My Books
Narrow River, Wide Sky:
A Memoir
In the vein of The Liar’s Club and The Glass Castle, Jenny Forrester’s memoir perfectly captures both place and a community situated on the Colorado Plateau between slot canyons and rattlesnakes, where she grew up with her mother and brother in a single-wide trailer proudly displaying an American flag. Forrester’s powerfully eloquent story reveals a rural small town comprising God-fearing Republicans, ranchers, Mormons, and Native Americans. With sensitivity and resilience, Forrester navigates feelings of isolation, an abusive boyfriend, sexual assault, and a failed college attempt to forge a separate identity. As young adults, after their mother’s accidental death, Forrester and her brother are left with an increasingly strained relationship that becomes a microcosm of America’s political landscape. Narrow River, Wide Sky is a breathtaking, determinedly truthful story about one woman’s search for identity within the mythology of family and America itself.
Where you can buy Narrow River, Wide Sky
Soft-Hearted Stories:
Seeking Saviors, Cowboy Stylists, and Other Fallacies of Authoritarianism
In poetic prose, Forrester navigates leaving a life in one state and picking up in another and repeating the process through various and vast personal, social, and political landscapes. It’s a personal story and it’s an investigation of change and how we tend to hide away the most valuable parts of ourselves, especially, paradoxically, the parts that help us survive change, the parts that make us Soft-Hearted, and we need more soft-heartedness in all times and in all places.
Where you can buy Soft-Hearted Stories
Soft-Hearted Memoir
Finish Your Book One Vignette at a Time
This little workbook, a 5.5 inch square will help you finish your book. Kate Gray, award-winning author and writing teacher says this, “Jenny Forrester’s Soft-Hearted Memoir is an invitation, a hand stretched out. In open-hearted prose, familiar like a conversation with a friend, her prompts (“Choose a relative who said too much or nothing at all or nothing that made sense.”) compel the writer to walk into difficult terrain—politics, disagreements, social inequities and injustice—so that the memoir becomes a way of “writing our resistance through artistic expression. …We’re writing ourselves resilient… so that others after us won’t have to.” Forrester has done what she asks writers to do: written the story of resistance, and this workbook is a very generous act and a practical guide.”
The People's Apocalypse
A compilation of Disruptive Unchasteness–poetry, prose, visual art. This is the third volume of the Unchaste Anthology: A Print Edition of the Reading Series, The Unchaste Readers Series. Reading Our minds is the theme weaving together the raw, ecstatic, various lives of Women and Gender Non-conforming word and image artists in these snapshots, these small and mighty gems.
Download a Free Digital Copy Here.
A compilation of Disruptive Unchasteness–poetry, prose, visual art. This is the third volume of the Unchaste Anthology: A Print Edition of the Reading Series, The Unchaste Readers Series. Reading Our minds is the theme weaving together the raw, ecstatic, various lives of Women and Gender Non-conforming word and image artists in these snapshots, these small and mighty gems.
Download a Free Digital Copy Here.
A compilation of Disruptive Unchasteness–poetry, prose, visual art. This is the third volume of the Unchaste Anthology: A Print Edition of the Reading Series, The Unchaste Readers Series. Reading Our minds is the theme weaving together the raw, ecstatic, various lives of Women and Gender Non-conforming word and image artists in these snapshots, these small and mighty gems.
Download a Free Digital Copy Here.