David Mecklenburg

In this companion to The Nightingale's Stone, Ada Ludenow explores the power of relationships to make and unmake us by using language itself as a fundamental binding force to use or misuse for gain or at our own peril. What emerges is one woman's portrait of the world as an ambivalent, often hostile place, made livable by our ability to perceive the small events of beauty that overcome us in unexpected ways.With color illustrations of each poem, Small Events offers timeless meditations on how we make meaning of love, hatred, memory, and being human. Readers of The Nightingale's Stone will find a further expansion of that work's themes and new readers will find a philosophically poetic voice inviting them to enter the plural reality of the Hagengard.

Between two hills was a decrepit hall. Of what manner of architecture had gone into its spirit and flesh, I could not tell. The profuse and overgrown garden around it--the wild apple trees that climbed and fought with one another--obscured its age and look. It was as if each step changed the hall, and the lengthening shadows hinted at its great age, a history spoken in a forgotten language." Ada Ludenow returns to the Harz Mountains of Germany where thirteen years earlier she experienced a love affair that threw her into the uncertainty of life. Hoping to find her lover from that time, she instead finds a hungry but inquisitive supernatural being who may or may not eat her. To forestall becoming his dinner, she tells him of the summer of her twenty-seventh birthday and how it opened the road to Elsewhere. With twenty-one illustrations by the author, The Nightingale's Stone is the first novel set in the world of Hagengard, a place where reality is a plural endeavor by its inhabitants.

Part introspective journey, part absurdist house of mirrors, Deukollectrum offers a thousand ways of looking into a character's mind through memory and imagining. Recalling Woolf's The Waves (and many other classic texts of re-wandering), each short chapter is a poetic and philosophical adventure on the seas of myth and language as we sail through Sisyphean tasks and picnics on carpets patterned with Zen koans. Your captain is Ada Ludenow--David Mecklenburg's Muse, Alter-Ego, and Guide.

What is a shadow?In the 21st Century our scientific minds may dismiss them as simply the absence of light, but a deeper part of our brain still knows them as tangible things full of meaning. Without them, the world would be a bleak, blinding continuum.Just as shadows make a painting or a film come alive, they define us and our families, our hopes, our mistakes and our dark triumphs. Collecting Shadows represents the seven short stories and a novella from the plural reality of the Hagengard, a particularly baroque and fabulist continent in Ada's World.Whether you are dragging your hooks through the darkness of your past, yearning to fly away like a raven, or find yourself uncomfortably close to a tank of eels, these stories explore the chiaroscuro of being human in a shadowy universe.Published by Blue Forge Press.

Hyperborea was the "Land beyond the North Wind" for the Ancient Greeks. Was it real to them and does that matter? Our mythology often shapes our reality despite the assumption that only the reserve is true.For Ada Ludenow, Hyperborea is the land beyond human company--a realm sometimes called solitude and sometimes called loneliness. Like most places--both real and imagined, both literal and mystical--Hyperborea changes over time. Its topography is written in the brush-strokes of love, grief, language, and routine. And its creator? Ada. And, in equal measure, not Ada at all.Explore lyrical essays and arresting artwork in this newest collection from Ada's World.

Unsettling. Disquieting. Unnerving.This fourth annual collection from Blue Forge Press gathers thirteen stories-a story for each month of the year plus one-from diverse, thought-provoking authors unafraid to provoke, rivet, and challenge brave readers. Explore the disconcerting with stories from David Mecklenburg, Jennifer DiMarco, Maxwell DiMarco, Bree Indigo, Michelle Lee, Marshall Miller, J.W. Capek, Lauren Patzer, James Lowell Snyder, Gregor Fjellrev, Angela Faro, Pauline Ugalde, and C.M. Kane.