Description
In Dancing Madly , Beth Mead explores familial, romantic, and self love. She dives bravely beneath the surface to reveal anxiety, doubt, guilt, and the pain that comes with love, and she does so with a light touch, often using a wickedly dark humor and deceptively simple situations. Through the worlds she creates, worlds that can have air like cotton candy , worlds in which lovers end affairs by saying “We’ve come to a stopping point,” Mead presses on our sore spots briefly but firmly, then, to our delight, dances madly on. --Mary Troy, author of Swimming on Hwy N
Beth Mead’s collection is a down-to-earth meditation on the elusive nature of happiness. Some of the stories are grim, even harrowing. Others offer hope. All of them will make you a wiser person about the lives of others. --David Carkeet, author of The Full Catastrophe
In Beth Mead’s stories, as in our own, human relationships are conditional, negotiable, and so knotty we can’t tell whether we are fooling ourselves or being fooled. The characters in Dancing Madly are learning to limit their hopes and expectations. This lesson terrorizes some and hardens or saddens others. Still others emerge as from a chrysalis. --Catherine Rankovic, author of Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis
Paperback: 120 Publishing date: July 1. 2019 Language: English ISBN-10: 1-950437-77-9 ISBN-13: 978-1-950437-77-1 Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
Beth Mead is a Professor of Writing and Director of the MFA in Writing program at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. She is the editor of The Lindenwood Review literary journal. Beth received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Fiction Weekly, Cuivre River VI, Mid Rivers Review, Noise Medium, Untamed Ink, and elsewhere. She won the Jim Haba Poetry Award and was an Honorable Mention in the River Styx Micro-Fiction Contest. She lives in O’Fallon, Missouri, with her husband, Chris, and her sons, Connor and Casey.