The Wessex Collective

Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

Sandra Shwayder Sanchez's short stories and novellas have appeared in The Long Story, Zone 3, The Healing Muse, Storyglossia, The Dublin Quarterly and Cantaraville. She is a retired attorney and lives with her husband in Nederland, Colorado.

Read a recent interview with Sandra here.

Three Novellas

ISBN: 978-0-9797516-0-8

156 pages
Price: $15.00

Each of the three novellas in this collection describes a journey. Noah Brown leaves his hometown of Annapolis in 1965. A complete innocent, he trusts the people he encounters along the roads who tell him their stories, take him into their lives, teach him and give him guidance until he comes to another port city, New Orleans, where he rescues people from a flood forty years later. The King and the Clockmaker takes up where an old legend leaves off about the maker of the astronomical clock in the 15th century town hall of Prague. This development of the legend examines questions about the genesis of evil, the role of art and the nature of time. In The Vast Darkness, a young woman student of anthropology learns about the effect of isolated mountain living on her backwoods neighbors.

Read a review of this book.

Stillbird
by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez
ISBN 0-9766274-1-8
Price: $9.50

From the strangling of a midwife perceived to be a witch in Scotland in the 1880s to thwarted love and the tragedy of incest in West Virginia during the depression thence to Denver on the eve of the sixties, accurate history is enhanced by elements of magical realism in this tale of five generations that is as ancient as the Greek tragedies and as modern as the daily news.

"What a pleasure to read this inventive, intelligent new novel by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez. Stillbird has the resonance of an epic tale and the immediacy of a gripping story-line. Sanchez reveals an acute sense of place and season as well as a rich appreciation for history. Through nuanced characterization and dramatic suspense, Sanchez draws us into a complex and fascinating world. Stillbird shows us that Sandra Shwayder Sanchez is a writer to watch for." -Valerie Miner, author of 'Abundant Light' and 'The Low Road'

"Stillbird is a strangely powerful novel whose haunting, almost surreal images; lyrical, dreamlike prose; and complexity will challenge the most sophisticated reader. . . Sanchez' writing style is exquisite. Her flawless prose flows, sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing but always memorable. Stillbird is a novel I highly recommend for the serious reader." -Mayra Calvani, The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, Jan/Feb 2006