2025 Beacon writers anthology
Stanza is a bookstore. It’s also a press. This volume is one of our first efforts. It’s a labor of love, meant to introduce readers to the rich literary scene in Beacon. It’s also meant to celebrate local writers and use Stanza’s position as tourist stop and literary destination to get more eyes on their work. This is a unique privilege of a bookshop in a popular town. We feature local writers prominently, right at the front of our shop, and we really hope, once you read the works herein, you’ll be enticed to return and purchase these writers’ books.
This book is not only for readers, but writers too.
We hope readers enjoy the great work, of course. We hope they get a good sense of literary culture in Beacon. That culture is richer than we expected when we opened Stanza in 2023. This volume houses poetry, scholarly essays, literature, mystery, horror, and science fiction.
If you’re a writer, We hope you can find some community in these pages. Every writer struggles with life/career balance, isolation, and fear that their work will never find a place in the world. The writers in this book make themselves quite vulnerable through artist statements accompanying their works. We hope this vulnerability helps you know you’re not alone.
Welcome to Beacon’s literary scene.
We’re donating profits from this anthology to the Howland Public Library.
Twenty-five years after the "Immaculate Game," a perfect twenty-seven up, twenty-seven down, all strikeouts, legendary pitcher Joseph "Big Breeze" Bye hides out on a small farm in upstate New York. He paints the legends he followed, the heroes he once stood beside, and keeps to a quiet routine after a hit-and-run stole his career and left him in a wheelchair. Silence is the only game he plays now. One day, his routine is interrupted when the phone rings. A young reporter wants the real story of the night that made him a ghost in the world of professional baseball. Minutes later, he receives a second phone call, a voice from the past. The caller reveals to Joseph that the crash that killed his career wasn't an accident, and the man who ordered the hit is still at large. As quickly as his career ended, Breeze is pulled off the sidelines and back into shadows he hoped to outrun. The trail winds through studio lofts and clubhouse tunnels, back rooms and midnight highways, into the dark underbelly of America's pastime, where every secret comes high and inside. The Big Breeze is a lean noir thriller about obsession, guilt, loss, second chances-and a fallen ace stepping back on the mound for one more inning.