Gray Dove Press is a small independent publisher, dedicated to lifting up the voices that are often overlooked by traditional publishers. We focus on personal stories, novels and short stories, as well as memoirs and other nonfiction works.
Selected Stories by Michael Glenn
“Brilliant, beautiful, and tender … This treasure of a book is not to be missed.” — David Treadway, PhD, Therapist and Author of Dead Reckoning
“Beautifully crafted and consistently thought-provoking … Glenn writes with great insight into the hidden workings of the human mind.” — Elizabeth Ammons, PhD, Professor of Literature Emeritus, Tufts University
“Shines in transparent style and solid images. Here, as in medieval times, love moves the sun and all the other stars.” — A. McA (Mac) Miller, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Literature, New College, Florida
A formerly close friend passes on the street without looking up, and a college friend arrives at a dorm room and refuses to leave. A working-class schoolboy looks for friends in his new neighborhood, and a middle-class teen learns something else during his piano lesson. A couple on the rocks take a vacation in a sunny clime, and another couple, older and wiser, head out for a weekend in New England. A medical student gets close to a girl with cystic fibrosis, and a family doctor loses his equilibrium when he treats an attractive but abused young woman.
Such are the stories Michael Glenn recounts in this volume, selected from the many he wrote between from 1958 and 2015, beginning in college and continuing through medical school and his career as a physician and psychiatrist, factory worker and community activist. His characters are prickly and difficult, caring and kind, old and young. They struggle to find meaning in the debris found on a street, a dangerous encounter on a subway train, and an idealized relationship that spans decades.
With grit and honesty, realistic description and a nuanced awareness of emotional states, Glenn writes scenes that bear witness to the changing world of the past half-century. The characters learn from their lived experiences, and the readers are the beneficiaries.
Grace Street: A Sister’s Memoir of Grief & Gratitude by Maureen Callahan Smith
“Maureen Callahan Smith writes with courage and honesty about the heart-breaking journey she walked with her sister Kathy through her sister’s cancer and ultimate death. This memoir is of inestimable value for family, community, and caregivers.” — Paula D’Arcy, author of Stars and Night and Winter of the Heart
“This memoir opens us to the deepest truth: that soaring love and searing grief are partners in the sacred dance of life, that we are here with and for each other, and that when we are present in our pain, our broken hearts can receive and give love and light.” —Rabbi Audrey Markus Berkman
“This jewel of a book will touch you, and it will change you. It reveals the gift that is available to all of us in our deepest loves and losses.” — Sue Cross, founder of Living the Possible
When a diagnosis of cancer upends her sister’s life, author Maureen Callahan Smith and her family find themselves having to map the way forward through the unknown. In the end, it’s a path they seem to know by heart.
Smith draws on her experience as a clinical social worker and her background in meditation and other spiritual traditions to find insight and solace in difficult moments. Somehow, facing the hardest thing she’s ever faced opens her to the deepest gratitude and appreciation of life, with all of its beauty and pain.
From Grace Street:
“Things that look like walls can turn out to be windows that we fly through because we must, becoming on the way a different person. . . . Heartbroken as I was, I felt a deep and completely unanticipated knowing that accompanying Kathy in whatever way I had was something my life had been meant for. And I could recognize, lucky me.”