Works by
Laura Chester
(Editor, Poet, Writer)

Anthologies

• Heartbeat for Horses (2007), Laura Chester, ed. with Donna DeMari, photographer
  Hearbeat for Horses is a collection of writing and photographs brought together in honor of horse crazy girls - those who might only live in the fantasy world of books and porcelain statues, who pin posters onto their walls and dream of jumping like National Velvet, or who actually compete in rodeos and horse shows in an attempt to win that blue ribbon. Writer/editor Laura Chester has selected a brilliant array of prose and poetry that is paired with the evocative photography of Donna DeMari who captures the heartfelt connection between girls and horses. DeMari and Chester together have created an equestrian dream, with selections and pictures that give us a glimpse into this special, secret world. Their collection is sure to inspire young riders and to touch the hearts of horse lovers everywhere.

• Eros & Equus: A Passion for the Horse (2006), Laura Chester, ed. with Donna DeMari, photographer
  Why do we never tire of good horse stories? Perhaps it is because they connect us to something deeper and more meaningful in life. Literature about the wild joys of riding and the profoundness of our relationship to these animals takes us away from everyday reality into a heightened moment. But even more than that, the horse reminds us of a creature both noble and kind, powerful and tender, as beautiful today as it was a thousand years ago. Reading this unique collection of world class literature is like entering "a dream smell of stables." One is treated to the "unrestrained feeling of utter freedom when riding out in the morning." Included are outstanding selections of prose and poetry from forty-four authors, including Billy Collins, Isak Dinesen, Jean Giono, Jim Harrison, John Hawkes, Kay Boyle, Lucy Grealy, and Lyn Lifshin. The exquisite photographs of Donna DeMari are full of an amazing energy. Here she catches the quirky, unexpected detail of mane, muzzle, haunch or eye, revealing to us the secret life of the horse with her special artistry.

• Sparks (2002), Laura Chester, ed. with Donna DeMari, photographer
  Selected prose-poems.

• Holy Personal: Looking for Small Private Places of Worship (2000)
  Laura Chester documents the American landscape as well as the American soul, as she and photographer-friend, Donna Demari, traverse the continent looking for small, private places of worship. From a chapel made of tires in Alabama, to one fashioned from a wine cask in Sonoma, California, from a root cellar shrine in Boston, to a stupa tower on Whidbey Island….  (Marilyn and Jerry Wennstrom's charming Whidbey Island home has a 40-foot meditation tower  which is featured along with his story in this book.)
  
  Holy Personal furthers the idea of honoring our differences, while being mindful of our oneness. It bears witness to a yearning for religious privacy, a deep desire to create for oneself a holy chamber, a place where creative expression joins hands with devotion.
   Luminous photographs by DeMari reveal the intimate nature of these unique places.

• Lupus Novice: Toward Self-Healing (1987, 1999)
  Recommended by Andrew Weil in Natural Health, Natural Medicine: The Complete Guide to Wellness and Self-Care for Optimum Health, Lupus Novice gives a moving account of the author's successful struggle with "incurable" SLE 9 systemic lupus erythematosus), affecting mostly women. Ms. Chester shares the personal discoveries behind her recovery, and a meditation on what it means for a body to be "attacking itself." This enlarged edition updates her story and includes a foreword by the best-selling authority on immune-system disease -- author of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Dr. Jesse Stoff.
  
  This “exceptional patient,” as Dr. Bernie Siegel describes Chester, reverses the expectations of current medical opinion… This intimate self-portrait is not only a personal mythology but a story of transformation.

Children

Joya Series

1. Hiding Glory (2007) by Laura Chester with Gary A. Lippincott, Illustrator
   First in a series of imaginative children's books this is the wild tale of a small blue horse named Glory (guardian of the morning glory vine) who takes Turner Flint off to the land of Joya, where she can forget her earthly worries, like her taunting older brother and what she should wear on the first day of school. Lippencott's drawings, together with Chester's prose, take us on a very exciting gallop, filled with fun and fright.  Ages 912.

2. Marvel the Marvelous (2008 release)

Fiction

• Kingdom Come: A Novel (2000)
  It was the worst Christmas of her life for many reasons. With little to keep her on Beacon Hill, Joanna Hawkins leaves her comfortable, false life and heads west into often threatening territory. Here she takes over her aunt's small cattle ranch, and soon rediscovers her teenage flame, Samuel Harrigan Sixkiller Mendoza, a complicated loner.
  
  Kingdom Come is not only a contemporary western with a Traviata twist, but the story of a woman in search of her mother, while struggling to become one to her own estranged children. Fast-moving, heart-breaking fiction, Chester's best to date.

• The Story of the Lake (1995)
  At the turn of the century, Nogowogotoc Lake was considered the Newport of the Midwest, where some of the most affluent families from Milwaukee and Chicago spent their summers in luxurious "cottages" at the water's edge. The Story of the Lake weaves the tale of four of these families over the course of generations. With each decade another net of history, prejudice, love and intrigue is cast over the surface of the water, creating a more and more intricate pattern.
  
  Joseph Ulrich of Kreuser Beer and his rival, "Pork Packing Prince" Walter Schraeger vie for the hand of Alicia Bosquet, flamboyant newcomer to the scene. Isabella Wells, the reclusive heiress to Milwaukee's finest department store, becomes dangerously involved with Margaret Sanger's early Planned Parenthood crusade, while her sister, Helen, tries to protest the end of Prohibition, a force too great to contend with in the beer loving city of Milwaukee.
  
  This often dark and disturbing American drama is full of gusts of lake air, filling the senses with images and traditions that have mostly slipped away. A personal retelling of family secrets as well as a reflection of the times, The Story of the Lake, is the big passionate family saga that finally gives the Midwest its due.

• Bitches Ride Alone (1991)
  In the linked short stories of Bitches Ride Alone, Laura Chester returns to her signature subject matter with headlong, unguarded candor. Chronicling girlhood crushes, bittersweet love affairs, and erotic fantasies, Chester's narrator, a nameless divorcee in her middle forties, examines the tension between the idealism of womanly desire and the shortcomings of reality.
  
  The titles of the stories say it all: "First-base Boyfriend," "The Never Enough Club," "How Not to Seduce Your Therapist," "The Art of Kissing at the Age of Forty." Chester's courage, honesty, and humor are here in abundance and are a healing balm to every woman's romantic misery.

• The Stone Baby (1989)
  Infidelity and sexual obsession, birth and loss - these are the themes of Laura Chester's frank and powerful novel The Stone Baby.
  
  Julia Chapin is an aspiring painter in her mid-thirties, blessed with three sons and a circle of good women-friends. She is also bored with her marriage, and finds escape, release, and a kind of controlled recklessness through riding horses. Her weekend afternoons at a Western Massachusetts stable bring an encounter with Philip Mercato, a smooth-talking divorced Manhattan stockbroker. Julia is swept away on the wings of money and charm to a world of compulsive sensuality - a world that comes to a sudden, sobering end when she finds that she is pregnant.
  
  Laura Chester precisely charts the evolution of a doomed relationship, from first erotic rush to shattering disillusionment. Along the way, she explores the ways that women support one another in difficult times.

• In the Zone: New and Selected Writings (1988)
  In the Zone is a selection of Laura Chester’s poems and stories from the first two decades of her career. The second half of this beautifully written book contains previously unpublished short fiction. Each of these various forms illuminates some facet of love, from heady eroticism, and maternal tenderness to wry disenchantment. A moving sensualist’s history.

• Watermark (1978)
  A novella that covers one disturbingly romantic day in the city of Paris.

• Stooge #9 (1973), Geoffrey Young and Laura Chester, eds.
  Stooge was a series of 13 magazines.

• The All Night Salt Lick (1972)
  Chapbook of experimental poems written together while traveling in Africa .

• Rancho Weirdo -- This collection of short stories and dark humor is completed and presently looking for a publisher.

Poetry

• All in All (2000)
  All in All is a collection of prose poem memoirs of growing up on a Midwest lakeside combined with period photographs. Recalling a past that cant crumble, the prose poems and images create a haunting collage of a childhood and the memories that they stir up . . . recollections of other incantations.

• Free Rein (1988)

• My Pleasure: voice pieces (1980)
  A peopled poetry, an overlapping of internal/external voices, dialogues, riffs, back-to-back talking, similar to the semiconscious linking of the twilight reverie, what we go to sleep on, the prickling of memory, audial and surface phenomenon.

• Chunk Off & Float (1978)
  This 38 page collection of poems. This limited edition of 500 copies was printed at the West Coast Print Center in Berkeley, California. Very rare.

• Proud & Ashamed (1978)
  This first major collection of poems, 128 pages, was published in an edition of 1200 copies.

• Primagravida (1975)
  116 page collection of poems, journal entries and prose-poems about the experience of a first pregnancy and birth.

• Nightlatch (1974)
  This 54 page book of prose-poem dream stories was written in Paris, France. Nightlatch was printed in a limited edition, now extremely rare.

• Tiny Talk (1972) with John Brandi, Illustrator
  This first book of self-published poems was written in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with seven illustrations by artist/writer, John Brandi, author of "Diary of a Journey to the Middle of the World ," roundhouse.

Other

• The Unmade Bed: Sensual Writing on Married Love (1992), Laura Chester, ed.
  A unique anthology of erotic and romantic writing on married life and love by some of the most renowned contemporary fiction and poetry writers, including John Updike, Laurie Colwin, and Raymond Carver

• Cradle and All: Women Writers on Pregnancy and Birth (1989)
  It is no surprise that we see in this collection the ability to describe that which is almost indescribable, that most “ordinary miracle” we all share—being born.
  
  Having a child is one of the most significant and profoundly mysterious events in human life, and no one is better qualified to describe the joys and pains of birth and motherhood than women writers.
  
  Not giving opinions or advice, but offering personal versions of the truth, this moving anthology brings together over 90 voices, including Adrienne Rich, Anais Nin, Laurie Colwin, Margaret Atwood, and Tillie Olsen.

• Deep Down: The New Sensual Writing By Women (1988), Laura Chester, ed.

• Rising Tides: 20th Century American Women Poets (1973),
  Author: Laura Chester and Sharon Barba, eds.
  A comprehensive collection of the female voices in America. This anthology includes the work of seventy poets, ranging from such established names as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore and to more recent and lesser known poets as Adrienne Rich, Lenore Kandel, Lyn Lifshin, and Nikki Giovanni. Rising out of the same growing consciousness that spawned the Women's Liberation Movement, this is a feminist statement in the largest sense: it expresses a belief in the full humanity of woman and her right to define herself.