Other Books by George Miller
The Best Free Verse Ten Dollars Can Buy
George Miller condenses seventy-five years into forty-two poems.
Book design and graphics skillfully presented by marine archeologist and author Donald Grady Shomette.
Miller and Shomette view their subjects through a single lens. Image after image, word after word, flow from the pages
A Carolina Wren: My last memory is ashes, drifting in a
George Miller condenses seventy-five years into forty-two poems.
Book design and graphics skillfully presented by marine archeologist and author Donald Grady Shomette.
Miller and Shomette view their subjects through a single lens. Image after image, word after word, flow from the pages
A Carolina Wren: My last memory is ashes, drifting in a chilly breeze across her wild flowers
Bulimia: Read at your own risk, vodka dulls the pain, a twist of lemon helps
Twenty Minute Cliff: Elsa knew sunset on the Blue Ridge, twenty minutes, then pitch black
Thirteen Stones: An elder walks a red rock trail to find a stone just so to fit my palm.
Published by Wineberry Press, Solomons Island, Maryland.
Loaded for Bear
Loaded for Bear is a collection of short stories written by Maryland poet and author George Miller reflecting the culture and ethos from the Maryland mountains to the Chesapeake.. So evocative is Miller's sense of place that you feel like you’ve been there—and if you haven’t, wish you had.
Sixteen stories feature characters that Miller, a
Loaded for Bear is a collection of short stories written by Maryland poet and author George Miller reflecting the culture and ethos from the Maryland mountains to the Chesapeake.. So evocative is Miller's sense of place that you feel like you’ve been there—and if you haven’t, wish you had.
Sixteen stories feature characters that Miller, an economist and programmer, encountered or imagined over decades riding trains from his home in Western Maryland to Union Station in Washington.
Miller acknowledges that several of the stories grew from personal experience. One such story revolves around the challenges for a barnyard neophyte who becomes the man of the hour in the case of a ewe’s breech birth.
In another story—from which the book’s Loaded for Bear title derives—a 13-year-old delivering the morning paper is stopped by a car full of well-heeled men with guns, friendly fellows who turn out to be Pittsburgh Pirates on a miscalibrated hunting trip.
“George Miller is a weaver who celebrates life in a tapestry of compelling tiles that are anything but average,” Don Shomette, an author and history, writes on the book’s back cover. “His soft humor, embellished with a topping of intimacy, soul and nostalgia, always rings true.”
Loaded for Bear arrives amid a recent resurgence in short fiction. The short story as literary form experienced a decline starting in the mid-20th century, attributed to television and the demise of popular magazines. But short fiction is becoming prevalent again on bookshelves, in magazines and sometimes newspapers, fitting more comfortably with changing reader habits in people’s busy lives.
“Accept an invitation from a write of short stories and you will find that time travel is a reality,” said Sandra Olivetti Martin, publisher at New Bay Books. “Because short stories are short, the journey lasts only for minutes. But their reverberations often last far longer.”
Miller is retired from Washington D.C. and daily rail travel and lives near North Beach, Md., on the Chesapeake Bay’s Western Shore.
Basilica
Basilica
Two noted Maryland authors teamed up to produce Basilica, an intense collection of photography and poetry. George Miller and Donald Shomette view their subjects through a single lens. Theirs is a true collaboration, a process in which images and words intermingle and grow.
Basilica begins with the Baltimore Basilica as a sanctuary from the
Two noted Maryland authors teamed up to produce Basilica, an intense collection of photography and poetry. George Miller and Donald Shomette view their subjects through a single lens. Theirs is a true collaboration, a process in which images and words intermingle and grow.
Basilica begins with the Baltimore Basilica as a sanctuary from the turbulent events of the 1960s. A desperate mother brings her shell-shocked son to the Sunday service hoping he might find peace after the trauma of Vietnam. "We're here, we're safe, no bombs, no guns, you're home."
Fifty-six poems and stories spread over seven sections lead the reader through decades along Maryland's western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
- SANDHILL CRANES - "The cranes descend, wings feathers brake, feet forward, one with the marsh, they land, dance, forage."
- BALANCE BEAM - "Know it, become it, feel the padded suede beneath your naked feet, the spring within the wood, the space above the beam."
- FLAT BOTTOMS, GOD BLESS'EM - "Master of tides snaking curlicue channels into the marsh, slithering back to the broad water."
- VIETNAM - "The wind blows warm from the delta at dawn, hot from the hill country at noon, sleep, dawn, direction fail me, time is forever noon and hot."
- A PALM BEACH BLESSING - "May the star in the east guide your petroleum engineers to oil deposits under the desert."
- ON READING JUNG'S SEVEN SERMONS TO THE DEAD - "Wings of the white bird hover over my hydrangea, incessant figure eights along serpentine garden paths strobe, stroke, beat."