Black Friday Bash Featured Author: Meet JoNelle Toriseva!

Come meet JoNelle Toriseva and browse their books at our Direct Sales Black Friday Book Bash, starting on Friday, November 24th, 2023! Check it out by clicking here between 11/24 and 11/27/23!

First, A Little Bit About JoNelle... 

Submerged. Poems from a sewing machine, a pond, and a small garden. Words gathered around the seasons, and a stream. JoNelle Toriseva believes in the power of writing for everyone. An award-winning writer, her poetry collection, Barbed Water, was elected by Shane McCrane for Saudade's annual contest. She was also awarded the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry from Cutbank, chosen by Oliver de la Paz. Toriseva’s work has appeared in The North American Review, The Literary Review, The Saranac Review, The Cincinnati Review, Descant, and JACKET, among others, and included in Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sound from City Lights, and Best Canadian Poetry in English. Close Calls, edited by Susan Fox Rogers. Toriseva edited the Image Out Anthology. She's taught writing internationally and in the United States, for Mills College, SUNY, California Poets in the Schools, San Francisco WritersCorps, and Literary Arts of Portland, Oregon. Find out more at authorially.com.

An Interview With JoNelle...

What can readers who discover your work this Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend expect to experience? Is there a particular message or feeling you hope to convey through your stories during this time?

What I look forward to in this season is the weighing up of everything. Life gives us so many gifts. As butterflies and bees guzzle nectar and dance through the air, they effortlessly pollinate from one flower to another. The male fruit shares its pollen with the female, fostering the circle of life in the garden. And so, the process continues with watering, weeding, and the gentle tying up of the climbing vines, all to ensure a bountiful harvest.

But amidst the abundance, there is always that one vegetable, that lone fruit, left to sink into the ground, transformed into a heavy, neglected mass. With a thud, it surrenders to the weight of time, collapsing and settling into a mushy muck during the winter months. The smell reminds us of musk, of decay, and of the consequences of death. Sometimes we find that rotting mass and it reminds us of something we'd rather forget. However, everything counts in the garden. The spoiled fruit enriches the earth for the next year. Everything and everyone is part of the cycle.

Could you give us a sneak peek into your current or upcoming projects? What exciting new worlds, characters, or adventures can your readers look forward to in the near future?

I'm working on life writing through poetry, short flash-fiction and hybrid work. I'll be sending out updates via my newsletter. I look forward to reading what you craft during this holiday season as well. I'll spend a few days regrouping by reading all day, staying in pajamas and talking books with my family. I'm planning on reading Alison Weir's Tudor Queens series, and getting lost in the Elizabethan court, when I'm not watching holiday movies and scouring cooking shows for last-minute brining tips.

During the hustle and bustle of the holiday shopping season, many turn to books for relaxation and escape. What do you hope your readers will take away from your work?

What I hope people take away from my work and life is that we weather it all. 90 percent of us in the United States alone will endure difficult and traumatic times. Writing has been a way for me to reconcile hard experiences and figure a way out. It's like walking through the garden and finding the fallen fruit and preparing the soil for the near year. Embracing our own life cycle and life events is like that. Through creating art (writing, drawing, dancing, quilting, embroidering, crafting, carving, beading) about life. Life writing gives us a way to share our experiences. Our writing self is a knowing and patient self that allows us to make sense of what has happened to us: good, bad, and complex.

As we dive into the holiday season, do you have any advice for readers or other creatives that they should consider?

Give yourself the gift of reading and writing a bit during this chaotic season. Remember to take good care of your creator self. The lights may dazzle, the smells will tempt, and we'll need to steal a little downtime to integrate all of our experiences.

Allow yourself to walk in your neighborhood, your field, your forest, your neighborhood. Each inhalation welcomes the familiar scent of dirt, our chapped hands find solace in dried leaves and brown stalks. Dreams sort themselves against the skin, slowly settling into the earth, gradually becoming part of the landscape once more, showing us the gift of another day. Incorporate those seeds, those fruits, and those memories into your own writing landscape. I invite you to join with me and others at authorially.com.

Happy writing, Happy giving and receiving, Happy Holidays and beyond,

JoNelle Toriseva