  They also praised the author’s inventive yet respectful use of various mythologies and religious traditions, including Celtic and Christian.  “Although this award is for a single book,” the judges added in their commendation, “this award also recognizes the three volumes of the Maeve series that have gone before and have served as mileposts in the literature of women’s spirituality.”