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Kirkus Reviewed Novelist and Poet

Creating works for adults, young adults, creatives, and literary explorers.

 

"Alicia Cahalane Lewis lives within questions and beyond answers; this requires unassuming elegance of mind."

– Joseph Braun, editor of The Lune – 

 
 

The Faeries Of Fable Island

April 23 2024

“Alicia Lewis is a poetic writer who uses simple themes to disentangle us from the complexities we’ve built into our everyday lives. In The Faeries of Fable Island, she uses the adventures of a 5th-generation Wendy Darling to reintroduce us to the universal themes in the original Peter Pan: memory, courage, joy, sadness, love, and the uplifting influence of believing in magic. James Barrie would be proud—an amazing evocation of a magical place where spirits are free and dreams come true.”

- Pam Webber, Bestselling Author of The Wiregrass, Moon Water, and Life Dust. -

Set on a forgotten stretch of Maine coast where tourists from all over the world once traveled in the hope of finding a hidden faerie land, The Faeries of Fable Island tells the remarkable story of sixteen-year-old Megan Elida Fay, the great-great-granddaughter of the only Wendy Darling to meet the real Peter Pan on the roving magical island.

Meg, who has been “banished to the attic,” in her words, by her aunt Georgia to sleep with the nursery toys and the memories of her ancestor’s past, grieves for her mother who died when she was a child, and for her father who ran away shortly thereafter. Haunted by grief, Meg has thrown herself into forgetting her true self.

What was once the truth, Fable Island has now become a storybook land, but was this truth obscured when someone else rewrote the Faerie Queen and Peter Pan into their own story? Perhaps the lost boys are simply analogous to the lost souls who wish to find their true selves.

With the help of faerie magic, will it be possible for Meg to trust her truth? Will she be able to bend time and find the mysterious island, as her mother once promised her she would, and discover her free-spirited youthful self once more?

When truth and storytelling collide in this modern-day adventure, Meg sets out on a quest to find the real Faerie Queen.

The Faeries of Fable Island promises the possibility of magic, storytelling, and the lure of a kindred land where dreams come true when one believes.

 

RESTLESS

“A lyrical historical novella about an elusive young Parisian woman who flees from her family and romantic relationships…A brief but memorable tale with prose that sings.

- Kirkus Reviews -

“…a beautifully written novel told from the points of view of its main characters…I felt like I was floating over the characters as I followed them on their journeys.”

- Los Angeles Book Review -

 
 

In 1903, eighteen-year-old Emilie lives on the streets of Paris. She ran away from home at the age of eleven, leaving behind a wealthy life, but now she must sell discarded flowers to survive. When she meets Guy, a well-heeled gentleman, they form a restless bond, one of expectation and uncertainty. They share a love and a genuine desire to improve their lives.  Will they be able to help one another, or will the grief each experienced in the past upend their love?

Written in poetic prose, Restless unfurls as various people who know Emilie share their version of her story. The narration circles into and around each of these characters, leading the reader to a more complete understanding of Emilie and her true self.


"This novella is comprised of many poetic vignettes that come together for a tantalizing whole that still somehow feels incomplete, as if the reader is searching, and failing, to find Emilie. The chapters are told in a  series of intimate stream-of-consciousness first-person perspectives, as in this narration from Guy: 'I construct a play without words because I have said nothing to you, and you, in turn, have said nothing to me. Where in this universe are you that I should know your lost language?' All the characters feel like brief sketches except for Emilie herself...Indeed, the story circles her like a haunting dream, with imagery taking precedence over plot."

- Kirkus Reviews -


Room Service Please

Room Service Please is awarded first place in photography and second place in overall cover design by The Book Fest.

In ROOM SERVICE PLEASE, Edie May, a budding dance protégé, has lost her virginity on the night of her sixteenth birthday, June 17, 1922, in New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Unprepared for this turn of events, Edie is nonetheless determined to confront the man who seduced her and demand he make things right. However, Edie has been mistaken for Agnes Ayres, the famous Hollywood motion picture actress.

As much as she tries to convince everyone that she is not the rising starlet, Edie is whisked into a role she is not prepared to play. Using her wits and ingenuity, Edie transforms herself from the daughter of a washerwoman living on the Lower East Side into a shining star of her own making, a true Modern, and one of the first flappers of her era.

“In Room Service Please by Alicia Cahalane Lewis, delivers a spellbinding, twisty tale that features not only strong plot points but unforgettable, richly imagined, and sophisticated characters.

“This evocative, deeply immersive tale is character-driven, a tale about taking impossible chances. Fans of beautifully wrought and suspenseful coming-of-age stories will not be able to resist the spell in Room Service Please…I loved everything about this book — the powerful premise, the compelling characters, the unexpected twist, and the gorgeous writing. You won't be able to put it down.”

- Christian Fernandez, The Book Commentary -

 

 

"A coming of age story wonderfully spun through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old from a different era. With vivid characters and a rich storyline, Edith shows us that growing up and away from expectations is as complicated and confusing now as it was a hundred years ago. Room Service, Please, is an easy read that will have you wanting to know how it ends from the first page."

- Grace Derickson, San Francisco Book Review -


The Intrepid Meditator

In The Intrepid Meditator, poet and Reiki Master of Masters, Alicia Cahalane Lewis, shares her spiritual journey by unpacking what it means to live in balance. To Alicia, Earth is advanced energy and a matrix of potential. We can either choose to fight or cooperate with the planet’s polarity.

By incorporating her techniques for attaining harmony, Alicia offers experience, compassion, and heartfelt strategies to help readers find grace while navigating the deep highs and lows of grief and fear.

Hers is a balanced earth, but she fully recognize the frustration, disappointment, and longing we create. By acknowledging the difficulty of finding balance on the planet that continually shifts, Alicia takes her a message one step further by offering guided, annotated meditations to help advance greater self-awareness and Reiki inspired healing.


 

The Intrepid Meditator explores my Reiki inspired healing modality. My year of meditations is designed as a companion to this work.

Should you, or your meditation group, find yourself needing additional support getting started, or are seeking more individualized care, please reach out for details and how to schedule.

 

AN ARTS EDUCATION

Arrival Spring : The Show At Long Branch

The four works originally displayed at Arrival Spring : The Show At Long Branch include a prose poem, a story, an essay, and a collaborative poem.

“Language through sound is word. Language through brush is still. Language. Bold innovation. Bolder still, the innovator.”


Marrow Music

The Loon

by Nicholas Hranilovich et al.

“A bicameral re-sounding of twenty-nine short collections by thirty poets orbiting Colorado’s Front Range from 2015 to 2017.

Comprised of the eponymous, stitch bound cento by Nick Hranilovich (part one) and twenty-nine looseleaf broadsides (part two), Marrow Music invokes The Lune’s original sense of “poetry as correspondence” in order to celebrate what David Mutschlecner refers to as ‘sublime community.’ “

 

If There Are Parallel Dimensions Let This One Be A Reminder

Poets’ Cooperative

This online chapbook is a collection of 19 prose poems that build sequentially so that the multiple pieces essentially become one. Framed to appear divided, as we seem to like to think we are, the poems come together to remind us we’re one.

 

Alicia Cahalane Lewis is a poet who sees to the vibrational spirit of things.

- The Poets’ Cooperative -

 
 

 

Nebulous Beginnings and Strings

Tattered Pages No. 1

Cover Art: And the Gods Made Love, oil on canvas, 2012 by Winslow McCagg.

A Coffee Table Book Collaboration

Oil Paintings by Winslow McCagg
Words by Alicia Cahalane Lewis

Although their work is not necessarily a planned collaboration, the spontaneity of Winslow’s art renders the poetry complete. The space a poem holds on the page in alignment with the art renders the form in a dialogue with the energies of the Universe. One can not be just anything, because everything is in relation to something, and in this way language becomes another layer of paint for the canvas.

 

“Alicia Cahalane Lewis is an accomplished poet who sees to the vibrational spirit of things. Winslow himself remarked that his paintings and her poetry are conversations. They are about the ultimate predicament: mankind and this planet, the only rock we will ever know, or live on in any vibrant way.”

- Winchester Book Gallery -

 

nebulous beginnings and strings is an artist’s lament. It is the song, long ago sung, of an artist’s relationship to earth. Asking us to grieve for a planet that recoils in today’s knowledge, the poetry and paintings return us to our place on an earth teaming with potential, direction, and compositional construction. The earth is stardust. And the burden of her grief is the weight of thousands of years of neglect.

How do we create and envision a new earth? How do we return to her nebulous beginning?

 

 

The Fish Turned The Waters Over

The Lune

The Lune's third quarterly issue features three short collections of new, expansive lyric poetry: Laura Chalar's Our Lady of ObligationsGinger Teppner's I Should Have Been Linen, and Alicia Cahalane Lewis'The Fish Turned the Waters Over so the Birds Would Have a Sky. Ranging in style from metrical stanzas to American haiku to prose fragments (whose original bodies exist sonically online), each collection deftly recasts the passing colloquial gesture—a memory, a sensation, a reflex, a guess—as a living piece of narrative moment. As a triune entity, Summer 2017 is persevering and patient, unafraid of distance, enlivened by spontaneity, and full of assurance.

 

Whereas the cumulative details of experience might lay prostrate in certain patterns—loss unto grief, belief unto doubt—Chalar, Teppner, and Lewis show us how to turn the mind over (like soil) and let light shine through shards of language.

- The Lune -

 

The Fish Turned the Waters Over so the Birds Would Have a Sky is a collection of 32 poems, presented digitally as text and audio with the link below. Lines from each poem come together as a poetic mother to the work as a whole. Please follow the link embedded in each line to listen to each complete poem as you explore the entire compilation.


 

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