This is a book about story, the human experience, teaching and learning, creativity and community. Story is so much more than decoding text and writing using academic language. It also includes literature and all forms of the arts; digital forms of story, from social media to documentation of history; and new forms of multilayered, multigenre research. Story is the backbone and the catalyst for personal connections, appropriation of knowledge, and synergy of knowledge for global citizens. Critical qualitative research is the methodology by which to document and analyze what is really going on in the complex, multidirectional interactions. The authors maintain that story in a broad and newly enlightened sense may help us to break out from the narrow concepts of literacy, content knowledge related to measureable standards, and random facts that are unrelated to dispositions for addressing human needs. Literacy as a conceptual synthesis of knowledge, skills, and dispositions has been giving us glimpses of synergistic ways to approach learning and teaching.

This is a book about story, the human experience, teaching and learning, creativity and community. Story is so much more than decoding text and writing using academic language. It also includes literature and all forms of the arts; digital forms of story, from social media to documentation of history; and new forms of multilayered, multigenre research. Story is the backbone and the catalyst for personal connections, appropriation of knowledge, and synergy of knowledge for global citizens. Critical qualitative research is the methodology by which to document and analyze what is really going on in the complex, multidirectional interactions. The authors maintain that story in a broad and newly enlightened sense may help us to break out from the narrow concepts of literacy, content knowledge related to measureable standards, and random facts that are unrelated to dispositions for addressing human needs. Literacy as a conceptual synthesis of knowledge, skills, and dispositions has been giving us glimpses of synergistic ways to approach learning and teaching.

Winner of the 2014 Blue Light Book Award Mary Kay Rummel is honored to be the first Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA. The Lifeline Trembles, a co-winner of the 2014 Blue Light Press Award is her seventh book of poetry. Blue Light Press published her previous book, What's Left is the Singing, in 2010. Her work has appeared in numerous regional and national literary journals and anthologies and has received many awards, including four Pushcart nominations. Mary Kay has read in many venues in the US and London, and has been a featured reader at poetry festivals including Ojai and San Luis Obisbo, CA. She often performs poetry with musicians. A professor emerita from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, she and her husband, Conrad, teach part time at California State University, Channel Islands. They live and play with their grand children in California and Minnesota. See marykayrummel.com and Poet Laureate Ventura County (on facebook).

In this accomplished book, Mary Kay Rummel spins words into mysticism and magic. "Not to be ordinary," she was drawn into the convent where she was forbidden to read fiction because the Superior didn't like it. In "Patterns of Obedience," she writes that she was able to leave when "words whispered in that wind/telling her to go forth and read, to never ask again." Set free, she read and wrote and traveled, visiting early Irish history and myth. Throughout her book, bells chime in celebration as her words become exquisite lyric poems. -Jill Breckenridge, Poet, The Gravity of Flesh If you delight in plunging into an environment's sensual and emotional landscape; if you thrill to poetry that seduces and resonates; if you crave fresh language, intelligence, revelation and uncompromising risk, then What's Left Is The Singing-this miraculous confessional, this collection with its complexity of conflict and resolution, this sound-feast-will satisfy to the bone. Rummel's work allows us to feel how. . . light slips/through fingers into every fold of sky. -Ellen Reich, Poet, The Gynecic Papers When one reads the poems of Mary Kay Rummel, one expects a certain precision of language, a vigilant detail, a concentrated lyric whisper that elevates the ordinary life's ordinary aspirations. On these counts, What's Left Is The Singing does not disappoint. But these poems are also transformative. Here we find beauty that resists adoration, caution that armors raised fists, and belief that survives religion. Here we find metaphors for life's passion in the scapes of sand and tides and endless stars that shine through us. And if we don't find distraction from our ignorance, we do find elegant language touched with music and some blessings and a few reasons to go on. This is exactly what we ask from our poetry. -David Oliveira, Poet, A Little Travel Story; Editor, Mille Grazie Press